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Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aunty_helen 3y agoIncredibly impressive to see the community unite with nearly 80% of the subreddits blacked out.
- makin 3y agoKeep in mind this is 80% of the subreddits that announced would be participating in the event. There are over 3.5 million subreddits altogether, though of course most of them are dead or with a single user.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 3y agoTIL. I thought reddit had already cracked down on unmoderated subreddits; that if a subreddit didn't have active mods whom the admins could command that they would shut it down.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 3y agoOne however also has to keep in mind that on Reddit you need either a tight-knit topic specific community, or a lot of users to have an active subreddit. Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits. If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.
- alisonatwork 3y agoNot sure I would consider mods unilaterally shutting down their forums and hiding information that was contributed by millions of other people a triumph for the wider community. Speaking as somebody who only ever visits Reddit when a thread appears in a search result and occasionally replies if the mods didn't implement a policy of automatically deleting posts from outsiders, now the information I need is not there, and neither is the information I contributed. Great win for the community.
- Semaphor 3y agoI’d say with you being a passive observer, you are clearly not a part of that community. Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.
- alisonatwork 3y agoThat exclusiveness is exactly my point. It seems for some people the "community" is narrowly defined to mean only those who are highly active Reddit users of very specific forums - so much so that they both visit frequently enough and feel strongly enough to vote on voluntary polls about shutting those forums down. The broader community of people who visit the site and post from time to time most likely never saw any of these polls and wouldn't have bothered voting even if they did. I think those people are still part of the community. To me, a city wouldn't be much of a community if the only people whose opinions mattered were those who had the time to attend council meetings.
- kataklasm 3y agoOne who does not vote does not have the privilege of complaining about the outcome.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoRats! I'll stop complaining about the weather then :)
- kgwxd 3y agoIs there a vote on the weather I've been missing out on? I thought the guy on TV just gets to choose.
- evandale 3y ago> gets to choose One of my favourite TV episodes is the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry thinks the weatherman is calling for rain so he can have an empty golf course. The thought definitely crosses my mind every time there's a big outdoor event happening and it's calling for rain.
- mathieuh 3y agoThis sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there are many communities that I feel at home in. It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.
- redundantly 3y agoIt's definitely surreal. Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? Is this the beginning of the end? Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come? It's an interesting time.
- radarsat1 3y ago> Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
- TheAnachronism 3y ago> I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app. You probably don't as most requests that app makes, are tracking requests. And they clutter the app so much, it's basically unusable with all the ads and broken video players.
- ryanstorm 3y agoTo add to this, the app downloads a significant chunk of data because of its inefficiencies. Not ideal for tight budget data plans.
- 3y ago
- fallinghawks 3y agoThe site seems to have gotten stuck. There are a couple mirror sites listed which are working. e.g. https://reddark-digitalocean-7lhfr.ondigitalocean.app/ https://reddark-digitalocean-7lhfr.ondigitalocean.app/
- bmarquez 3y agoI was watching the stream earlier. It was an exciting feeling to have 10,000 people viewing, and cheering on the chat whenever a new subreddit went dark. I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.
- valine 3y agoI’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoWhat makes reddit valuable are 1. The communities 2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities
- sebzim4500 3y agoIsn't #2 freely available for anyone to scrape? And even if they shut down access now, presumably everyone training LLMs already has a mostly complete dump of reddit comments/links.
- fsflover 3y agoYes, but actually scrapping it is a hard work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254485.
- chrischen 3y agoWhat would be funny is if as a result of this everyone moved back to Digg (where the Reddit users initially came from).
- Exmoor 3y agoMaybe I'm just a pessimist, but if Reddit doesn't backtrack what's the endgame here? I've seen multiple subs indicate they intend to fully shutdown if the API changes continue, but for the popular ones what's to stop Reddit from just appointing new mods and starting the sub back up?
- upon_drumhead 3y agoNothing other then the sheer amount of subreddits and hours of commitment by the new mods
- wvenable 3y agoIf the mods get replaced, that's just another thing for everyone to complain about. Reddit relies on the community to do "community things" but if they stop doing those things then what do they have?
- prox 3y agoThis is why Spez is such a tool imo. He tries to be a Zuckerberg or something. Get his IPO moment. Not one moment does he reflect if this is the course to take. I understand why, the railroad of any tech site is to sell out, make those billions. Get some money. Reddit’s DNA seems different enough, like you say, it is far more about community building. A model like wikipedia, to see it as an utility, would be far more in line with what it is. Spez if I had to guess probably is just flipping tired of it all and wants to cash in asap.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 3y agoThat is exactly what many (including the people working at Reddit [1]) just don't seem to understand. Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities. Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase? This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators. Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part. [1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users [2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard
- RobAley 3y agoThe revolution WILL be televised, as it turns out.
- Alifatisk 3y agoIf Reddit would die, it would be interesting to see where on the web the community would go to next
- rglullis 3y agoHow about we go back to being a web? What I really wish people learned from all these issues with Twitter and Reddit is that the best way to avoid abuse of power is to not let power concentrate so much in any single centralized entity. We don't need everyone with technical skills to make something completely decentralized. How about we take the (I don't know) 3-4% of the population who does have enough sills to buy a domain, manage a server (even if only through basic click-ops) and to offer these services for their closest friends and family?
- zirgs 3y agoImagine if each subreddit was a separate forum with a separate account. People are lazy and want everything in the same place. Also it's not 1998 any more. Running a forum is a full time job. Need to handle DMCA takedowns, deal with illegal content, think about ways to monetise the site and so on. It's much harder than simply moderating a subreddit.
- rglullis 3y ago> Imagine if each subreddit was a separate forum with a separate account. You can have a separate forum, but you don't need a separate account. You just need need these different sites to talk with each other. This is how email, Usenet and now ActivityPub works. > People are lazy and want everything in the same place. It doesn't have to be the same place for everyone. For me (and my friends and family), the "place for everything" would be the server I set up for them. For you, it could be a different server. For journalists from a media outlet, it could be an institutional server. Also, stop projecting. Instead of hiding yourself in the excuse of "people are lazy", just say that you are lazy and don't care about giving your freedoms away to faceless corporations. > Running a forum is a full time job. Need to handle DMCA takedowns, deal with illegal content, think about ways to monetise the site and so on. It's much harder than simply moderating a subreddit. This is the key principle behind the idea of "Small Web". Your servers will be serving your immediate circle only. By definition, you would be only dealing with content created by people who you actually know. - By not having to deal with thousands of users, the setup and maintenance is minimal. - There will be no problem that you can not solve by just picking up the phone or knocking on their door and talking with the person directly. - There is no need to "monetize" the site, because the operating costs are negligible and you are doing it only for yourself/your close circle.
- chakintosh 3y ago86% is dark
- scrollop 3y agoHere's the website that the stream is viewing: https://reddark.untone.uk/ https://reddark.untone.uk/
- HlessClaudesman 3y agor/AmItheAsshole? Yes YTA.
- sebzim4500 3y agoThey locked it instead of going private, but I think it has the same effect
- HlessClaudesman 3y agoAhh OK, thanks for the info. NTA.
- janfrode 3y agoWhy is it only counting a total of 7265 subreddits? There must be many more, right ?
- denvrede 3y agoThese are the ones that announced they're going dark.
- fho 3y agoOne thing that stands out to me right now is that Reddit might actually be better without the big subreddits. With all of the big subreddits going "dark" my feed is dominated by all those small community subreddits that I actively subscribed to. Honestly it's somewhat refreshing to open reddit and nothing has changed on my frontpage.
- hospitalJail 3y agoApple wants a curated experience, why can't reddit? Devils advocate of course, I love my third party apps.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AegirLeet 3y agoIt's really kind of crazy to see. I just checked some of my favorite subs and out of 22 subs I checked, 20 are currently private. I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit. I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.
- lawgimenez 3y agoAs I have expected r/ExperiencedDevs did not go dark. Devs just can't figure out things together.
- realitythreek 3y agor/ExperiencedDevs is such a weird place to me. It’s like the secondary school for r/CSCareerQuestions. It has builtin gatekeeping due to their goal of being for “experienced devs”. I’m also not surprised they aren’t participating.
- deelly 3y agoExperiencedDevs will go dark until the end of the month https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/147ebxd/experienceddevs_will_go_dark_until_the_end_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/147ebxd/ex... > It’s like the secondary school for r/CSCareerQuestions. It started few months ago when sub suddenly become popular. A lot of... how to say it, trivial questions/topics.
- cantsingh 3y agoThey appear to have gone dark for the rest of the month, unless I'm missing something.
- zwily 3y agoThey have a sticky saying they’re going dark till the end of the month. Don’t know when it starts though.
- tjpnz 3y agoHow long would they need to stay down for associated posts to fall out of Google's index?
- mattkevan 3y agoWell, Google search is going to suck even more now if I can no longer add Reddit to the query
- capableweb 3y agoYou can, and if you arrive at a dead page URL, you can use Wayback Machine to see the content. If you use Brave, I think there even is a built in redirect to Wayback if the page loaded is failing.
- black_puppydog 3y agoHah, conspiracy theory of the day I guess. The kagi folks are behind all of this, making google less useful to gain a competitive advantage. Case closed. :D
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Firebrand 3y agoNever truly appreciated how many niche porn subreddits with significant following there were until I started watching the stream.
- activiation 3y agoI removed reddit from my RSS feed... I subscribed to probably 40 or 50 subs.
- robotguy 3y agoI’m still using Alien Blue, which at one time WAS the official Reddit app. It’ll be interesting to see if it actually stops working.