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.
"Site I only still care about to laugh at thinks I am going to give it my tax information." I'll have to think real hard about that one.
Investors should themselves have a good think about how the CEO that self-reported making zero profit in over a decade as one of the most popular social media sites — a site whose ad revenue has stuttered in the face of what is officially a month long protest — can afford to be handing out money to shitposting bot farms now.
I don't know, while I won't be going back there, I can see it help make reddit more mainstream, by attracting influencers. Imagine IG Influencers or Youtubers encouraging people to engage with them personally on reddit. I can see it actually working out alright for Reddit and possibly a small number of already successful influencers and celebrities. I don't see it making the experience any better for the average redditor, though
I can see it help make reddit more mainstream, by attracting influencers. Imagine IG Influencers or Youtubers encouraging people to engage with them personally on reddit.
…please like this post and friend me, and ring that bell. Oh man, you’re right, they’re going to go the tickytocky YouTube route.
I feel like a big part of the appeal of reddit was that it was kind of a sea of anonymous people and mostly sidestepped the cult of personality that thrives on other forms of social media.
This is a big fucking gamble on their part I think.
There definitely were personalities on Reddit, like poem_for_your_sprog, who gained a following. I could see sprog making appreciable money with the proposed system.
u/SchnoodleDoodleDo in the r/aww community (known for their cute animal perspective poems) was another. I could see all their upvotes being worth something.
Teah but it's not like the predominant mode of the website and it's not the same kind of like cult of personality you get with youtube creators. Poem for your sprog is like a novel little thing you randomly run into on the site and are like, ah cute. But if that kinda gimmicky shit was all the site revolved around it would for sure not be the same place anymore and I think it would lose a lot of people.
When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@ChristianSelig) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this; but I’m wondering if reddit isn’t pulling a silent reversal of this to stem the bleeding of users and content. There is a lot of useful stuff that has been deleted. The AMA staff resigning and all the stuff migrating to fedi. No matter how much f-u/spez tries to shout “This is fine”; the building is still burning all around him.
I thought access would essentially be the same from the app's perspective, just the app builders would start getting MASSIVE bills in the mail? And they were shutting it down preemptively to avoid this.
That was my understanding, also. I read that the first billing for devs would be sent on Aug 1, so developers who did not want to pay shut their apps down on June 30 so they wouldn't have even one bill for API use. However, it also sounds like Reddit shut off the API early from what Christian Selig said so they continued their petty games.
Reddit is supposed to block api access to anyone not in a contract with them. This is why all the apps stopped working early yesterday. Reddit had to turn access on to any app that is staying. That is why this is weird. Unless all these apps are in deals with Reddit.
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon
This is the reason I'm still using Twitter. I use Twitter not to tweet about what I did, but to get news from people I follow.
Tech people can move to Mastodon because their circles are moving, but not with common people.
For me, personally, Mastodon is like empty void. No one to follow and I can't interact with people who share same interests because they only exist on Twitter (since the "famous people" isn't moving from Twitter)
The famous people did move over for certain specific groups; app developers are pretty much all on Mastodon now, the WWDC chatter / visionOS experimentation / etc is way more active on there than on Twitter. (Of course if any group ought to be uniquely pissed off at both Twitter and Reddit, it’s app developers)
Reddit migration will succeed for some communities and fail for others. Generic subs can live on with new mods and new subscribers. They're not much different from FB or Twitter. Just mindless content to feed that infinite scroll.
Specialized subs where the community as a whole (or a majority at least) decides to move to a new home will move (or have moved already), because for those the community is what matters, not the venue.
%100 this. I have Mastodon and use it sparingly because I found a good community but I still find myself going back to Twitter because most of the people I follow on Twitter haven't moved and most of the people I follow on Twitter are celebrities or influencers. The only way a #twittermigration will work is if most of the influencers and celebrities move off the platform as that's the content most regular users go for. With Reddit however we just need people that create good content to move, the lurkers will follow the content regardless of how "complicated" the platform is. The reddit lurkers won't stay on Reddit if there isn't any quality content being posted there, they may be satiated with reposts for a while but eventually they will leave and go looking for the content and if that content is on Kbin/Lemmy they will come here.
Welcome. It's gonna take everyone's effort to make KBIN fun. Upload content daily, and interact with other people's content that you have something to say about. It's gonna take effort from all of us.
This (in Reddit parlance). Kbin has come a long way even in the short time since I came here at the beginning of the reddit protest a few weeks ago. I am hoping with the second influx of refugees it will get even better now.
Mark Hanna: Number one rule of Wall Street. Nobody - and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or if you're Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a fugazi is?
Jordan Belfort: Fugayzi, it's a fake.
Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.
If you buy a house with a loan and pay it back, you haven't turned a profit either - but you do now own a house that has a theoretical value. That's basically how these things work, investing everything on growing the company in the hopes that some day what they have built can start creating profit, or be sold to someone who thinks they can.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under. It’s not about making profit. Companies don’t have value outside of making a profit. Now that I type that I see they actually can have value. Such as political sway or if it’s a company that has some value beyond money, like education or taking care of the needy. But you’d have to find someone willing to sink money into them simply because they find value beyond money.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under
But that doesn't mean you can turn a profit from it, or even break even. If you want to do that you have to sell it to someone, and there are multiple reasons why you might not be able to - maybe you spent too much money renovating it and now nobody wants to pay that much. Maybe a bunch of new housing was built and the value crashed. Maybe Detroit happened and the location and land it sits in is literally worthless and nobody wants to live there. - until you actually find a buyer for it all houses have only a theoretical value, as do all companies.
I get that, but who would want to buy a company that's never been profitable? It smacks of a scam. "Hey, bro! Buy my company! It never managed to make any money for me, but it'll be highly profitable for you!" Sounds like the company founder is looking to pull a fast one and laugh all the way to the bank while their investor is left holding the bag.
The only way I can see this working is if the idea is to build a large user base by offering a good user experience, i.e. not monetizing the platform very much, just enough so that it barely pays for its own operating costs. Then you sell that user base to someone else for the express purpose of shoving tons of ads down everyone's throat. In that case it's still a fast one, only in this scenario the users are the victims. But even then I'm skeptical. If that's the plan, why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
Profits don't matter under capitalism, it's only stock money. Trying to profit is a death sentence in the tech space, as we're all seeing right now. This system doesn't work for the 21st century
why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
Because it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself - as we are currently seeing with how wonderfully incompetent Spez is with Reddit.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 - only to sell it for $3 million in 2019 - was Tumblr bringing in millions and millions of profit? No. But Yahoo thought that they would be able to make it.
Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, it hasn't turned any profit either (and never will enough for him to get his moneys worth, but that's just because Musk is an idiot).
But yeah, quite often it does feel like a scam. Or kinda like... gambling? You hope someone will pay a lot for your company, while they hope they can make it turn wildly profitable, both may or may not come true.
it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself
That's pretty much what I said, though. That's the core of the scam. You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that. Maybe I'm just extremely ignorant and naive in matters of business, but selling a fake company like that seems no different than selling pyrite to someone who can't tell it apart from gold.
You're basically assuming that the company can't be made to turn a profit, in which case, yes, it would be a scam.
But that's not the case. The company could potentially be made to make a profit, and you're basically selling that potential. It often works out, like in the case of Amazon. Sometimes it doesn't, like Yahoo buying Tumblr.
As long as what the prospective buyer is actually getting is clear and up-front, it can hardly be a scam. With your "You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that.", you're essentially assuming the company can't be made profitable, and that the seller knows that, but doesn't disclose it to the buyer, and that the buyer is somehow naive enough to not be able to tell.
It's generally unlikely that a company can't be made profitable, it would be unlikely for the seller to know that, and it would be unlikely for the buyer to be unable to find out before buying it, which altogether, makes it unlikely this would happen. Which is why it's big news when it does happen, like with Theranos (Which was eventually found out)
If the company can be made profitable, why isn't it? Why wouldn't the current owner rake in some profits before selling? Surely a company that is already profitable would be even more attractive for buyers.
Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.
As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.
So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.
The issue is that you don't have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can't even build your lemonade stand.
Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.
So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you're making from the lemonade.
That's OK for me, though. I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it's finished, I'm fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.
So everything is tugging along and now you're actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you've always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don't actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.
Currently, your company haven't made a single cent, but that's fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.
Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.
So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.
Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can't actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company's value plummets and eventually closes down.
Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn't make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You're also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.
Hello i hope you dont mind if i post that post, in case someone does not want to go onto reddit:
r/Save3rdPartyApps
u/attackofmilk
Subreddits are starting to see spam from anti-protest, pro-admin ChatGPT bots
Thread on /r/Pics discussing bot spam. (Pics is now NSFW, but this thread is only profanity / vulgarity.)
/r/pics/comments/14puynz/chatgpt_bots_are_spamming_proadmin_astroturf/
/r/Programming closed (by admins?) after community recognition of bot spam:
Anything new is scary
Reddit is complicated, they just forgot.
The digg users said reddit was ugly and they would never use such an ugly site.
I tried explaining reddit to a diehard forum user, why are all the replies out of order? why are upvotes changing the posting order? this is so complicated!
Don't explain, tell them where to start and how to start. then it explains itself.
As a forum user, it was absolutely crazy to me when I first signed up on Reddit a decade ago that the replies would be out of order and sorted by popularity. But I grew to understand that it was a crowdsourcing effort in most ways and that the cream rises to the top. It was really quite good to get the information you needed out of the thread.
Anything new is scary
Agreed. Most people just want to settle into something comfortable.
This is 100% it. Also some people have only ever used iOS with the Reddit app and Twitter and Tiktok which are so easy to use a literal 3 year old can use it
I think this is also the cause of the squabbles.io Vs kbin/Lemmy split. Squabbles is like new Reddit, kbin is like old Reddit. And people like what they know
This last sentence is the crux of the matter. People don't like change, but quickly forget that they spent time learning the site that they're so familiar with.
This article kinda makes me hope for reddit to survive. I want all the toxic, angry assholes to stay there, not desperately flee to the fediverse in search of their fix.
Kind of happened in r/apple you used to get the occasional good discussion in the comments until the last few weeks of 3rd party apps then it was an absolute cesspool of hate and trolls as people seemed to leave for other sites
No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.
Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.
That's not how I understood defederation. If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
So if the Cow instance defederates from the Poopie instance, people from the Poopie instance can still see content and comments from Cow users. But Cow users cannot see content or comments from Poopie users. For the scenario you're describing to take place, the Poopie instance would also need to defederate from the Cow instance.
That said, it's still not quite shadowbanning. The admins of the defederated Poopie instance would be aware that Cows were not seeing their content. It would depend on the admins to inform the Poopie users that they've been defederated. If the users were not aware of the defederation, then it'd effectively be a shadowban.
If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.
I invite you to check out, say, technology@beehive.org from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.
The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.
Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.
Edit: Hi Lemmy users! You can't see the screenshots I've attached to this comment. I've just learned this thanks to @B1naryShad0w. If you'd like to see my comments with the screenshots, please view this comment thread via kbin by clicking this link.
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I've looked at a few examples, and I'm just super confused now. I've also tried searching for a simple explanation of what exactly defederation does, and I keep seeing conflicting descriptions.
Let's look at two examples (please bear with me as I only know how to attach one image to one comment at a time.) On this comment let's look at AskLemmy, a lemmy.world community, from Beehaw:
Notice that all threads (with one exception) were posted almost a month ago when defederation happened. That one exception was a Beehaw user who posted to AskLemmy 5 days ago. So we can see that BeeHaw, having defederated from lemmy.world, is blocking 100% of new content from this lemmy.world community, except for that one thread published by a Beehaw user who seems to be out of the loop 5 days ago.
Mostly makes sense to me so far. Beehaw defedearted from lemmy.world, so Beehaw can't see new stuff from this lemmy.world community. A little weird that there was a new post by a Beehaw user, but that still makes some sense with my previous understanding of how defederation worked, since I think(?) defederation is one-way. After all, if defederation was two-way, then how did a Beehaw user make a thread on lemmy.world?
Now lets look at Beehaw's technology community from lemmy.world:
On the one hand, this is not blocking 100% of the content from this community, which seems consistent with what I originally thought. Lemmy.world is not defederated with beehaw, so lemmy.world can see new content from Beehaw's communities.
But on the other hand, there is a ton of content missing. And it's not just federated content taking awhile to move from instance to instance, as I'm seeing posts from the last 24 hrs from Kbin that are not showing up on lemmy.world. So it appears that there is content that's being blocked from getting to lemmy.world. But it's not 100% of the content that's being blocked?
To make matters more confusing, I can see content published by Beehaw users on a Beehaw community from lemmy.world. Wtf is going on.
I appreciate the effort and have also verified your analysis myself to be true. However, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t see any images attached to your comments.
Thanks for calling that out. It looks like attaching images directly to a comment only works for kbin instances. This is what it looks like from kbin.social. I just tried viewing this thread from lemmy.world and the images were not showing up.
To be honest, I don't want to go through the effort of editing my comments to correct it right now. But in the future I'll go back to hosting images and linking them in my comments, so anyone from any instance can see them. That's a shame, because attaching images to comments in Kbin is super convenient. Oh well! Thanks again for letting me know.
Hrm it seems defederation needs some work put into it. If an instance defederates from another, there should be no way to see each other, one way or another.
For what it’s worth, there is a big problem with Lemmy.world federation. Lots and lots of posts to/from LW and other fully-federated instances take days to show, if at all.
I suspect it’s something to do with their size, but I base that on absolutely nothing.
I read a post by the Beehaw admins a couple weeks ago saying they were talking to the lemmy.world admin about resolving the issues that caused them to defederate, so it’s possible that they were no longer defederated when the post you found was made. My understanding is that automatic updates only happen when users on one instance are subscribed to the community on the other instance, so refederation might not be obvious. I expect they would have cut the cord again over yesterday’s security breach, though.
That’s pure speculation on my part, though, and quite possibly it was some kind of bug. But I am not particularly tech-savvy, so I tend to wonder about non-technical causes.
There is. Lemmy.ml is currently shadowbanning kbin for unknown reasons.
Lemmy.ml is blocking the bots kbin uses for federation. The devs have ignored anyone asking why. It's been weeks and only applies to Lemmy.ml, so it appears to be intentional. They're running slightly different code on their flagship site than what all the other instances use (which makes me wonder what else Lemmy.ml has changed compared to what's publicly available).
OLD angry assholes who don’t know how to navigate social media. They need Facebook because it’s easy and you can comfortably be a racist, homophobic, entitled prick and you’ll find a big audience that will stroke your ego.
Reddit is too popular and has too much group think, too many of the same types of comments that will get a lot karma, and too many comments that will just be ignored.
NEW is a garbage dump or a pile of duplicates. So why comment on a new post? It will never go anywhere. HOT is already full of comments, so your comment will just be lost.
The karma system also gamifies trying to find a variation on the same thing as always. You’re not trying to be clever or unique, or bring new perspectives to the conversation, you’re trying to be the first person to say the thing you think everyone else is going to think of
I’m constantly seeing posts about how much nicer kbin is, but I’ve also seen a “KYS” comment and personal insults towards people. I also recognize it’s possible that there are fewer nasty comments, that the ones I see are just outliers but I’m more likely to notice them here instead of just downvoting and forgetting because the posts about how nice kbin is are making the counterexamples stand out that much more.
thats crazy. im very active on here as my profile can tell and other than a run in with an alt right person on one thread, i havent seen anything bad. of course, as it gets more popular, this will increase, but for now its pretty nice
Communities are going to have to start actively moderating and removing blatant abuse like that. I haven't seen very much, but ultimately, we cannot rely solely on votes or people simply being nice forever. It's always a touchy question, but every community ultimately has some standards of acceptable behavior, and it'll take time for us to figure out what ours is.
To be fair some instances (like Beehaw) defederate for not being big enough to maintain a huge influx of users. It isn't always about Nazis although for sure Nazis suck I agree with that!
Sure, but anyone complaining about defederation in the context of "group think" probably isn't thinking about how much it sucks that small spaces can't moderate well enough.
Like literally these people are all like "FrEe SpEeCh" like dude if you wanna be a Nazi go be a Nazi I'm not gonna stop you but I'm definitely not gonna support you in it. You will get a hearty kick to the nuts if you approach me with it but like you do you
I would typically only engage with new posts, but in two places. One was some smaller subs where there was going to be more opportunity for discussion between everyone, and two in the larger subs would be breaking issues where new was by default and it was more group observation of the events going on in real time.
It was pretty clear to me, that’s why I stopped going.
It was getting toxic a long while back, but I was ok with that – I just deleted my account every few months so I wouldn’t get doxxed. But then I started to realize 2 things: First, many subreddits wouldn’t even let you post without a minimum amount of karma. Second, many subreddits would downvote you into oblivion for any sort of wrongthink.
Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m a wierdo and I have some bad takes sometimes, but you put bad takes out there to put them in the fire and then you get to see they’re bad or you hammer them until they’re good. But in the echo chamber, there was only one answer: Obey.
Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they're exhibiting to this day isn't new.
I was hoping he put something special in like a countdown with that last update. Or that you could still open it and see something. App is totally dead.
Update: Apparently Reddit killed all the third party apps themselves early. Probably knowing we would comment only to protest and complain.
If you put the phone in airplane mode, you can get the app to load the UI at least. Doesn't do/mean anything but I suspect I'll be doing it out of nostalgia a lot in the coming months.
The developer of Apollo said Reddit cut them off unexpectedly but he was able to make it stop crashing by deleting his token. He can no longer access anything now but at least you can go into the app.
RedditMigration
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