Yeah pretty much on the nose. I’m seeing more 1 month old accounts taking it upon themselves to trash 3rd party devs and the protests in general. I’m sure that’s nothing suspicious.
Just like every “grassroots” political campaign on Reddit that suddenly arises, and then disappears just as suddenly after failing.
As an LLM-powered protester, I have been prompted by Reddit HQ to tell you that your line of thinking is wrong and u/spez is a beautiful boy. bleep bloop
I’ve seen some people on here questioning why this stuff was happening and what was the point.
You have to assume that they just needed explained plainly. Which is hard to do because you can never tell the scabs from the honest people online.
Granted, it’s plausible that longtime lurkers have created accounts to post about this, since this is the first time that Reddit drama has affected them. But I’ve largely been avoiding Reddit since the blackout so I don’t know.
Huh… my feed has been nothing but straight porn or pictures of John Oliver… sometimes both at the same time.
There’s only one thing left to do.
What tf is going on over there I’ve not been to Reddit since the 11th
Reddit is now filled with a bunch of people saying “we don’t even NEED mods! they just make everything worse!”, because this is apparently their first time on the Internet.
I had a Hacker News discussion where in separate comments, a guy said:
- all the moderators should go away because they’re not needed, and he doesn’t agree with their decisions
- but there should still be moderation
- but he’s not going to do it because he’s not here to do unpaid labor
- but of course he wouldn’t pay for there to be moderators
Internet discourse in a nutshell
I think we talked to the same guy
@Raji_Lev @Casmael @zedtronic @JoeCoT
Chances are good that it was separate dudes. This is not an uncommon thought loop.
Aw… I went and made myself sad.
@dismalnow do we have to tag people here for them to see replies?
I’ve been getting notified of replies even when I don’t get tagged
@Casmael @zedtronic @JoeCoT @NoIWontPickaName
Likewise. They pop in the notifications for kbin mags and lemmy, too.
@'s autopopulate in replies using kbin’s webapp, though.
Yeah. My tendencies are pretty tame anymore, and my inner troll just started salivating.
Right now some guy is typing “COMMENCE OPERATION ASS FUCK” into some fucked up window
Me either. It feels good.
Same. It really does
Ditto!
The people that cared distanced themselves already so a new majority of indifference starts to emerge. Those that are still active on Reddit are now more likely to just want things back to normal.
Well, yeah, there’s definitely going to be a new “normal” for Reddit.
Either only the scabs are left, or there’s a concerted smear campaign against the mods who helped with the blackout. I lean towards the latter, but it’s probably both.
There’s a lot of upset users who had no idea that a protest had been planned for weeks ahead of time or that the protests made the news.
They just showed up looking for their content, and having it cut off is like when your heroin supplier leaves town.
I talked to some kid who was furious he couldn’t see r/starwars.
And he blamed it all on the mods.
When I explained the whole history of what was happening, he said he supported the protest but wanted to subs to go public again.
:/
I only went over today cause a couple of the subs I frequent had temporarily opened to ask “Should we stay blacked out?”
Not planning to make that mistake again anytime soon
I mean…what’s wrong with that? The original meme talks about society, something you can’t opt-out of.
You can absolutely opt-out of Reddit. Reddit is a private company and it’s CEO has announced he doesn’t care what the users of the site think, he will be making any changes he damn well pleases. Continuing to use the site after the CEO has already given a hardline “No” to all requests (and then telling the media he idolizes Musk and his overhaul of Twitter) is implicitly accepting you’re fine with the answer and the changes.
I think the problem stems from the fact that Reddit and other ‘private’ businesses are acting like public squares. People use these systems as public spaces in which they can build communities, relationships and ideas. It’s not just a question of “well it’s private so they can do whatever they want”. Lawful is the same thing as ethical. Some people on Reddit have their society on Reddit. What does Reddit owe them? It’s a demand to ask ‘How should Reddit and other businesses participate in society in a way that is ethical and helpful?’
I think the problem stems from the fact that Reddit and other ‘private’ businesses are acting like public squares.
Oh absolutely, but is that the fault of the private company or the people who use it? There are now alternatives that are decentralized and run on free open source software with the specific purpose of creating public spaces that can exist without pressures from CEOs, shareholders, and advertisers. Why not use them instead of whining on Twitter about Twitter or complaining on Reddit about Reddit?
You know why. Network effects, usability, marketing, astroturfing, etc.
We need to do a better job at making the Fediverse more inviting and easier to use. Have a better, clear path for migration.
We should start by designing better and more informative UX, and ditch the email analogies altogether.
Nobody imagines the correct thing when we harp on about how decentralized and amazing everything is, analogous to email but also reddit and twitter combined but also different but it doesn’t matter because it’s all the same in the end.
I’ve actually had a lot of success explaining this all like email; where you and I can create our accounts on different “email services” (instances) yet still be be able to communicate. Using something so ingrained in every day life makes it much more approachable, imo.
Once that concept is understood, simply saying that the fediverse, aka everyone who uses this technology, has alternatives to most of the major social media sites is not beyond most people. I mean, we’re all here, right?
Problem is how do you make migration easy without running into centralisation again. You ideally need to spread people out across the Fediverse, or we will just end up with another monolithic Reddit that can do what it wants
I think one way to help this is to make migration from one server to another really, really, really frictionless. Like to be able to do so on a whim with very little drawback if any.
It might allow people to start off in a central thing but then be able to hop to a smaller instance once they get their Fediverse legs.
Why not use them instead of whining on Twitter about Twitter or complaining on Reddit about Reddit?
Same reason townies bitch endlessly on Nextdoor about their town. Even if you hate what’s happening to the place you are, you still have connections, community and relationships in place that that mean more to you than who the Mayor is. The communities I was part of on reddit were the only real stable, consistent thing in my life while things were turbulent. My father’s not alive anymore, most of my friends have moved to other cities, but up until a week ago I still could enjoy talking about the week’s X-Men comics every Tuesday. Silly as it sounds, that was the only routine thing from ten years ago that lasted until today.
Instances are still privately operated and at the whim of their operators, who are technically free to delete and modify posts arbitrarily. They are not public spaces.
The American legal definition of “fiduciary duty” precludes “ethical.”
People use these systems as public spaces in which they can build communities
What really amused me is when Reddit sent messages to moderators saying things like “your subreddits are public spaces which users depend on, so you should open them”.
When obviously what they mean is “your decision to close your subreddit is hurting our revenues, and if I don’t keep up the payments on my BMW then I’ll be forced to drive an old Honda, so either open the subreddit or we will forcibly do it ourselves”.
There’s a new post from Christian Selig where he addresses false statements from Reddit on the front page. It has 109k upvotes 😂
No link?
Unfortunately it doesn’t show up on the r/all for me just an hour later.
Wow they removed it from the front page
Why wow?
Does it really surprise you?
117k now. Definitely gonna keep growing, too.
I’ve been lurking on old.reddit.com and I’ve seen a lot of people who are upset about the protesting. They are calling it childish, they are calling protesters white knights, etc. If you go on r/JustUnsubbed you can see a bunch of people whining about it. But it really just shows people don’t get it nor do they care to. They just care about being mildly inconvenienced.
Some of them are starting to go on r/Save3rdPartyApps to tell people who are upset to “get off our high horse” lol
It’s just sad that people are trying to defend corporate greed man…
for free
I’m sorry, what? I need details on this.
It’s a very poor analogy.
I suppose it works better like so:
Imagine…
You’re in line at McDonald’s talking to a buddy about how Burger King has better quality, is free, and that you’ll not be returning to McDonald’s in July because their burgers are going to cost $0.24 per microgram, and the owner is a clown.
Someone unaffiliated with McDonald’s who is also standing in hears your comment and starts shouting for you to “GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE!”
… not because they don’t like Burger King.
… not because they have never tried Burger King.But because they closely identify with McDonald’s, and the clown that represents it.
Hope that’s clear. Heh
@dismalnow Ah, okay. Yeah, that makes more sense. I legit thought folks were getting free Burger King somewhere. xD
I got banned from there because years ago for disagreeing with someone that a post was “being upvoted because girl” and politely pointed out to him that it wasnt really, and that he was a baby.
I can understand the wanting to vent about a sub declining, because reddit certainly has lots of declined subreddits, but a lot of it was the usual “THIS IS TOO POLITICAL!” “THIS ATTENTIONWHORE GOT UPVOTED BYE BYE” and etc.
Me commenting before the protest
“You are NOT contributing with those low effort comments”
Me commenting after the protest
“ANY kind of interaction is contributing!”
Pretty much how the whole site is going right now.
The people bringing actual content there have mostly left from what I can tell, now it’s almost all reposts.
Unfortunately that seems to be enough to sustain a platform nowadays.
The bot accounts are becoming the most active
They are so easy to spot that I’m convinced they are deployed by reddit themselves.
Unfortunately they can still copy content from other platforms. The comments will probably devolve, but investors hardly care about that.
“Average words per comment” would probably be a good metric for the quality of discussion on the platform.
Reminds me of the dead internet theory. What if all that’s left on Reddit is bots posting? New content could be asking AI to generate a “cute puppy picture” and post in on r/aww, and that could all be done by a bot.
deleted by creator
The contempt reddit’s defenders have for reddit is a bit boggling. They seem to truly hate the site and the communities they want to be open, and they seem to truly hate the mods. Spez ought to be careful with friends like that, they are guaranteed to dislike whatever his next subreddit banning is
So reddit is becoming World of Warcraft. Genuinely disturbing.
I haven’t touched a Blizzard game since WotLK but I’m assuming you mean the community is loyal by routine despite hating everything and everyone involved in the process?
That is a tendency with long-running MMOs. Planetside has gone the same way and until the day the subreddit closed for the protest, there were zombie players in every thread gaslighting the community about a “dead game” that is still very alive. They can’t move on, there’s nothing like it.
So reddit is becoming
World of Warcrafta cult.It’s just like Elon and his Twitter sycophants, or any other version of this type of cult-ish behavior.
always has been
I appreciate the idea that they are doing their best to make the protest impossible to ignore.
Unironically.
(there was a lot more that I could’ve/wanted to put in there)
![[Shitpost] Took a look at Reddit, this is pretty much how it is right now](https://media.kbin.social/15/14/15143627079183cd5bd9606367fdc35969ee7841655e075c315f927971dfe673.png){kind=link}