I personally never browsed TIHI. It was always one of those where linking it was more of a meme than actually browsing it in my mind. Similar to how a lot of people would comment “/r/unexpectedjohnmulaney” but very few people were actually subbed to /r/unexpectedjohnmulaney. Because who the heck wants a bunch of pictures of comments referencing John Mulaney jokes in their feed? It’s the old “subreddits as hashtags” bit.
All that being said, it sucks because I know TIHI actually had more of a community than most “hashtaggy” subreddits. My understanding is it was a bit like a blend of ATBGE, MildlyInfuriating, CursedImages, or DIWhy.
Reddit is killing real communities, and killing their own history in the process. All those comments throughout the ages linking “/r/TIHI” now link to a dead sub. As much as I may have found those comments annoying, there were people out there who would click that link and go browse or maybe even subscribe to TIHI as a result of those comments.
It’s only a matter of time until more subs start meeting the same fate. I’m glad to have found a new platform to move to. After reading the posts from the Apollo dev, it seemed like the writing was on the wall about Reddit
The thing about TIHI, interestingasfuck, SLPT are that they regularly made r/all. Content hitting the front page means views for Reddit. So it's less about the sub's specific userbase, and more that those "main" subs have broad user appeal that brings people to Reddit in the first place.
And currently they're all shuttered. Which means less content on r/all, which decreases the general audience appeal of Reddit.
I guess we will start to see an uptick of "r/subsIfellfor" posts after more closures in light of how frequently the subreddit-as-hashtag but was being used.
@abff08f4813c The main thing about all this is that there were no alternatives to Reddit until now. We needed a good push and reason to leave but never had a tangible alternative with nothing even showing up in Search results worth checking out. Now we do, All these big corps are screwing themselves, and we now have a BETTER alternative than all of them. So keep screwing up, Reddit, we have a place to go now. Keep screwing up, Twitter, Google, StackOverflow, Tumblr, Imgur, and all others that will soon follow suit.
They are seeing a decrease in usage since ChatGpt came about. They had implemented a network wide no AI generated answer policy, but after seeing their number declined decided to blame the mods for removing and banning users who were posting AI answers.
They refuse to show any data that supports their claims (that the mods banning users accounts for the decrease in usage), have told mods in private that they can no longer enforce the rule, but still want the rule to be in place.
They have continuously said one thing and done another, slowing eroding moderator and user trust. You can checkout the meta stack overflow site for the entire situation.
TIHI was a fairly large sub, with almost multimilion level of subscribers. If reddit wanted to increase traffic and get more eyes on ads, they're doing quite a terrible job of it so far.
So they want people to pay to not see ads? They literally sell that as a product, Reddit Premium. Why not tie API access to premium subscriptions? It's not even unprecedented; Spotify does this.
Being a cheapass, I would probably have made the switch to using their horrid app. But, it would have been my own decision to be a cheapass so I would've been fine using it.
I can understand that line of thinking. In this instance, I think I'm w/ @bionicjoey on this one. If it was a choice of use their app or pay, I'd have paid. I refused to use New Reddit on the PC. I know folks that have gone to using the new app though (even knowing what we know now) and I guess that's ok. Their choice and all that.
I know folks that have gone to using the new app though (even knowing what we know now) and I guess that's ok. Their choice and all that.
IMO this is the reason why boycotts don't really work in the age of the Internet. It seems like there are just so many people with access and either too apathetic to try and make change or are simply just ignorant to the situation, whatever it may be.
I'm so fucking tired of this line. Redefine success and you'll find most boycotts are actually quite successful - if you include every individual who changes their habits as a success. It took almost 20 fuckin years to get reddit to where it is, to think it was gonna burn in a day is foolish. The fall of Rome (I know I'm being hyperbolic) took what, 250 years?
For good measure, I agree with your concept in regards to most things - general good deeds, small actions that have cascading effects on the people and the world around you. It's just difficult to find that the intent of boycotts, which is to effectively end a businesses customer stream, is effective with the tools available today.
The difference between Rome and a corporation is that a corporation can now be global.
Over 5 billion people have access to the internet. There is simply no way for all of these people to be informed. Reddit is a prime example of something taking 20 years to get where it is, having a "mass exodus" and being... barely affected (their words, not mine!)
Don't get me wrong, I am tired of it too, but the reality is that we are more people today than we ever have been historically. As a result, a mere 100,000 is both enough to keep a company alive regardless of whether the other 5 billion buy or not.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't attempt boycotting, just that our tactics need to change for modernity. Boycotting when you and your whole town stopped buying from Joe's Wares worked. Boycotting now that Joe's Wares can make sales online means your town is never getting rid of him, regardless of whether you all never buy from him and actively dissuade others from doing so.
Once the battle is joined and a tactic is employed, it is important that the conflict not be carried on over too long a time. …There are many reasons of human experience arguing for this point. I cannot repeat too often that a conflict that drags on too long becomes a drag. The same universality applies for a tactic or for any other specific action.
Among the reasons is the simple fact that human beings can sustain an interest in a particular subject only over a limited period of time. The concentration, the emotional fervor, even the physical energy, a particular experience that is exciting, challenging, and inviting, can last just so long — this is true of the gamut of human behavior, from sex to conflict. After a period of time it becomes monotonous, repetitive, an emotional treadmill, and worse than anything else a bore. From the moment the tactician engages in conflict, his enemy is time.
BTW Alinsky (b.1909) wrote this book to try to stop baby boomers from being dumb and fouling everything up. I am not a huge fan of the intergenerational model of class conflict but I think it is interesting.
It's a difficult issue. I'm definitely not suggesting we shouldn't attempt boycotting, just that our tactics need to change for modernity. As you said, they are already difficult to accomplish effectively. Even just 50 years ago, you and your whole town stopped buying from Joe's Wares could work. Today, boycotting now that Joe's Wares can make sales online means your town is never getting rid of him, regardless of whether you all never buy from him and actively dissuade others from doing so.
Moreso if Joe's Wares knows they can buy reviews and other scummy tactics to make them look more worthwhile than they are.
That's an interesting snippit, definitely something that feels true to society today still. Similar to how I said is disheartening in how many people are apathetic to a cause, that's a very apt description to what exactly about it becomes so tiring.
@gpage@danbob@bionicjoey I've said in other threads that I would have gladly paid $3/month (assuming that even 20% of the reddit userbase would also be willing to pay, making this subscription so cheap) to keep the lights on at reddit - and hell, maybe even turn a profit - if that had been presented as an option before all this debacle.
But then someone replied to me scoffing about how this means not only would I be generating free content for the site, but also paying for the privilege to do so. My take is that if this created a gated online community of contributors, that's probably fine by me.
Now that humans are leaving by the droves, the chatter in the Fediverse is that AI bots will eventually be all that's left on reddit and a few humans who don't know they're talking to bots. But if being a participating member (submissions, comments) cost money, I think it would become cost prohibitive to run bot armies on a platform like reddit.
He took Elon Musk as an inspiration. I am wondering if he has a narcissistic anti-liberal leanings that he just wants to make whatever he can on an IPO while destroying it in the process
It does not make sense to me why the API charge have to be calculated by total traffic of all users of an app either. I've decided to think it is just an excuse to get rid of third party apps until convinced otherwise.
To my understanding it's a somewhat reasonable approach that has its upsides and downsides. I believe Twitter apps were all designed that way back in the day as well.
It's not about the ads. It's about the telemetry you can get on user behavior from a mobile app. Reddit wants to leverage that as part of its ad sales package.
Once you have enough of it to live a comfortable life, money just becomes about power. So, what we have is some spoiled rich asshole who is used to having influence and power being shown that most of that was a gift. That gift has been recinded, and so the only control he has left is money.
He's spending some of Reddit's current and future earnings on stepping on necks. Because that's what the cash was going to be used for, in one way or another, anyway.
It was more than a sub to meme on things you/to dislike, it was more like Oh Gosh Why Would This Exist Thanks I Hate It!
Have you ever imagined a bird with teeth? What about a gif of a needle going into an eye? Or maybe a nice chocolate milkshake in a butt-oriented sex toy.
To all the folks saying that reddit couldn't replace the mods, that it was too big an effort, that they couldn't run a big sub all by themselves, I have only one thing to say to you.
Ever since Victoria got sacked, reddit doesn’t seem to have anyone competent enough to run community relation anymore. They probably can’t figure out how to vet new mods if they were to hire some.
I'm sure users will step forward if they care. Otherwise, it's just a campaign optimization at work. Limit the breadth of organic content to deepen the brand-friendly content and push more paid media into the feed.
Yes they most definitely will...but increasingly such things likely will not happen on the Reddit platform, moving forward. There are actual reasons that the mods left - e.g. to moderate a sub of millions of subscribers takes effort, which needs tools to make that happen - and those reasons still exist.
Im halfway tempted to start claiming demodded subs and filling them up with instructions on how to move to their kbin/lemmy alternatives.
If they kick me out and ban me I won't find out cause I don't go into reddit no more.
Edit: of course they would never give the subreddits to me, but I find the idea really funny
this would have been a good thing to do for some of the people who deleted their accounts. the ones who had accounts which could have credibly been given subs.
Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:
People requesting the subreddit so they could continue the protests.
People requesting the subreddit so they could give it back to the original mods.
People requesting the subreddit so they could own it.
People requesting the subreddit because they have strong feelings about "moderation" and want to /worldpolitics it.
Absolutely no one who wanted to just do what the old mods did.
From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.
That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.
And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.
From the one time I tried requesting a sub there, they don’t just let someone have a sub if they ask and it’d be banned otherwise, they probably won’t give it to you if you don’t have mod experience for example (the reason I didn’t get the niche sub I was trying to revive, which is reasonable enough), or if they feel that what experience you do have isn’t enough that you’d likely be able to handle the particular sub. TIHI is a big sub, so they’d not just be looking for any random volunteer, it’d have to be someone experienced with moderating sizable subs, probably. And those people are, well, exactly the kind of people angry with reddit right now.
Reddit gave the snackexchange subreddit to someone who had no mod experience and hadn't participated in the sub for years. The person claims they didn't even ask for the position and only asked for the head mod to be removed. Reddit removed the top mod and made the person top mod.
That person had effectively no mod experience, but was already on the moderator list there - having been added by the old team.
Head mod chose to reopen under protest by turning off anti-scam bots and similar - letting sub continue to function visibly the same, but without the bot-supported protection it had used prior. He somehow talked his way onto the team during the protests, and then went to Admin and arranged to oust the head mod who had shut down the bots and was doing protest stuff in the sub.
He has since been returned to the bottom of the mod hierarchy there, for whatever that's worth.
Like, I kind of get that guy's point in some senses - simply turning off security features that quietly protect users, without announcing it, sure seems like the kind of thing that would hurt users pretty quick - without ever affecting site Admin. Especially when the head mod who shut down those bots wasn't the user/mod who was responsible for them, it's not 'their' bot if they're gonna go home and take their toys, as it were.
Staging a coup and getting Admin to put him at the top of the modlist is hyper shitty, and Admin's decision to promote someone who wasn't really part of that community to that sort of position is utterly inexplicable if we were trying to square their actions with their stated values.
If I had to guess, there are too many users who would become appointed as moderators, then just shut down the subreddit again. The admins need time to filter through the applications to find the genuine bootlickers.
Yeah I fully expect reddit to replace the moderators but it will take time and effort to select the right people.
If all the mods who protested actually resigned or moved their subs to being unmoderated it would've crippled the site, reddit would not be able to replace them quick enough.
It's unfortunate that the threat alone was enough to get most of them to reopen.
I would drop kick FB in a heart beat if it wasn't for that shitty platform being my only means of communication with some family and friends. WTF happened to email and phone calls/txt jesus.
I wish I could do that. But I'm disabled which is isolating by itself but also makes maintaining friendships difficult let alone making new friends.
So unfortunately the few friends I do have are firmly entrenched in FB and I have little recourse to make more friends. They're good people. Genuinely good people so I don't want to ditch them anyway, they've just been wicked into social media addiction and entrapment the same way many have been.
I can't put aside my sneaking suspicion that can't figure out any of these tools: kbin, lemmy, mastodon, etc.... Is more or less code for, "I have reach and influence on platform x, and I need can't figure out how to be that person here."
Can they setup an account? Can they read? Can they write? These seem to all be achievable. Can they influence? Well... should that be the goal?
I have been using Mlem for Lemmy (an iOS app that is in beta). You have to install it through Testflight, but it is beautiful and reminds me of Apollo a bit. I highly recommend it
"the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
In the article, the full sentence is,
That "blackout" movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7% and the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13, according to the data shared by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
So basically the amount of time people spent on reddit dropped 16% between June 12 and June 13.
"Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million ?
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Again, the full sentence is,
Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million on June 13, compared with averaging nearly 56 million in the days prior.
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Looks like that number lines up with their reported DAU (daily active users) metric rather than site visits.
52 million DAU is about where Reddit was in the summer of 2021, per data on Statista. It also tends to vary up or down by a few million at each sample point, so we'd really have to see a long-term trend-line rather than a 2-week data snapshot to know whether the blackout had any real effect.
That “blackout” movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7%
I wouldn't call single digit percentages a plunge.
But who knows, maybe they will continue to bleed users and the protest was just the first crack in dam wall:
Experts are unsure if the current protest will significantly impact Reddit or if it will just be another controversial moment in the platform’s history.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, I don't think the largest wave of users leaving has hit yet. Once the big apps shut down today, I think there is going to be another wave that actually leaves, and then it's just going to trickle out for months probably as reddit gets less relevant since the people actually making the content are likely to be the ones to move.
Do they hope to pick up all other 3rd party apps users? Not that it matters much to me since my reason for quitting reddit is the way they mistreated the entire userbase (I don't use apps), but I'm curious nonetheless to see how this ends.
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