I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.
Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that depends on functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.
It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger subreddits are starting to see how little their users understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more than they already do by those users, because of the issue that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing".
Curious to see how this all shakes out.
I checked yesterday and some widely used mod bots are already down. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.
• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.
• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.
• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.
• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.
• SafestBot (Blank-Cheque) - This is widely used by subs to ban spam and troll accounts. SaferBot, it's only alternative, was closed to additional subs some time ago.
I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me, and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire site for "harassment" of the mods
So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway identities for talking about diapers and talking about philosphy
The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong, can be bad.
But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10 years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much higher.
I'm sure there are some small subs where the mods aren't huge jerks and benefit from usable tools to fight spam and deescalate flame wars, but I think we'll all be a hell of a lot better off with a bunch of unaffiliated or loosely-affiliated topical forums than we are with this current panopticon. The mods will be better off too: A guy moderating his own website will have better tools to combat spam and punish whatever he defines as trolls within his own kingdom.
I thought this too until I went to Reveddit one day and WOW there was a lot of stuff silently removed without disappearing from my user history.
To further my point, I just looked myself up (same as my HN handle), and I only found 7 comments removed by mods. Most of which were honestly fair to remove, in my opinion.
Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic amount of work that goes into keeping the system well behaved. If you do your job right as few people as possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who everyone thinks does nothing in the best case and enraged at when something breaks in the worst case.
Why not publish some stats every week/month about what kind of content/users were banned/suspended etc.
"We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API."[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_update...
Last month Reddit cut off the Pushshift API (https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...). It was widely used by moderation bots such as AssistantBOT. Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift or most of the services using it will ever be restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based around selling the data to intelligence agencies (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for moderation tools isn't really part of their business model.
Accessibility apps are exempted only if they're free and noncommercial; they also can't access NSFW content. Many popular third-party apps that blind users rely on (https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/1447ibp/what_apps_me...) are commercial and will either be shutting down or have an uncertain future. It's unclear how many apps will make the transition; they weren't given anywhere near enough notice.
Reddit's CEO has publicly lied about discussions with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with developers is almost nonexistent. The Verge reporter may be taking their word for it, but few moderators and developers are.
The changes they've already made have led to many popular bots being shut down. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists a few of them. u/SafestBot, one of the affected bots, is widely used to ban spam and troll accounts. It's a moderator at 342+ subreddits. If brigading is a serious problem in your sub, then your life has gotten a lot harder.
The official Reddit mobile app is hot garbage and uniquely poorly suited to moderation. Third-party apps save much of the work and are much easier to use. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...).
It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
If your subreddit is being brigaded, then eventual bans don't help. It took years for r/The_Donald to be banned and over a year for r/NoNewNormal to be banned; meanwhile their users were trolling and brigading all over Reddit.
> It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
They have 393k users, but how many are both interested and suitable for moderating? It's not necessarily easy to find good people, especially on a sub like that where mods are regularly harassed. Here's a concrete example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_cod...).
There is a balance struck by any business when setting prices, and I would wager that every one of these app developers put a lot of thought into it based on Reddit's broken commitments. The mod userbase is not enough to support a single app, so this is just forked tongue doublespeak in the final analysis.
An additional factor is that the third-party app cutoff cost Reddit a lot of goodwill. Some bot developers such as u/Blank-Cheque have already taken their bots down. My other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists some of the affected bots.
Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally doesn’t care about them at all.
For example, /r/ExperiencedDevs is one of my favorite subreddits. They have rules around the types of questions you can ask. These rules are put into place to prevent the subreddit from becoming like /r/CSCareerQuestions, or to prevent an influx of memes.
Without these tools or these moderators, I have a feeling some subreddits will become more generalist and possibly drop in quality.
I go to /r/ExperiencedDevs (and other subreddits moderated in a similar fashion) for a very specific set of posts and expectations for questions. I don't really want to see memes, jokes, etc. in the subreddit, as I have other ones to go for that.
This just isn't true. Subreddits without moderators get buried in spam (both thinly veiled self-promotion and outright unrelated spam link dumping).
(I've both moderated a small subreddit and tried to participate in subreddits with absent moderators.)
You can even see this with smaller active subs that only have one moderator. The sub doesn't fill up with spam when the moderator is sleeping.
old.reddit.com may not be long for this world. i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact were both removed earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283379
(The irony now of that top comment, "99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo"...)
I keep hearing this repeated by people who use the site. Honestly, no they won't. At least the vast majority of them. There's literally no viable replacement.
Completely fine for reading purposes and mostly free of all the UX "optimizations" for ads and such.
Have similar feelings about old reddit on mobile.
What it comes down to is that yeah they're better than new reddit, but that's not much of a bar to clear and if I'm going to be spending extended periods of time using a site/service the experience needs to be good not just passable.
It works, but it's not a good experience, nor is it on par with HN.
What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with 'old.reddit.com' next?
Years ago, when announcing the new website, he said "the API is not going anywhere"
old reddit is 100% on the chopping block
This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people.
> looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks
It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.
Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?"
My wife noticed day-1 of the protests (I know because she asked me for the TL;DR of WTF is happening) and she doesn't move in tech circles, and the subs she likes (liked?) are all pop-culture stuff. Pretty sure she's just not been using reddit since then, as all of what she cared about is gone. Other non-tech friends of mine also noticed within 24 hours of the protests starting, with similar "well, damn, guess I'll find somewhere else to waste time" reactions.
But, all of the people I know who use reddit use it only for a few subs, and hardly ever visit the site's front page except by accident. I don't know anyone who's like "I'll just go to the Reddit homepage and look for something interesting that it's decided to promote", though I'm sure such users exist (and may even be the majority, for all I know).
I mean, yeah, I thought I made that clear in my post. I see words to that effect, certainly.
And I was responding to your anecdote. So. Did you ask yourself these questions before posting, or was that different somehow?
maybe you're just really into meme/imgur post type stuff that doesn't have nearly the dedicated user base as other, more text-heavy subreddits?*
* this isn't a read; the example you gave (a picture of a weird looking fish) seems like the kind of content I described
we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure), accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I’ll get HN hate mail for even suggesting such a thing), or nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these companies. I don’t see “the two main online forums for public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous return on investment, respectively” as an acceptable thing. Sadly my preferences aren’t exactly big news, and I assume the reaction from society at large will continue to be “oh no! Anyway…”
They presumably know this or if they don't, they soon will. To avoid allowing app devs to run around the API changes they have to either continue maintaining the front end or cut the dead weight. Given their decision making lately, I'm going for the latter.
It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.
This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods are integral to the site’s operations, and they aren’t employees they can just order around.
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)
Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.
It's a slow process that involves building up communities and trust to hit a critical mass.
Pure speculation, but I think Reddit will continue to decline, it'll just be a while longer before everyone migrates from it.
Shameless plug, but that's been a focus of ours with the platform that I've been building (sociables.com). We are trying to create an all in one stop for people to create communities, and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community on the platform:
I am really hoping the next Reddit is not some megacorp effort.
I don't think reddit needs to be replaced, but they need to change some things. All subreddits are replaceable, and so are mods so i don't see the point of this protest
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
There is Saidit https://www.saidit.net/ but it's not really a viable alternative.
Popular? No.
Viable? Yes.
Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance.
If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.
So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with?
I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.
So https://zapad.nstr.no/c/rust is distinct from for example https://programming.dev/c/rust
I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances
I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instances but I have not yet figured out how I can use my user on my instance to leave a comment on another instance
According to https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get... whole communities are able to federate as well. But I have not yet understood how this works, heh.
Edit: Same page has some more details:
> One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches
> [email protected] (Community)
> @[email protected] (User)
> https://lemmy.ml/c/programming (Community)
> https://lemmy.ml/u/nutomic (User)
> https://lemmy.ml/post/123 (Post)
> https://lemmy.ml/comment/321 (Comment)
and
> If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:
> New posts, comments
> Votes
> Post, comment edits and deletions
> Mod actions
> You can copy the URL of the community from the address bar in your browser and insert it in your search field. Wait a few seconds, the post will appear below. At the moment there is no loading indicator for the search, so wait a few seconds if it shows "no results".
Here you can see a post from a different instance, shown on my instance:
There have definitely been cases where I did attend multiple forums of the same format and same topic, but generally because I was in transition from one to the other, such as when alt.music.ween was dying and I started trying out the popular Web Forum of the time. In the end I gave up the community of Internet Ween fans, because coming from Usenet, which was absolutely beautiful if viewed using a good client program, web forums were like trying to write a business letter in crayon.
For me, it was actually the first round of enshittification, and we did it without any VC help at all; fact of the matter is that the web forums were easier to use, and so more people came to them, and up to a point, that does result in better community, particularly with non-technical subjects like obscure bands with cult followings.
But, it really did boggle my mind that anyone could use those things without going completely insane at the terrible bad and no good interfaces with no filtering or thread view etc etc (especially early on), but it was an important lesson in psychology for me: they did not have the context of the only-a-tiny-bit-harder, but galaxies-better thing that already existed, they only saw "here is a thing I can use to talk to people about a thing I like, which never existed in my world before," and from there they can tolerate any shortcoming, because it's all novelty. People thought Pong was mindblowing.
Eventually, as the ever-growing blob of spam goo make the Usenet landscape radioactive and impassable, and there was clearly a huge party going on in the forums, everyone just left, other than the diehards that always stay out of some misplaced stubborn urge. A lot of those forums hadn't even figured out how to pay for themselves, and in many cases never did, they just did it so that something would be there where before there was nothing.
All in all, things are really starting to look like the old internet, and it warms the cockles of my heart, truly it do.
So yes, there is certainly at least a vocal subset of people who believe that "finding information is bad actually" and deliberately building tech along those lines.
I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support, but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier for those that is much more expensive. Something along those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-unmonetizable users.
Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.
The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.
And I should have added some cutoff there. It's mods of large enough subreddits.
But why else would the mods be so up in arms?
My own speculation is that a majority of the content is produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to produce content in this mode.
To your point about paying full price —- it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the number of “evergreen subscribers” vs “fair weather subscribers,” but I’m not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its subscribers think of the basic value of the service.
You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.
That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best. I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.
The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.
I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.
I will say that I haven't noticed a decline in quality of posts; not sure if that's due to a strong culture or strict moderation. I suppose most of the Reddit refugees only browse the HN homepage, so HN veterans still have an out sized impact on the New page, which in turn dictates what can reach the top.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.
Edit: is interesting to note the knee jerk negative reaction to this comment. I don't think it contains anything controversial and is a simple statement of reality
I have no skin in the game, and couldn't care less either way what happens to Reddit company, the subs, their third party apps, or the moderators.
I think Reddit should be very worried. Federation works fine for a "forum-like" replacement that doesn't need to be super timely.
Yes, the federated replacement is currently half-baked. You're not going to pick up the unwashed masses this round.
However, more than a few technical sub-Reddits that have simply shut down and are not coming back. The technical users didn't care much for Reddit to begin with and don't mind putting in some elbow grease to permanently kick Reddit to the curb. Lots of technical people now suddenly know about Lemmy who didn't have any clue before.
I have no doubt that Reddit will win this round, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. A nice chunk of software development talent is now mobilized to build the thing to wipe them out.
To be fair, I don't think the CEO is actually wrong. The AI companies are absolutely free-riding on everybody and that needs to stop. However, the way it was done was not it.
Sorry, but digg died because they told their community in unmistakable terms (aka v4) that they don't matter. Reddit happened to be there to take the refugees.