Yup. Moreover, i want clients and implementations that help summarize and reduce doomscroll behavior. Social networks have value (imo), but they also have a cost and i'm tired of paying that. Reddit built a habit in so many of us to go back to it during any downtime, doomscroll more time than we wanted or expected, become overly invested in karma, arguments, etc. Reddit also has zero incentive to fix any of this, as it was perfect for engagement. Reddit is Facebook is Twitter, and i'm tired of those applications drugging my brain.
I definitely do not want Reddit. I want the value we got from Reddit, without the cost.
Buddy, doomscrolling is your own issue. Are you old enough to remember "doomscrolling" cable television for hours at night? We're all choosing to distract ourselves from something else or we're just bored. It's nothing new.
I mean, if you're having trouble stepping away from something, it almost sounds like you're describing an addiction problem. Everyone should make it a practice to step outside themselves for a moment and assess all their habits.
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
Jeez, this feels quite hostile.
I'm a developer. I'm working on this problem myself. You can craft features which promote a behavior or inhibit it. For example focusing only on live oriented features, making sure that posts show up constantly and with little ability to see what previous came, i would argue, focuses behavior on addictive FOMO. Features that help summarize historical posts to leave you with less of a feeling of FOMO does the opposite. Quite difficult to get FOMO if the summary of posts only changes once every 5 hours, right? You should see the ideas here. All of which i want to explore.
Features promote behavior. Some drive engagement, some reduce engagement. I seek features which reduce engagement by way of inhibiting FOMO and promoting the feeling of being informed on what it is you were seeking.
I'm suggesting a platform which focuses on features that help users avoid what i feel are negative outcomes. Which is wholly different than saying that all platforms need to do this. Why is this controversial to you? Should i, and users like me, not be able to use a platform which tries to eradicate (as best able) FOMO? Is FOMO other people experience somehow essential to you?
You can have whatever platforms you like. Just because an option exists does not mean it is hostile to your preferences. To me your reply seems short sighted, entirely focused on your individual use case and ignorant of a wide array of methods people want to use to interact with these products.
I am focused on my slice and my pie. You can have yours too, it's okay.
This argument that a social media platform not doing evil things also exclusively means it cannot attract an audience in some other way is a false dichotomy.
Seconding everything here — hostile/destructive platform design is so normalized for users (of Reddit and in general) that designing services that don’t encourage doomscrolling/“anger-tainment”/FOMO/etc feels completely foreign to them, or even impossible. But it’s gotta happen, otherwise we’ll just repeat the worst parts of Reddit (and other platforms) all over again.
@UnshavedYak for real. It's so refreshing not having to see loads of wasted awards on the most facile, idiotic comments. Or the obnoxious avatars people made in place of their pfp. It seems so hyperbolic but it genuinely feels great not having to see all that anymore.
Just to say, I 100 percent would pull RIF up in downtime but doomscrolling is not ubiquitous; I would pop into really specific communities to read about specific interests and shit that didn't expose me to current events. I am an extremely politically plugged-in person, despite avoiding it almost entirely on reddit (unless I was in the mood), but I found shit like RIF actually allowed me to be more selective about what content I want at any given time. That kind of fine-tuned control of my information intake, of course, is completely lost on New Reddit with its barrage of random recommendations.
Yea and i don't mean to imply this is something everyone needs to see as a problem. Plenty of things are addictive for some and not for others. Even regardless of addiction, i just want (to explore) a set of features that is kind of anti-reddit. Explore anything that can help me feel like i didn't miss anything, while not needing to visit more than once a day, once a week, etc. That i felt informed but that the random stuff was filtered out. etcetc
From a developer, often these features don't scale well either. Either complex to define (if customizable) or too costly to run, but Fediverse tweaks that a bit. We have the potential to have smaller servers with less concern for scale, etc. Fediverse has potential here, for me at least
That's exactly what I was thinking. Even with federation off it feels like it's already turning into a smaller version of what we had before. Not so much with post content or comments per se, but more for the already established "power users" and recreation of the exact same garbage, popular subs. I can't believe how many people I've already blocked that I got sick of seeing on every single post.
This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.
Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.
The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.
A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).
To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.
They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.
Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).
Very good points, especially on siloing the admin from the mods. Like you said, the mods had been doing a great job performing damage control from the last few rounds of drama.
I've said this before, but I don't envy an admin for a social media site. I certainly wouldn't want to do it. So I get he was stressed, and had been getting a lot of backlash, but again he could have stepped back and let his team handle it.
To be fair, Aaron wasn't really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.
After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as "co-founder" much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.
That being said, given what Reddit's become, wherever his spirit roams now, I'm sure he's relieved to have his name off the site.
I find that people who judge a statement, not based on the whole of it's content, but on the surface aesthetic of it to be wholly smart as a bag of rocks.
I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.
It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.
Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.
Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.
Thus spoke reality? Aaron founded another startup at the y combinator when it got merged into the reddit startup. But the fact that they merged at the y combinator would suggest that reddit already was founded before Aaron was involved. This is all easily verifiable information you’re just so angry that you aren’t on your favorite website that you are just making shit up at this point.
This is why I don’t leave one star reviews as a part of a group.
Even if the spam detector doesn’t flag it, there’s often going to be some kind of back room deal going on with review hosters and rich “one star” victims.
Do two stars and list the “acceptable” reasons why. Don’t mention anything that can be removed as a part of a “brigade cleanup”.
Oh you had a completely legit review but ended with “f*** spez”? Guess what, the Reddit community manager can flag it and ask for it to be removed.
That’s not karma. Those are community points, which are subreddit-only points that have been on the blockchain for years.
If you’re not on the crypto subreddits, you’ve probably been blissfully unaware they exist. But it sure gets the crypto subreddits excited, especially when they can announce that their pet coin is moving to a New And Improved Blockchain ™.
I wish all were the same lol if only everyone moved we could have a great site, not that I like big crowds, but Kbin and Lemmy run on community service for a lot of stuff so the more people, the more we could see this site grow in many ways
After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms
The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that's a compelling point but I don't think it's as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of "don't go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that's just helping Reddit" has some "But you live in a society, curious" vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you're protesting or abstaining from.
In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:
The argument that you shouldn't go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with
Like all protests however it's not that impactful if it's a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.
Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.
r/place as an event is a showcase of a community's coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there's a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that's pretty cool)
what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place's first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they're doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities' size and coordination
These comments also included people asking "why fuck u/spez ?" and "the only reason I'm still on Reddit is that there aren't any alternatives"
This means there is a pool of normie users who aren't aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the "fuck u/spez" movement is effective in bringing their attention to it
By the same token there are tons of users who aren't aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got "Lemmy" as a recommendation in replies and said "interesting I'll check it out" - they legit hadn't heard about it).
In conclusion: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.
Now in practice I don't know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that's fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is "which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places", I've come to believe the answer is the first.
EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was "but the admins will just erase it", and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there's stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that's visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.
Is there a way to take a url like old.reddit.com/r/sub/comments/abcdef/the_post_title/ and get the post text body and the comments (at lest the first couple of levels) via rss?
The first entry is the post with the content and the next ones are the comments (all). Of course there is no nesting structure in the RSS, you need to go to reddit for that.
EDIT: There most probably be a limit in the number of elements of a feed, so if you try that with a post that already has a lot of comments, you will probably see only the last N ones. But if you add the RSS Feed of the comments of new post to your RSS Reader, it will most probably store all the elements over time, so you will have all of them there (and not only the last N ones)… unless the comments are posted too fast and/or the updating frequency of your RSS Reader is too slow.
I’ve heard that moneied interests are paying Twitter and now reddit behind the scenes to ruin their respective communities. It’s because every time something happens that shakes the foundation of who’s in charge, it’s always a social media coordinated public effort behind the push for change. The most recent one I can think of is the Twitter-fueled women’s rights movement in Iran. Or even the push to get progressive names like AOC elected.
So now we have rich interests paying CEOs to sabotage their own companies in order to better maintain the status quo.
I know this concept falls squarely into conspiracy theory territory, but with Twitter and reddit, both once bastions of progressive organization, going to shit at the same time, and threads popping up with the messaging that they explicitly want to avoid news and politics, you can’t help but wonder if there’s a concentrated effort behind the scenes to break up communities that are actually starting to make a difference.
I mean what makes far more sense is that interests rates have skyrocketed, which means VC money dried up, which means these platforms that haven’t made money in over a decade suddenly have to figure out how to run themselves.
It’s not just Reddit and Twitter, it’s YouTube and Twitch also.
It also might have something to do with the people running the show are now being tasked with real work and it turns out they aren’t good at their job.
Yeah I think this is the Occam’s razor explanation that makes more sense. And why might Reddit be doing such a similar thing so soon after twitter? Spez has said he’s in touch with Elon and admires his business decisions. Simple as that.
For those in control … there is no more terrible thing than to have all your workers talking amongst one another to discuss how terrible their situation is and what they could all do about it.
It’s the same in prison … if the guards and management keep everyone in control by isolating them all. Once the inmates start talking to one another, they start to conspire and plan on what to do about their situation. If they plan long enough, they’ll figure out how to do illegal activity, find specialty items or contraband … give them more time and they’ll start trying to figure out how to break out of their situation.
Then when things go too far and all sorts of illegal activity is taking place and people are trying to break out … the guards and managers will shake up the prison and breakup the communications system they were all using.
It doesn’t sound too outlandish. The destruction of Twitter seems to attract some replacement from the far-right groups, Threads is already gaining far-right pages promotion and Reddit is still in the phase of destroying a once very influencial community. And all in the same time as the beginning of the US electoral campaign. It really aligns with a concentrated effort
reddit started trialing a "Community Points" program in 2019 in /r/ethtrader, /r/cryptocurrency and /r/fortnite , where posters and commenters could earn "Community Points" that were supposedly backed up with crypto that you could eventually cash out. They announced an expansion of the program in December 2021 but, afaik, they never actually did so. Which might have something to do with the fact that one of the /r/cryptocurrency mods made $10,000 by selling community points. I don't know if the program has actively continued since then; maybe someone who was in the three trial communities can say.
My point is that reddit has been working on something similar to this program for at least five years now. And this article isn't based on any announcement by reddit, but by someone examining their source code. It's possible that this code has been present for a while and reddit has leaked it's existence to try to attract back some of their lost contributors. Or even that it hasn't been present but they included the old code in the newest app release and then pointed it out for the same reason.
In any case, this article isn't based on any official announcement, and reddit has been "trialing" a similar program for over four years. I wouldn't hold out any hope that this actually sees daylight anytime soon, or that it'll work well if it's actually released.
Gold originally was fine imo. Then it got out of control with so many different medals, some free, some cheap, etc. They made it so confusing and basically every post on the front page had some sort of award. They made it confusing and cluttered… At least they realized it was dumb.
I remember at one point, Talklittle mentioned the addition of rewards, and how he was against them, which was convenient since Reddit didn't give third party apps access to them in the first place. I know at one point I was able to buy gold in RiF, but that was gone the moment that Reddit introduced all the other bullshit rewards.
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