Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
God we need indefinite blackouts.
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
How is that an example of bad code?
Honestly, it’s probably not - if I’m actually right this is likely an issue that Reddit’s engineers never predicted would happen so never planned for it. I was being hyperbolic.
It’s not reactive. A proper reactive system can handle fluctuations in usage patterns more robustly.
I’m having a hard time believing the claim that Reddit’s code isn’t reactive.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a gigantic mess of nested if-else statements.
Maybe, but this was a huge increase in usage. Reddit never expected to deal with anywhere near thousands of subs going private simultaneously.
The servers run on the tears of bitter whiny CEOs.
Tildes’ dev Deimos used to work for Reddit and had this guess https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_during_blackout_day_1#comment-87v1.
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
Want Free API? Straight to down status.
Want cheaper API? Also straight to down status
Not enough people on Reddit because of protests? Also straight to down status
This comment is so good an upvote won’t do justice (without awards, a classic comment such as this now has some merit… it’s a new day boys & girls, a good day)
If Beehaw offered awards I would actually buy them, at least the money would be going towards keeping the lights on for a project that isn’t actively trying to screw over users for profit.
Give them some gold. Oh wait…
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
thank you, this comment made my day
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.
At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.
Is that what the subreddit coins or subredidt points idea was about?
I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
They’ll find some people.
The reality is, not having (good enough) mods will take a while to really hurt the bottom line. Subs will slowly deteriorate.
But I’m 100% sure, within a few weeks you can establish a new order of more servile mods.
People on Reddit complain about the mods enough as it is. (And I include myself in that. I’ve had some less than stellar mod encounters in the past.) However, if Reddit were to force out existing mods and replace them with mods willing to toe the company line (and possibly ban people for mentioning the blackout, complaining about Reddit, or mentioning alternatives), it would just result in more user dissatisfaction.
Reddit won’t go out overnight. There are too many people who post there. However, this could turn into a snowball effect. Rebelling mods are replaced by bootlickers. Dissent is crushed in order to make it seem like everything is hunky dory before the IPO. Power users flee to alternatives like Lemmy. Slowly, normal users hear that some of their favorite content is on this new service and sign up. Reddit usage drops little by little until it’s limping around as a shell of its former self.
Whatever causes the website to have trouble, I’m all for it, right now.
I already wondered if I got lightning-banned for sending too many API requests in a short time, when I used a script to auto-edit all my comments and text-posts.
Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku…
Bold of you to assume they had a keikaku to begin with
A significant number. Fantastic. I’m not sure I believe the stability issues, I’m just a a tin foil hat kind of guy though. I guess it’s possible.
Reddit didn’t design their systems around needing to deal with a huge number of subs going private all at the same time. It’s not surprising that it caused a short outage.
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
My hypothesis is that it’s probably because so much of Reddit posting is automated by their own bot network now that they DDOS’d themselves trying to auto-post to subs that are suddenly locked. Like they didn’t even bother tracking which subs would be blacking out and like…write exceptions to their post schedule.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn’t a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted…
As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.
None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.
At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
I’ve had some of those. I’ve been responding with a link to Louis Rossman’s video and “Please consider limiting your own reddit use.”
Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.
Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.
You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.
I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).
I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…
in a way it does, when you’re building massive scale systems. Say you are the mitigation team and want to protect yourself against a malicious hacker/employee that starts shutting down web servers or removes posting permissions from the DB for everyone. You’re going to monitor the frequency of posts and if it drop too fast, you know something’s bad happening. You’re going to take automated measures against it - maybe freeze access to the DB completely, maybe switch to a (much less tested) backup region/system, etc… so you can see how things can snowball from there to strange scenarios…
yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).
I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.
I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation
I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.
The fail whale was iconic back in the day.
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can’t say I won’t miss it though, wish there was a “Lemmy is fun” already
Didn’t know we had an app. The RiF developer is working on an app for Tildes, which bums me out, RiF was my weapon of choice.
I’ve only convinced one real life friend to become interested in reddit, I asked her if she’d heard about all the drama there, and found out she’d been using the official app all this time…she was super shocked when I told her the stories about peoples’ phones heating up using that thing.
I’m still trying out Tildes now and then, but the lack of an app pretty much kills the experience for me at the moment. I feel like the Lemmy system is overall the superior option, but Tildes is still an interesting alternative from what I’ve seen so I’m excited to see what it looks like with an app.
I read that people were really impressed with how dedicated the RiF developer is working on their app - bugs or features were reported and bam! Fixed asap. I mean to join up at Tildes when they have another bidding round, it is interesting in its own way - same with Squabbles.
Any chance you could give me an invite?
I was going to join tildes until I saw a slew of posts talking about how they got permabanned for saying stuff like “I like tildes more than lemmy”. Lol… what?
started using jerboa, but as it stands i found browsing in firefox on the mobile interface better
Agreed. Jerboa has a ways to go to catch up with the mobile web interface.
And they both have a long way to go to catch up to the likes of RIF.
I guess I have the minority opinion here - I reallykme Jerboa. It’s not Apollo or Sync but it’s lightweight, all about the text, has bookmark, comment, up and down votes front and center, and gets out of the way.
I’ve also been over on kbin.social and the mobile interface there is really lacking so maybe Jerboa just looks especially good to me jn contrast!
The lack of a mobile app is what’s keeping me from trying kbin.social right now.
In one of the subreddits, someone mentioned an effort to make a “Reddit API->Lemmy API bridge.” Basically, you’d load this code and point your Reddit API calls to Lemmy instead. Then this bridge would translate your Reddit code to Lemmy. This could allow for apps like RIF, Boost, Apollo, etc to quickly turn their Reddit apps into Lemmy apps.
I hope this pans out. Jerboa isn’t bad, but having many third party apps to choose from would be great. (As a Boost user, I’d love to load Boost and browse Lemmy instead of Reddit.)
If folks are on iOS, you can beta test the app “Mlem” by following the instructions here:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
I like it!
I just downloaded it. I’m not sure how to log in though. I entered beehaw.org for the home page then Skyteck for username and added my password. Then it says could not connect to beehaw.org.
Try the full URL:
https://beehaw.org/That worked for me. Logging in was as easy as logging in here on browser.
Logging in is a major pain in the ass. It took me like 12 minutes to figure it out and if I got logged out, I’m not sure I remember how it worked.
Terrible UX. But better than nothing.
Same. We need better Lemmy apps
Jeroba is great and open source (and free)! Rather than “better Lemmy apps” why not just improve the one that already exists?
I don’t like the layout personally. I agree that we should improve existing apps but we also should create more options.
Reddit (and Boost, the app I used before) offered several different layout styles that you could pick from (e.g. cards, list). Are those the types of layouts you’re referring to? Those could be added, I expect, and the more the merrier
Or do you mean more specific layout details like where the voting buttons are?
Jerboa has “Card”, “Small Card”, and “List” modes under “Look and Feel” -> “Post View”
For me I want a LemReader a Lemmy version of RedReader.
I was using joey. Joey for lemmy sounds pretty weird.
Lol yeah. Traded one animal for another.
The RedReader developer (QuantumBadger) said they’d like to make it a more general reader app and include support for RSS and Lemmy. It would take a while to to it though. They would have to abstract a lot of the Reddit specific code.
I hope they do it, it’s a really nice app.
Jerboa is a pretty nice app overall already. I use an iPhone as my main device, and Mlem is very incomplete at this stage (but it’s quite new). I loaded up Jerboa on a Pixel, though l, and was very impressed. Jerboa is far more polished…shame it’s Android only
Did the same this morning but with Boost. End of an era, really
I’ve done the same. I miss RiF but I have to say, jerboa is nicer than expected. The main thing that gets me is that tapping on a comment hides it, I’m used to just selecting it to upvote lol
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!
That’s what I did!
Same here!
I’ve also done this. It makes it really easy to forget about Reddit, to some extent.
Honestly, all I need is something to occupy my eyes and fill that reflex that has me tapping an app on the tray of my home screen when I’m stressed or need a distraction.
This place isn’t the most efficient (yet) and there are many gaps from what I used to read back in my Reddit days but that place was beginning to be too toxic for me anyway.
The newness of this, and the energy here is much better for my mental health. I can see googling something +Reddit to read an opinion about a TV show or something but if they don’t allow unauthenticated browser access to the site, I won’t even be doing that anymore. And I’ll almost certainly be better off for it.
I might suggest getting ebooks? I have found reading a book to be a lot less stressful a lot of the time, and bonus, you don’t need to deal with data after you dl the book to read it.
My solution to this was to put Jerboa there, and add Tachiyomi (Manga reading app) above it, for when I’m just looking for “something” to busy myself.
I switched it out for the PWA of my instance
I put mlem in the spot where Apollo (sob) used to be
Mlem is kind of ass. I’m working on an iOS app now for Lemmy and others. All of your posts and communities across all of your services and servers in one feed. I’m really excited about it.
Oooh. Make a sub or whatever they’re called so we can follow the progress? :)
Same, but for me it’s Apollo! I had to take it off my home screen. I am committed to the 48 hours and beyond, if necessary! And got everyone in my house to join in too! But damn it’s a hard habit to break!
I’ve become partial to animals eating food 🥺 where do I go for this content 😭
I’m not sure, but here’s a photo of my son’s blue parakeet eating to hold you over until you find it. (Also, let me know if you find such a community.)
Nom nom nom. (But if you find fruit bats or capybaras eating, let me know!)
Stick around the cute animals are growing by the day! Seriously on Saturday I could only find one community dedicated to animals. Today while browsing I found like EIGHT!
Same, I just kept instinctively looking for Boost throughout the day to scroll and then catching myself amd going “godamn it, you made accounts in other places a week ago for this! Just go there!”
I got better at it by the end of the day, by tomorrow hopefully I’ll hop here or tildes first instead of mindlessly trying to open reddit first.
The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I’ll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn’t coming naturally.
And, yes, I know the username doesn’t match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.
So instead of removing RIF, I removed my entire phone homepage. D’oh.
I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website’s core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I’m aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they’re going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg…
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I’ve learned anything it’s that Reddit’s admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that’s come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don’t see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted “free speech.” I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don’t like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn’t seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
IIRC it wasn’t within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.
Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.
There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it…
I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of “this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that’s great,” which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.
If there’s something I’ve learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it’s that they can’t be reasoned with. It’s like a cult where people are brainwashed.
I’ve also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there’s no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it’s most likely a bad-faith ploy but I’ll still take the gamble even though I’ve never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.
I don’t like eating any kind of shit
This is some terrific no context life advice.
At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don’t expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it’s becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I’ve commented loads on here that I haven’t felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it’s getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It’s become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I’m really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it’s more engaging. IDC if it doesn’t become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I’m 100% down.
Agreed, feels like a fresh start without some of the noise. Reddit will be bleeding users for a long while. A large number of power users have jumped ship and many of them technically apt. Lemmy will improve very quickly now. New UIs and features.
I’m excited.
Same man. I’m also trying to get out of my shell and contribute as well. I have thousands of reddit comments, but only a few posts in 12 years, mainly because I didn’t see the point. But here, where there are 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer users, what I have to say or post may genuinely interest somebody AND be seen by said person. If people don’t like it, that’s fine, at least it was there for them to see and not like!
Well your username certainly wins my everything for the day!
Thanks! My reddit name got shit on frequently, so I’m not sad to see people appreciating the new one!!
This just makes me really curious what it was - Mine was never a point of contention because it was just some letters and numbers
This is it. The algorithm amplifies the popular and in doing so mutes the rest.
Whether the algorithm is upvotes from the community times hotness or likes from the whole world times your social graph.
It is still inevitably muting more people than it is promoting.
People are worried today that there might not be a single place to find the one true forum, but in wanting that they are silencing the decentralized voices who can only get attention in a smaller group.
You can’t have a sensible discussion when everyone is in the same room.
Yeah I was super surprised to see just how many improvements hit the Jerboa Android app in just a couple days since I installed it. So many PRs lol
I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users’ mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.
I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover – the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.
I think the Digg v4 moment will be when/if Reddit bans porn. And if they’re gunning for an IPO, they’re going to do just that.
I miss pre-G4 TechTV so much
Call for Help and The Screen Savers! Take me back 🥹
Those shows literally drove me to a career in software development.
I’ll never forget Leo telling a young kid about my age about a new programming language called Python. I like to think he shaped a fair number of future careers with that one call
There’s already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about “What if this fails? What next?”
I don’t think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven’t figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn’t cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.
OTOH, I do like Lemmy.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen power mods collectively band together to form their own Reddit clone.
undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this
Sure it will survive. And it’s certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn’t fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won’t know until long after the fact.
Even as a reddit addict I didn’t know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn’t even a mobile app user.
I don’t know if it will ever fall or fail, but I think the days of reddit being a place for the future of the internet to happen is over. People just plain don’t trust the site anymore.
Like why build fun tools for it? Why help moderate a community? Why do anything on reddit if the post quality is insanely low, bots are everywhere, and trolls have taken over.
Companies do this a lot. They sacrifice good will and community for money because it can’t easily be put down on a profit graph. So reddit seems fine to burn most of their genuine community to make a profit. And that’s fine, they’ll go elsewhere.
My hope is that somewhere like lemmy can stop the need to keep changing platforms.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before…
It was getting really bad.
Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.
I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit
Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.
Why?
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It directly falls afoul of Reddit’s rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.
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There’s an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with simp culture, or the notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.
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In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them…
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It’s ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you’d otherwise have feel genuine, that’s if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.
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More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn’t agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so put an Automoderator filter so I’m effectively shadowbanned from using words like “OnlyFans” or “e-girl.”
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All those OnlyFans links and not a single photo of a fan!
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist the dad joke.)
If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we’ll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch. Long term that might still mean a transition.
Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn’t around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn’t know this stuff.
By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I’ve heard that before but I obviously had no problems.
It’s not intuitive to find communities on other servers. You have to be adamant that one exists it order to get it to come up in search after multiple attempts. Communities I’ve created on midwest.social still aren’t showing up in the search on lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz and I would rather people find my community than create a new one by the same name on their server.
In its current state, and if it stays in this state, this is why it will not replace Reddit. It’s not just unintuitive, it’s about as hard as you can make it without purposefully making it hard. You can blindly grope in the dark slapping r/ in front of a topic. Here it’s a totally different story. And splintering the discussion does not a (viable) Reddit competitor make. If a first time user is expecting Reddit communities and gets the sub 1000 community counts Lemmy currently has they’re gonna drop it like a lead balloon.
That’s all okay with me because at the end of the day I personally don’t care. For me I’m happy with what community there is. What itches I have that Lemmy doesn’t scratch that Reddit did are replaceable with other content from other sites.
topic aggregation and finding communities faster is being worked on, as well as improvements to the cross-instance synchronization.
If there are multiple communities with the same name you should eventually be able to aggregate them together into one feed.
This influx of users will give the system a real test, as many users are lumping into a handful of large servers, rather than spreading out as there is no good way to find a local server with free capacity and a low ping.
Oh yeah. If nobody on your instance is already subscribed, that’s true.
Off-topic, but I’m glad you’re a Midwest llama who eats casseroles instead of hot dish!
I think it’s down to the communities page more than anything else. Don’t know if it’s a bug with Beehaw specifically or Lemmy in general not having the feature, but you can’t sort/filter the list of communities by number of subscribers or by instance.
Still a tonne better than Mastodon… My biggest complaint about Mastodon and the reason I barely use it is that if you look at all posts outside of your instance, you get riddled with bot spam. All I saw in the ‘All’ feed outside of my local instance were posts from a hentai reposting bot that regurgitated posts from various imageboards and anime porn subreddits…
undefined> lemmyNSFW.com
My use case for Mastodon is quite different than yours. I only look at what I have subscribed to. It was the same way I used twitter. And in this case Mastodon works fine for me and it doesn’t even matter what instance I signed up on.
"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "
lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you’re right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it’s going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be “the front page of the internet” anymore.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Reddit has a worse power-user problem than Digg. I mean at the very least Digg didn’t give its most active users the power to remove other people’s content. The difference is that Reddit already existed as a better alternative to Digg until it imploded, whereas until the recent API changes and blackout happened, there was no viable alternative to Reddit and a lack of people seeking an alternative.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Time will tell. My concern about Lemmy is that it’s non-profit and server hosting costs are great. It’s all well and good until you see some of the smaller instances shut down because they cannot afford to host.
It’s so frustrating. I deleted Apollo and don’t see myself downloading the garbage reddit app, so I really hope a new website can come out on top. I wish one of this community driven platforms followed suit of Wikipedia and allowed donations to pay for site costs but didn’t try to become profitable. These kind of community-run (aka free labor) pillars on the internet are bigger than just a dumb tech company
Fwiw, Tildes is non-profit and accepts donations. However they are gated by requiring an invite and are intentionally not growing quickly
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.
I’m totally not going through withdrawal.
Uh huh.
Deleted my account and took Apollo off my phone. My hands feel… itchy.
I’m doing the same on 6/30. I had to move Apollo off my front page to stop me from reflexively opening it every ten minutes.
I deleted RiF in the line for the bagel shop this morning. I feel exactly the same way.
Save and import:
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.011Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Reddit to Beehaw", "exampleUrl": "https://reddit.com", "exampleResult": "https://beehaw.org", "error": null, "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)?reddit.com(.*)", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Reddit to Beehaw", "redirectUrl": "https://beehaw.org", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] } ] }Is there a way for the extension to replace only the domain? for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/memes will become https://sopuli.xyz/c/memes ?
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
Praise porn-Jesus, horny be his name.
NSFW always seems to push technology forward, be it video streaming, or VR, or now federated link aggreagators.
Niche communities reign for now! I’ll wait to create an account until the influx dies down, but this is, uh … handy to know.
We’re trying to expand it to cover more topics currently
Are we blocked from seeing NSFW communities on Beehaw? (Not an issue, I would create an alt for that anyway. Just curious)
I believe (could be wrong) that they just are against hosting NSFW communities on beehaw. You should still be able to view things from other instances if NSFW is enabled in your account settings.
Check your profile settings. There’s a nsfw setting in there that might be blocking you
I have an account on lemmy.world and can see more NSFW communities while browsing all communities. IDK if that’s just a bi-product of them being more active or something beehaw does on their end and it just hasn’t caught up with the influx yet, but either way it’s fine with me. Beehaw ain’t about porn, I’m perfectly fine having a separate account somewhere that is more about it.
I think so. I am not sure but I remember reading somewhere that beehaw blocked nsfw. There is a stickied SFW post on lemmyNSFW that is for linking NSFW communities to those who wouldn’t be able to see them.
I can see it on mobile with jerboa so I don’t think so
This morning I deleted all my posts, comments, and accounts on the aliensite. 4 accounts total, and over 10 years of data. I hope others will do the same. At least for the sake of the app devs. They deserve better.
I nuked all my posts and comments as well.
I did the same, 12+ years. I was an Alien Blue user till they bought it and spezzed it up, then I found Apollo and never looked back. I debated waiting, but at this point I just can’t support that platform anymore, even if they do try to backtrack.
What’s the benefit of deleting ones account(s) vs just letting it become an unused relic? Wouldn’t making them dedicate that fraction of their service space to dead accounts/comments/etc be more of a burden than removing it all for them?
People visit reddit for user generated content. If you remove all the memes, links, comments, and answers to all the things you google " X site:reddit.com" to find, it loses value.
To my mind, that value created by one’s content would exceed the fractions of a penny it costs to serve it
Ah okay that makes more sense. I was never a big submitter, just commented a lot. Still, you make a good point. I have some highly updated comments in discussion threads (not a lot but still), and you’re right that reddit could get residual value from those down the road. Best to scrub completely.
Is there a guide for how to do it thoroughly? I have THOUSANDS of comments, it would take days to do it manually.
You could use something like PowerDeleteSuite.
I used Redact and it worked perfectly! Nuked some other social medias while I was at it.
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
