what I take from this, though, is that even with the anger against Reddit, there’s no talk of leaving in the comments on that post!
you hate the site and all of their changes so much and it’s only been getting worse… why do you stay? even the content is already worse, and even worse on the subs that have the new Reddit tipping system… why stay?
Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.
Why? I mean, technologically, why couldn’t a more standard payment platform work, and then just pass around those payments among instances? PayPal is not crypto, but you can use it almost anywhere online.
PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.
Put anything to a vote
Run weighted polls to make big decisions in your community, like getting input on rules changes or deciding how to distribute Points.
Unlike regular polls, these polls give a larger voice to people who have contributed more to the community. The more Community Points someone has earned, the more weight their vote carries.
This will end well...
EDIT
What they're really looking for are a bunch of whales to drive engagement.
Call me a cynic but I suspect the biggest ‘contributor’ to r/product will end up being product’s marketing department account, likewise with r/country and party-political apparatchiks. The move is elegant in a way: Reddit Inc can ruin true democratic operation of subs by turning subscribers into shareholders (which wards off repeats of mod activism) and simultaneously provide further cover to astroturfers (lots of points = Time and Effort™ = good faith actor).
Oh, absolutely this is the case. Reddit could even run bot accounts to gain a lion's share of points for any particular sub they want to control, thereby stifling any sort of protest or activism authorized by sub vote.
Yeah it's been enabled on the crypto reddits for a while... as a result the subs overwhelmingly changed to "vaguely interesting and/or attention-grabbing but ultimately useless with a race to see who's first" posts, signal-to-noise ratio got way worse.
The article comments are linked to Reddit, if you click on "Replies" it routes you to the topic on Reddit where there are posts about leaving the platform.
Plato's cave. If all you have ever experienced is a shit app, then the shit app seems fine to most people. Others will recognize its faults but not how bad it is because they think that the only alternative is to have no app.
oh. well, there's artemis that in private alpha at the moment. should be out in a few weeks i hope. Plus kbin is a PWA, so you can add it to your home screen.
I got distracted by the post about the person’s boyfriend putting laundry detergent in their dishwasher. I guess that does mean RIF is better, since only one post is visible on the other one.
Brilliant work by that team! Either reddit has to violate its own rules (which sadly they can, by deleting all NSFW content and removing the flag), or let the mods go.
And if they let the mods go, other giant subs can do the same thing in order to safely go NSFW.
I mean ... I agree for sure but when I think of paid mods I think o f how shitty they do their jobs in facebook and snapchat and am like yea they should be paid to ru na functioning sub/site but not to just watch people be awful to one another.
It looks like the current plan is just to archive subreddits, turn off comments, and leave them public until the IPO.
Unless you happen to be r/programming of course and someone noticed the ChatGPT bots that seem to consistently be posting statements supportive of the admins. Then we got to force the subreddit to private immediately.
Unrelated segue, did you know that Sam Altman, current CEO of OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT, was a long time reddit board member, and despite claims that he left last year, is still listed as being on the board of reddit?
Also, anyone else find it weird that in a lot of the threads talking about the protests on reddit... While the most upvoted comments usually favor the admins, if you look at the sheer number of comments speaking out on a lot of major threads and don't worry about the upvote/downvote ratio, the number of comments in favor of the protests near completely dwarfs the number of comments in favor of the admins. Just another interesting data point.
It's almost like there was a way for someone who owned the website to manipulate things in their favor and then call in a favor from someone with an interest in the company to help them do a very poor job of making it seem like it was all justified by the community.
If by won you mean cause controversy, drive away some users, and allienate most of those staying than Mission Accomplished. Nothing positive happened for Reddit out of this.
Really? Reddit retained about 98% of its users and gained full control of the app market. I’d call that a success for them. They got exactly what they wanted.
They solidified the establishment of competing services (kbin, Lemmy). Many of us would've never even considered using them otherwise. It may not have hurt them a ton in the short term, but they've helped set up their competition.
The users aren’t the value in reddit, it’s the content creators and savvy community members that respond to questions and leave useful content in their own right. Reddit lost a number of those, and those users are forming the nucleus of their demise.
I'd also say the brand reputation has taken a pretty decent hit with their awful handling of the situation. With an upcoming IPO you think they would have handled it carefully but they just seemingly YOLO'd it
This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn't a blanket ban.
@JohnEdwa The bots should not even hit the limit, otherwise its a hint for any anti-bot detection. Just create lot of small bots staying low on threshold to be detected. Together with an AI, then the missing bot detection utility and some missing moderators, Reddit should become a bigger pile than it is already.
The funniest thing is that reddit is so shitty that they created all this caos and didn’t even meet the deadline!! 3rd party apps are still working because they fail to enforce the changes! aka they were bluffing! Reddit is a shit show omg
Third party apps that are still working are most likely going to get hit with a bill on August 1st they were not prepared for. Reddit knows which applications are using the API keys so they know where to send the bill. But the changes took effect on July 1st. The apps that shut down before the first did so because the developer killed their API key so they wouldn't occur any charges.
The problem with platforms advertising that they’re free speech platforms is that you’ll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.
And that backtracks all the way into
The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don’t). It’s quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to “ackshyually”. In this case “free speech” makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn’t, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)
Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
Often, but not always. It’s a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it’s just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.
What will decide if Squabbles’ admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let’s see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there’s some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on “With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence”).
I disagree because any and all words and expressions can be used to bring the dogs to the garden. Coupled with your reasoning, this would mean that all words and expressions are always dogwhistles.
Instead I think that it’s better to see a word/expression as a dogwhistle if it’s within a certain context, and that context is mostly available to a hate group but not to outsiders. This has a bunch of consequences*, but in this specific case it means that we’d need to look for further actions and words from Squabbles’ admins to know if it’s a dogwhistle or not.
Or even a lack of actions/words. If transphobic and related content becomes commonplace in their site, and they do nothing against it, I think that their very silence would be already enough to label it as a dogwhistle.
*e.g. it explains why dogwhistles are often found alongside each other, or why they keep changing, or even how they actually work on a discursive level.
so I totally get your point. For example, a therapy group that says, "this is a free speech area" and has 8 members who are all queer, would probably not mean it as a dogwhistle, and in that case, it also probably would not be one. But also, they wouldn't be saying it to anyone other than those 8 members.
The thing is, in this case it legit does not matter the intent, they are saying it on a public chat forum. That makes it a dogwhistle regardless of intentionality, and it will be recognized as such, because if you say that on a public platform on the internet, guess who will hear it.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn't want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they've attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
I looooove watching reddit burn. Their CEO is so fucking incompetent but honestly, that's part for the course. Most CEOs are fucking morons fueled by nepotism.
Not just incompetent, but also just plain mean.
After making an incompetent decision (super high api costs) he didn’t reassess the situation, he just started lashing out.
First at the app devs, then at the mods, now at the users.
In a way social media is a drug and most of us were addicted. At least I was on Reddit, because I liked being there. So not using it, especislly when it was kind of a habit may not be easy for many on virtue fo that alone.
The perfect site for reddit admins would be endless bots posting, commenting and viewing adds while said advertisers are oblivious to the con.
The first two have been going on at some level for years. The last? Well, it will be interesting to see the official reddit app's adoption numbers in the coming months.
Reddit…it was once my respite, and now it is a desert of empty words. The admins betrayed their creed: “Remember the human”. They sold it for the Dollar Almighty. Their humanity is lost…let them succumb to that which they so infinitely prize—the towers they built out of their money.
That won't go well either, in the long run. Advertisers will catch on to how many "people" are viewing their ads without ever clicking on anything and put their funds elsewhere.
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