I didn't delete anything, because there's quite a bit of programming & tech advice. I always knew reddit was profiting off my contribution, everybody should have known that from the beginning.
I'll stop contributing, but I don't like how much useful information has gone dark or otherwise suddenly just been lost. I wouldn't burn a library down because they started charging exorbitant late fees, I would just stop going there.
I didn't delete my account, but I did wipe out my post history.
I keep my account active because I've already found a couple of instances where reddit restored my posts in particular sub reddits ands I had to delete them again.
If I deleted my account I would never again get that special feeling of conducting a websearch to solve some problem and finding a hit from a person who looks like they are having exactly the same issue as me, only to find it was me posting 2 years ago and there are no useful responses.
Makes me wonder how identifiable I am by my "accent" online... I must phrase things in unusual ways. And I spend a lot of time trying to solve problems that are either unsolvable or over my head..
I always find this situation crushing, demoralizing and very funny and until lemmy has better search indexing I don't want to give it up.
Also I wrote things I think were useful too. But I don't stumble no them.
Tech/programming stuff is exactly why I did nuke mine. Going isn't as meaningful if you leave a bunch of value behind when you do. While I'm here for entertainment now, I'm often spending my reddit time during work hours on vendor-hosted support forums, stackexchange, etc. now.
Gradually, that library will be relocated to other places. Instead of just not going, I think it's better to take away others' reasons for going too, give them reason to seek out better libraries.
Good thing is that the content is not lost for those that know to surf the web. But those locations don't help reddit at all (main one is the wayback machine from archive.org and then there is a raw datadump of anyhting up to march 2023 as JSON)
Why I left mine intact. The Reddit "library," as it were, remains one of the largest and most significant public goods online. I think that's more important than burning my contributions in the hopes that Reddit management will do a 180. I also pinned a post advertising kbin/lemmy and Squabbles on my profile.
I'm certainly no longer participating, however, and I don't think Reddit's built to survive only on visitors from Google.
Same here, I just stopped using it. I never had the urge to burn the place down.
Not that erasing my paltry contributions over the years will probably have made that much difference but who knows if it helps someone in a future Google search that's a good thing.
Yeah- there is so much information that is more detailed and accurate to specific situations in almost every area that would be lost to the future.
And you literally never know what weird take on a current situation, or what seemingly small detail of information about a field of knowledge might be important to people, historians, etc., in the future. So much of our knowledge is in our inherent understanding of how the world is right now, that we tend to assume that that knowledge will always be there and available, but that's not necessarily the case.
Anyway. I get deleting, or even removing maybe some of the more frivolous content if possible, ("This" "So much this" somes to mind lol) but I think it's ok to preserve that history.
The dev announced they will be switching to a subscription model. However, Infinity is open source and someone is trying to make a lemmy/kbin version called Beyond. They don’t have a discord up yet but it seems like they plan to when an alpha is ready.
There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.
A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:
Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.
There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.
There’s a lot here I’d not considered so this is helpful, thanks.
The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership. I don’t want to further splinter the community by creating another community as you say, so I figured I’d just have to subscribe to all of them and wait to see which one takes off. I guess it’s going to be down to the subreddit mods to say “this is where we’re going”, if that’s even what they want to do. Until then it might be a bit daunting for those making the jump but it is what it is.
The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership.
Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.
But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.
Were you a subreddit mod? In this case my advice would be to contact the existing mods of the lemmy communities / kbin magazines and see if one of them is willing to hand the community over to you (add you as mod, they step down). If so, you've found your new home!
(you may want to re-make your account on the instance that you're primarily spending time on, for convenience, in case federation doesn't work for several hours at a time here and there, etc)
At the same time as keeping an eye out for "power tripping jerks" you want to watch for poorly moderated instances as well. Instances with little to no moderation are at risk of being defederated by other instances if they can't stop their users from trolling/harrassing/evading bans/blocks, etc. You don't want to set yourself up on what seems like a big instance only to have it disconnected from the rest of them because bad actors decided it was a safe haven for acting up.
I've been looking for a fan that literally mechanically raises and lowers a large leaf-like thing (think Anthony&Cleo) in a pleasant wafting fashion. How does no such device exist?
I’m petty sure (and hope) that Reddit will slowly die. If a s% of the users creating content that are not bots move to Lemmy of kbin, it’s game over for them eventually.
The only thing that’s quite sad is the amount of information you can find for an insane amount of problems. I hope that everything will get archived somehow.
It's been archived, but I can't find an easy way to browse it. So far I've just been using the web archives plugin and finding a archived version of a page
Karma was pointless. Just checked and apparently I ended up with 340k+ comment karma which was mostly repeating memes and reddit inside jokes and a few rants about Republicans. Posts that I thought had value tended to be downvoted (opinions of running role playing games).
The number doesn't mean anything and nothing of value was lost when I edited or deleted all of my reddit posts as most everything I posted also exists from other posts I have made on forums over the decades.
So in a roundabout way, karma was pointless and I hope it doesn't end up being a thing here.
I get what you're saying, but I wouldn't say it was pointless as a whole. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it from a slightly different perspective.
Karma did help push engagement, in fact, the system worked.
People cared about this number, and started to optimize their behavior such that they receive the largest amount of karma in the shortest time.
Since being active by posting / commenting facilitated getting karma, it helped produce a lot of content and made people interact with each other.
The problem with that is that it wasn't tied to quality (and couldn't be). As you said, that encouraged regurgitating the same meta over and over. It never incentivized good content, just quantity.
So my conclusion would be more like: Karma was pointless for animating users to create good and thoughtful content.
Instead it helped driving engagement forward, but at the cost of somewhat turning people into bots.
Posts receiving upvotes / downvotes is okay, but I'm not sure in what way reputation - or karma - should be displayed for a user account, publicly or privately.
Some subreddits require a certain level of karma to be able to post or reply to comments. I don't know if that was to help against bots or people who would make an account to avoid a ban or something. Other than that karma was just an ego boost for those who cared about such things.
Yes, it was great protection against spam accounts, b/c on day 1 they would start with nothing, and have to actively earn karma before they could switch to selling t-shirts or promote OF sites or whatever. Every little bit helps in the efforts to combat simply spinning up a thousand of those and be able to instantly spam whatever sub(s) you wanted.
Karma (especially comment karma) is useful to indicate someone makes positive contributions, but once you’re above a few hundred it doesn’t really make a difference. I do wonder if it makes Reddit worse though, because it incentivises low effort comments and content to get easy karma.
It’s too much fluffing around. The absolute simplest and most effective thing you can do is to simply stop using Reddit. I guarantee that their selling point to advertisers is impressions. If they’re not impressing you, they’re selling less ad space - simple as that.
I'm really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.
There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.
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