Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
Is anyone surprised? The “blackout” seems to have been a total flop most subs don’t give a shit.
The blackout helped me to leave.
It’s difficult to rewire a dopamine pathway you’ve been traveling for 14 years.
Knowing that other people care enough to abstain for two days is useful in that process.
I never expected Reddit to change their policy. I have been surprised at how petulant, dishonest and unprofessional they’ve been. I would have expected a bland corporate response.
Anyway, onward and upward.
onward, and onto the next dopamine pathway.
Same. Not sure I would have ever heard of Lemmy otherwise.
100% same.
I wouldn’t say it was a flop. A massive number of subs and users are participating at the moment (some forced due to the blackouts). But I do agree that reddit executives definitely don’t give a shit, and will eventually just start booting mods to bring the subs back if they don’t fall in line.
Not surprised, still disappointed. Will discuss with other mods the idea of nuking our community as a “fuck you” to Reddit.
Do it. For the lulz. For great justice. Move every zig.
I think it’s more important to bring the subs over here to convince people to migrate
7750/8300 subreddits are blacked out. Plus the server issues caused by the blackout yesterday. I’d be interested to see if an indefinite strike could be powerful enough to reverse this plan
Wow, that’s way higher than I expected. I hope just as many people transfer over to nee platforms so we can get those communities restarted.
Reddit has MANY more than 8300 subreddits. That 8300 is the number of subreddits who SAID they would shutdown.
How did the blackout cause an error?
I expected they would see less utilization, so the servers would be coasting compared to a regular day
It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn’t as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be. They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I’m sure but they’ll keep getting away with it if there isn’t a clear alternative and people keep going back.
That’s true. The changes don’t really effect me in any immediate way, but the blackout gave me a reason to uninstall Reddit for a few days and try Lemmy.
Thanks Satan.
My Google searches are in SHAMBLES rn
Blocking mobile web access and ending old reddit is going to bring more people here over time.
What absolutely bends my mind is there’s still confused people wandering into the blackout threads with absolutely no clue what’s going on. How is this info not reaching these people?
Yeah if they were serious, they’d go dark for good
deleted by creator
Do you have any numbers?
8479/8838 subreddits are private as of this comment.
The number on the page is a bit misleading. If you comb through the website’s code on GitHub, you’ll see that the 8,838 is actually the number of subreddits that agreed to participate in the blackout.
Calling it a flop isn’t accurate either, though.
Sure, most subreddits don’t care, but the largest and most active subreddits are overwhelmingly in support of the blackout, but they are also much more affected by Reddit’s changes than smaller subreddits.
EDIT: Some words for clarity.
Reddit has more than 100k active subreddits lol. Also, this number doesn’t mean much because community sizes vary a LOT
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
Unfortunately they aren’t since the ones who cared couldn’t be bothered for more than two days.
The death of Reddit will be a slow bleeding process. Expect waves. Not floods.
I think it will be more like the tide moving out slowly … no one will really notice and the CEO and owners will keep telling everyone everything will be fine even as their ship sits beached on a sandbar and the water will never return.
Here’s a thread where subreddit mods are announcing their subs going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I’m thankful.
Yes I’m aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can’t take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it’s decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it’s just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can’t really buy that out.
The question is if it’ll take off, more or less.
The question is if it’ll take off, more or less.
It already has.
we’re here aren’t we (grin). Looking forward to seeing how this plays out for sure.
One thing that worries me is Lemmy’s dedication to non-advertisement funding. Lemmy will never be able to handle a ton of people without money for server space and bandwidth. I hate ads as much as anyone, but there are ways to do it that aren’t intrusive or toxic or damage your integrity.
There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.
For example, the paper magazine “Small Craft Advisor” recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn’t take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.
Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. “Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business.”
There is a site I am familiar with that was determined to not have intrusive ads and actually created a side business of creating ads for its advertisers that it would find acceptable on the site, which consisted of a still image of given dimensions, and a link.
When you say no data collection, you mean no personalized data collection, right? Obviously they would want to know how many times the ad was clicked.
That sounds like the kind of thing I envision.
Yes, no personalized data collection. Both sides of the ad transaction would need to track something if the placement had some kind of impressions or click-through payment system. It’s been a while since I’ve managed a website, but I think most of that can be handled with pretty basic logging that has existed since before micro-targeted advertising was even conceived.
For a simple placement contract like we have with what few newspapers remain, the ad supplier could assess the value of the placement for themselves using standard referrer logs. Not paying its way? Don’t renew the placement.
As more and more people host their own federated instances it won’t be as big of a problem as it was for web 2.0 legacy sites like reddit. The Fediverse really is the future.
The privacy movement can’t sell out to private entities or all bets are off again, I think no advertisements is wholly nessasary. I think taking out Reddit is much more achievable than many people think. Yes it will take some money and resources.
Yes, but where is that money going to come from?
The money is coming from the community, which is why progress is slow. People don’t have much money. It doesn’t mean we should sell the soul of the project for a quick buck. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Rome wasn’t built for free either, we need some sort of financial backup. Even if it isn’t advertising something needs to be in place.
yes, its origins were great, it’s finale is not so great. I suspect if Aaron were alive he’d be livid. I also think reddit’s demise might be the intended outcome, like BCG is at the helm or somesuch.
It’s not that you’re charging for API access; it’s that you’re charging US pharmaceutical industry pricing levels ($12,000 for something that should realistically be $200) and then only giving devs such a short time to implement changes. This was designed to kill 3PApps outright and everyone can see it. What an ass.
That part. No one is saying don’t charge but literally no one can afford to fork over that kind of money. Christian crunched the number to run Apollo for a year and it came out to approximately $20M. Twenty million freaking dollars. How is this reasonable?
Say whatever you want about spez, he is the best thing that ever happened to Lemmy.
Funny how Reddit’s peak happened to be during the time their two “co-founders” had nothing to do with the site itself.
EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!
I find it funny that a 3rd party app can be “profitable” but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase.
Reddit has increasingly become a cesspit of racism and bigotry anyways, and I find Im going there less and less.
I need to get used to how lemmy works and find my 3d printing people here.
but reddit cant be profitable without alienating a sizeable chunk of their userbase
Do those API prices make Reddit profitable? I highly doubt it.
I’d never repeat their claims as if they were true. It’s just bullshit reasoning. Mismanagement.
Heres a community for you https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
and here’s a sh.itjust.works like to the same subreddit so you don’t have to jump through hoops to subscribe to it.
https://sh.itjust.works/c/3dprinting@lemmy.worldTheres a way to link “instance agnostic” but im unsure
I mean, there kind of is. just like in reddit you could just type/r/subreddit, here you can type/c/community, and if you want it to link to a community on another instance its the obvious/c/communitywhich is now agnostic no matter which instance you find the post from.edit: nvm, I thought that was how that worked, and looking at the lemmy issue tracker I thought that’s what was suggested, but upon trying it, it doesn’t seem to auto link like reddit does at all. so 🤷
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
Been for for 10 minutes. Really like it so far. Really gives me the vibe of the early 2000s internet (in a good way)
This right here.
I really can’t wait to see what’s the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
The real fallout will be seeing what the numbers look like after July 1st. When all the third party users are given the unavoidable choice to switch to the official app or not. If engagement goes down then and stay lower, it’s ogre for Reddit.
I’m going to try to ween myself off reddit. I added the Lemmy page to my Home Screen where Apollo used to be and deleted the reddit app. (Don’t feel like sideloading the Lemmy app). I’ll probably still be browsing with Apollo until I can’t any more. 🤷🏻♂️
Edit to add: the death of reddit will be slow. They’re going to stick to their guns, the people who actually make reddit good will move leaving only bots, scammers, and idiots. The idiots will realize they’re surrounded by idiots, while not realizing they’re idiots, and they won’t like that so they’ll try to move here. Depending on how easy it is to move to Lemmy by the time that happens will dictate how many idiots move here. I feel like the current level of difficulty sets a high enough bar to keep the idiots out… for now.
Yeah it’s gonna be quite an interesting event. Most of reddit’s newer userbase doesn’t seem to care, but then again the mods of major subreddits do.
Mods can be replaced. Remember r/TheDonald? Not that I have -any- sympathy at all for those trogs, but the admin dealt with them by deleting all the mods and appointing new ones that would toe the line. There’s nothing to stop them from using that playbook again. A lot of people will leave, but a lot of people will shrug and go back to posting cat pictures.
Mods can be replaced. I saw a post today – mods are being replaced.
Yeah, called it. But I was hardly alone in calling it.
I don’t need reddit. Reddit doesn’t generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
Yeah its weird that people keep talking about “Reddit’s content” when they haven’t created shit. At least Slashdot has always said “These comments are owned by whoever wrote them”
Not that slashdot hasn’t become crap, but it’s something.
At least Slashdot has always said “These comments are owned by whoever wrote them”
The same sort of thing is in the Reddit terms of service. They don’t want to own the possibly-offensive, maybe-even-illegal speech that people post there. They just require as a term of service that they receive a perpetual license to do whatever they want with it.
Free Reddit silver and a kick in the nuts.
And some ugly-ass NFT snoo abomination
Of course they aren’t going back. We saw how arrogant spez was. There was no doubt in my mind he is just going to rely on the fact that most people are rarely committed enough to do anything.
My expectation… Some will stay with the fediverse. Others will see the blackout as a “we did everything we could” and then go back, business as usual.
I for sure will not be back. I like RIF and it is the only way I browse. With RIF gone so too am I.
This is me. If I can’t use Apollo or Narehal, Reddit is dead to me except when web search sends me to a Reddit thread.
I think you’re probably right. I might even go back because /r/stopdrinking is sort of a lifeline for me, and I just don’t see another viable alternative.
But I’m hoping to replace the majority of my reddit use with the fediverse.
I relate to this, I am in a number of support groups on Reddit. I ended up just making the knitting community here because I didn’t know what I was doing and now I’m a mod. I really want to set up a c/stopdrinking community here but that’s a mod role I am not willing to take on.
Hey Lemmy gang. Just signed up after seeing this.
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
Glad to know we’re just ‘noise’, lol.
One minute our content (through the API) is “very valuable” and “needs to be monetized”. The next we’re just “noise”.
If you can’t be monetized, you’re just noise. They don’t see their community as people, they see them as data to be harvested and eyes to be advertised to.
Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”
lol it’s hard to do that when you aren’t making any money, Steve.
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!
Shame they killed it like this, but fuck 'm! First comment on Lemmy 👌
What a clown show. Glad I’m gone.
Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable
It’s their own fault. They didn’t have to take hundred of millions of venture capital and hire thousands of people. They didn’t have to go try to become a XX billion dollars company fighting with Facebook and Tiktok.
They could be profitable with a hundred engineers, a hundred support staff and reasonable ads. They could make delivering ads part of their API and have 3rd party apps serve them for them. They could let those 3rd party app handle the mobile markets since those solo devs are creating better apps than the hundreds of engineers at Reddit.
I’m really annoyed that they are changing a winning formula to build something that nobody wants
and im willing to pay for API access. If Reddit started charging me a buck or two i would be ok with that. I recognize that servers are not free, and their profit has to come from somewhere.
But charging app devs $20,000,000 a year is NOT the solution.
I would have accepted it… Not anymore. They burned this bridge.
This is the big issue with growth investment or whatever the hell its called. Instead of being happy with a steady revenue, big companies have to always grow until they become completely unsustainable.
