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KillaBeez ,

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.

charlytune ,
@charlytune@mander.xyz avatar

It really is a breath of fresh air, and has highlighted for me how dumb and angry so much of Reddit has become.

KillaBeez ,

I think the major turning point was around 2016. That’s the first time I began to feel like my guard needed to be up with every single comment from there on.

Mozingo ,
@Mozingo@lemmy.world avatar

Hmmm, I wonder what major event occurred in 2016… Lol

sping ,

Frankly, I think it’s entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it’ll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.

KillaBeez ,

I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.

Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while

People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.

Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.

It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.

makeitso ,

But I think a piece of this that’s important to remember is the messed up incentives that most platforms have had beginning around the time they took on serious funds from big investors.

From the moment you bring in serious investment dollars from Silicon Valley funds and SV wannabes, your incentive is no longer to build something that seriously delights users just for the sake of delighting users, everything is in service to shareholder value.

Reddit is perhaps the most classic example of our time of a truly wonderful platform being destroyed by shareholder value coming first.

Nobody ,

A few small pockets of civility survived here and there, but everything else has drowned in bots, ads, and trolls for so long that it’s shocking to come here and be able to click on a random post and see civil discussion as the default. That tone needs to be set and maintained. Basic decency and civility are really not that hard, even when people disagree. We lost that somewhere along the way.

pokkst ,

It’s so nice to not see GPT-3 bots replying to literally everything, like they have been for like 2 years now on Reddit.

GiantBasil ,

That was happening? Well it explains a lot of recent reddit then, it really felt people had really weird reading comprehension.

Lexicon ,

It felt like every other comment on popular subs (like r/AmITheAsshole) was a bot calling out another bot for having scraped and stolen a comment from someone farther down the comment chain. It makes me think that a significant portion of the traffic being seen still active on Reddit is just bots talking to each other. That, and porn subs, probably.

Chainweasel ,

Trace it to the root of the problem, if the subreddits going dark took the servers down, then what made all the subreddits go dark 🤔

battleoften ,

My guess is that it didn’t. I wonder if all of the subreddits going dark left the front page and r/all open to god knows what from more unsavory subs, and when Reddit realized that it was happening, pulled the plug until they were able to filter out anything less-than-corporate-allowable on the front page.

Suppoze ,
@Suppoze@beehaw.org avatar

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 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: reddark.untone.uk. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside 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.

But as @immolator mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.

DJDarren ,

An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.

CanadianNomad ,

There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…

pre ,
@pre@fedia.io avatar

If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?

Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?

It's like the kids today don't know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?

Dunno. I've never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.

@Gaywallet

Gaywallet OP ,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

? why are you pinging me

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

Hey man, seem like a cool dude. Who wouldn’t want to ping you? Keep being awesome my dude

Gaywallet OP ,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month

scrubbles ,
@scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech avatar

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.

https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/pictrs/image/13d6a20c-b7e4-4ccc-ad4d-3f56f0782097.jpeg

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