Rif kept working throughout a lot of the day yesterday but I finally had a minute yesterday evening, very late, and sat down and launched the app... It worked for a few moments but alas that was only the cached posts. Soon it stopped, for good.
It was very sad uninstalling rif, I can't fathom the obscene amount of hours spent using it, endlessly scrolling my carefully curated subs, be it while pooping, waiting for someone, watching something dumb, or in the middle of the night unable to sleep.
Sigh.
Hey, there's lots of nice people and good magazines and fewer bots and trolls over here, so we'll all be fine.
Honestly, I hope the UI adds a built-in option to hide upvotes and downvotes (seeing the vote totals and having the up and down arrows visible to click on). I know there are pros and cons of reputation systems, but I think that's why it makes sense for each user to decide whether or not they want to be aware of that stuff. I've always been pretty disturbed by the 'popularity contest' nature of social media, and think that for myself, the slight mental health hit of paying attention to my reputation and the up/down votes of every comment is something I'd rather avoid, at least much of the time.
I'm aware that there are some scripts or some such that can do this, but I'm not extra tech savvy, and many people are less tech savvy than me, so having a simple setting would be great.
Having said that, it's great that the latest revision to the system went live. It now seems a lot more intuitive.
they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on.
That's pretty damning. If they can't even demo it while simulating a real world use-case, then that tells me how little faith they really have in their product.
Reddit has already showed how much it cares about its users. We've tried going private, we've tried going restricted, we've tried going NSFW, we've tried spamming John Oliver posts, we've tried asking nicely in open letters, and Reddit has consistently given its community the middle finger in every single situation. And now that we've seen the admins change rules, remove mods, ban users, and break privacy laws, the plan is to just do the exact same thing they did before in the hopes that it'll work this time?
If a blackout on the platform was going to get Reddit to change its mind, that would've happened already. The time to induce change was two weeks ago, when the protests had lots of momentum. But it didn't work, and trying to make another stand now is going to be even less effective.
I still think that the best move is to leave Reddit for alternatives like /kbin, Lemmy, and Squabbles. Thankfully, some of the comments on the /r/ModCoord announcement are also saying this. Instead of desperately trying to cling to a platform that doesn't care about you, go somewhere else.
Two reasons the ongoing Reddit protests are important:
the protests keep the pressure on reddit and can lead to ongoing news coverage (which also keeps the pressure on reddit) . Otherwise, reddit will be able to spin the narrative "see? we told you it would just blow over and it did"
kbin, Lemmy, and other alternatives aren't yet at the point where they're ready for millions of redditors. For example, the modCoord post makes the important point that a lot of reddit's moderation functionality isn't accessible ... but almost none of this functionality even exists yet on kbin and Lemmy. So most people aren't going to leave yet.
Don't get me wrong, leaving now is also a good option if you can find what you want elsewhere! But not everybody's there yet.
I think a LOT of folks overlook point 2. Kbin.social was a halting mess for a few days during the Blackout, because they had to enable Cloudflare to keep the servers from imploding on themselves. There still aren’t that many kbin instances yet, and more instances is how you handle large influxes. The platform needs time to stabilize before large groups of Redditors come over.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin. Im sure this will push others to do the same. If all it takes is to slowly dwindle the reddit user by doing the same thing then im all for it.
Of course, i do see why there shouod be more creative protests to switch things up and see what else works.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin.
Absolutely same here. Because I use Mastodon a lot, I heard about kbin when it first came out, and poked over to look at it, but decided it was a bit too empty and rough around the edges, and stuck with Reddit. Then came the Blackout, and I went ahead and made an account.
As Reddit gets more enshittified and kbin and lemmy get more polished and active, we’ll start seeing a bigger shift.
At this point any reddit protests need to sort focus on tarnishing the platforms reputation further. They've made it clear they won't course correct.
Top of mind, spamming the subs with content that looks bad for them to remove. The ideal would be dirt on spez (e.g comments he made on /r/jailbait), but it could even be something more reserved like a charity link or "why I'm leaving" memes.
July 1 is a good excuse to get another news cycle out of this, and warn potential investors skeptical of the future of the company.
Moving a community is hard, so at least some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage. Its not like Reddit is going to respect a request to close, so they would end up competing with themselves when Reddit replaces them with compliant mods.
I'm not saying they shouldn't move (they should) but it's definitely a hard road to re-establish elsewhere. Some communities will thrive, but others, well, its possible that their users will just stay put.
I agree: migrating a community is really challenging. I'm a subreddit moderator myself, and when we were initially discussing this stuff, there was a lot of doubt because of how daunting the task is. Mods from other subs see the challenges as reason to not even try. However, I think it's important that people at least make the attempt given the current state of Reddit.
Something that I think people should keep in mind is that this stuff is gradual and doesn't have to happen all at once, especially since the alternatives aren't fully polished yet. Even just establishing a small, active community outside of Reddit (like people have been doing with all these fediverse communities) is a big win.
Some of the best things we can do right now are
providing feedback and suggestions for alternatives
making sure alternatives are approachable (/m/quickstart is great)
simply being active and providing stuff to do here
some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage
they aren't wrong. It will massively deflate their community. That's an ineivtability of how lurkers on the internet work. They aren't there for community, they are there for easy passive browsing.
What can we do to help them transition?
"we" as in the common person? It won't be a fast track. There will need to be a steady supply of content for a certain topic, and a stream of discussion. Unfortunately the best way to help as a single person is to basically become that sweaty forever online person. The first step to the Network Effect is to generate enough content to engage with.
If "we" have developers or artists that can be one bigger step to help out. contribute to making apps and extensions to either bridge the gap or overcome current shortcomings of these federated instances. Even amongst techy communities there is a lot of confusion to how instances work. So some app to make it dead simple to browse and comment (while later allowing options for power users) is key. Sync committing to working with Lemmy/KBin is definietly a bit help.
Most of the rest is up to the instance admins. SEO, improving features, getting good moderatiors, etc. None of that is in out control, we can only give feedback
The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits.
stylish apparently had some sort of spyware from memory after being bought out to another company, so i'm not going to port it to that, sorry - stylus is just as good and does the same thing
Looking at this from a leadership perspective when communicating to investors, it’s a lot easier to explain the low user engagement over the next couple days as a blip due to a service outage blocking access rather than due to an intentional protest against using the site.
Not suggesting this is deliberate, but I do imagine this is actually a best case scenario to them in some ways.
Exactly. If people want this protest to be taken seriously, they shouldn't have pre-emptively announced it would only be 48 hours long. 48 hours is nothing to worry about when you know it's coming. Like you said, they'll just blame the lack of engagement on server issues.
I love the format of kbin, with some TLC i can see it taking off. I like it better than Lemmy's layout. As to people returning after 48 hours, doesn't that depend on Reddit caving in? I don't see that happening, so why would anyone return if Reddit's terms are egregious? They going to cough up the money to Reddit to use their API? People just going to cave in and use their shit app, enduring the ads and personal data farming? This should be interesting.
I guess this is the new Reddit! Time to kick our feet up.
I expected as much. 2 days is a pitiful protest length. I will not be using Reddit any longer whilst keeping an eye on updates from here and other news sites. I'm hoping this memo encourages all subreddits to protest idnefinitely until this assclown of a CEO is willing to negotiate lower API prices. And if he's not, onto greener pastures. And watching /r/wallstreetbets figure out a way to destroy their IPO when it eventually launches.
I agree i'm in no hurry to use Reddit. I'll be satisfied if enough people stick around and keep the place interesting. In fact i would say sticking around the fediverse is the only answer to dystopic corporate domination. Those who return, enjoy your exploitation, lol.
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