The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit

Hmmm. Maybe it's intentional. A purge. Flush out the old crowd with their adblockers and their nonsense ideas about "free speech," and whoever stays -- out of ignorance or compliance -- is left with the ad-ridden hellscape that is the new interface and the official app.

I certainly never viewed it as a social media site. I joined it as a link aggregator and a way to find information on topics I thought were interesting, not make friends. It always seems odd to me when people refer to it as a social media site.

Reddit *still is * a bottom-up community, that's why all their monetization efforts never worked and there's so much backlash against the API changes. All of the content and value on the site is created by the users and mods. Reddit the company doesn't own that, and redditors take offense at management's attempts to take advantage of the users' free efforts for their own gain.

What Huffman and Reddit should have done was think long term and set up a Wikipedia-like entity that could have ensured the health and growth of the site while only taking a modest cut. Instead they tried to pump up the value and cash out with an IPO, and when that likely fails, they'll end up with nothing.

Additionally, it's not even that good of a venue.

I was talking to my friend about this and asked if he could point out a single improvement that reddit has made in the last decade that hadn't been about monetization, since I exclusively use old.reddit.com and third party apps, I certainly couldn't. We couldn't come up with anything...

Its a better analogy that Reddit pissed off the roadies, ushers, ticket takers, and other crew because they wanted 300% of the concession stand's gross take.

It's more that they just treat every artist with a lot of disrespect, but they know they're the only big venue and there's a basically endless supply of artists that wants to play there.

However, there's smaller venues that will host these artists and treat them with respect. If it gets too bad, these small venues will grow and gain fame. Ultimately becoming a viable competitor to the original venue.

The comparison doesn't hold exactly, because the nature of social media makes it so that the advantages of scale are exponential (the more users your platform has, the more attractive it becomes). However, federation breaks this. Which is why I believe this is the way to go. It's probably not a coincidence that the reddit-style Lemmy has seemingly the most potential. The appeal of joining is not really dependent on famous accounts (e.g. twitter) or having friends that already joined (e.g. Facebook or Instagram). People move regardless, build communities and grow the platform.

I hope this whole ordeal, no matter how it goes down, ends up being a landmark for "social media as a monopoly". I think there's been a lot of talk about this in past years, with little real interest, because people are more interested in their next dopamine fix no matter how much they say they care about their data being sold. I hope this is the push we need to start considering these things for real. Most of us are uncomfortable with personal information being sold to 3rd parties, or knowing that users of these sites are technically the product being sold. It's more weird and uncomfortable knowing the CEO and other execs are throwing a tantrum because user data and user submissions AREN'T being generated for them to sell to earn money to buy some yachts and golf courses.

Should social media be a public commodity, same way a community center or library is? Something paid for by taxes and regulated by government. I think it's interesting in concept but odd to consider once you get into government censorship and surveillance aspects. Not a good idea either.

For me its just the third party apps that I care about

FTA:

(Disclosure: WIRED is a publication of Conde Nast, whose parent company, Advance Publications, has an ownership stake in Reddit.)

They mentioned "federated alternatives"

conde naste was reddit and wired's parent company and I believe still a major shareholder so probably why

cast yourself into the kiln, and ignite the age of fire once again

The more this drags on, the less people think this is about money, and more about controlling the platform.

A real business person finds a common ground, sets terms everyone can at least pay forward. Because, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I have $100 lemonade, if no one is able to buy it.

I really don’t understand why reddit doesn’t just charge end uses for API access. Heck chuck it in with premium or something. They can generate an API that you use in whatever client you wanted.

I’d happily pay Reddit for a key to then use in Apollo, but bizarrely this isn’t an option. It’s not like Reddit lacks the ability to charge end users, they already have premium after all.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that all the reporting I've seen so far has failed to capture all the nuance involved. Unfortunate, but not surprising, I suppose.

Just sad how far wired has fallen. This is extremely poor journalism.

If reddit backpedals, even just for damage control, it will cement just how much power the users and mods have over that site. As it should.

I think that's precisely why spez is going to do everything he can not to backpedal.

The rich control the narrative.

I still think that's one of the most damaging events to the success of the fediverse over the past week

Not to whitewash the take, but it's a bigger issue.

The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.

But it's not, truly.

Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some "less relevant" platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.

I don't want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we're trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don't seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.

Maybe that's just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things... but then again, that's the tendencies we've seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol' monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another "mall", its policies, and their results.

Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.

I mean. I'm going back and forth between Lemmy and kbin, but let's not kid ourselves. We're not at a Digg-level exodus yet. The, for lack of a better word, hardcore users are moving on, but the casual redditors aren't showing signs of going anywhere.

Not saying it might not happen, but we're not there yet IMO.

it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing

They kinda bring it up but nothing is named directly.

With how shitty they have been lately will that overflow and flip back to having goof content?

I think it's sad. There is so much good information stored in the side bars, like for example /r/buildapc or /r/fitness, that I hope gets salvaged by the fediverse.

Plus our spaces here need indexing so we can find answers to obscure questions again.

Getting flashbacks of digg

afaic, anyone still with Reddit after all this should stay there. I'd love to have the Fediverse as a tinier space for tech minded, power users.

It's a big, relevant, ongoing event which affects the fediverse directly. There's a huge influx of new users who were recently burned by it who would normally go to "the other website" to discuss, but no longer do.

Would you prefer they go back, or is there a place here for those displaced?

I totally get that. At the same time though and speaking for myself, Reddit has been a major component of my internet life for nearly a decade. And having such a dramatic switch, but also doing it as a group with other people, it's cathartic to be able to share and see that you're not totally alone in the way you feel.

That said I've also blocked Reddit on my home DNS so I won't accidentally go back out of habit. That's how little I want to have to do with it. But it's okay to miss Reddit and what it used to be. That will fade with time.