I agree, but I try to be pragmatic. Everyone is looking for the twitter killer that will destroy it in a blaze of glory, but I am fine with it slowly bleeding users and value as Threads and Mastodon (and Bluesky?) get better and gains more users.
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.
Imagine starting [a subreddit], hyping it up, patiently providing four-fifths of the content until people show up, moderating spam, moderating jerks, growing it gradually over time. Setting rules, establishing tone, running the weekly topical threads. Would you feel like that /r/whateverItWas existed because of Reddit the company? Would you feel like it fundamentally belonged to his Royal Highness Steve, and Steve was just delegating it to you to run? No! You started it! You shaped it! You collaborated with the people it attracted to make it what it is! Even those users – they could switch tomorrow to /r/whateverItWasTwo and you couldn’t do a thing about it – if they decided they didn’t like your vision for /r/whateverItWas, they would, so the fact that they’re still here is a kind of voting with your feet, it validates what you’re doing… To the extent that /r/whateverItWas exists as a thing within Reddit as a whole, to be run or misrun, managed or mismanaged? It feels like yours.
But at the same time, to an external observer – you can see how they would feel that this is pretty silly, right? The thing that’s “yours” is nothing but rows and columns in Reddit’s databases13, a series of flags giving you the power to moderate. The only thing you have is set in Reddit’s systems, a permission to edit stuff under a certain scope a bit differently than other users, wowee aren’t you important. It’s not you who has a license to the user posts, it’s not you who controls anything but a tiny little square of grass Reddit let you mow. You’re gonna protest over that? The world at large already doesn’t understand why you might volunteer for this work, why you might care enough to do it unpaid – you seem like a schmuck to them, a victim.
or a power tripper.
I’ll admit that some mods probably are on a power trip. A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited. They care about the online space they’ve built, not that they have a ban hammer and can wield it with prejudice. I’d imagine a lot of other mods are pretty similar. Knowledge about their niche community, though probably not as much as the people on r/askhistorians, a certain subreddit culture that they don’t want to collapse and fall apart… they’d rather preserve the online space they and many other people enjoy. Even if it just looks like free labor and power tripping to outsiders whenever they don’t want to just up and abandon Reddit.
Yeah, as someone who modded for several years, there were two insults people loved to throw at us: Either we were power tripping or we were janitors who didn’t matter.
Either of these were used whenever we enforced the rules of our community and kicked out people who didn’t want to play nice with the rest of it. Of course, they will never have a positive opinion of people who enforce a community’s rules.
And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind.
"And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind."
Who is asking them to leave it all behind?
The only way you can be part of a community is by being a mod?
If mods are feeling as wronged by Reddit as how they say they feel, why not resign as a mod and just join the community as a member?
I mean you would still be part of the community you say they hold so dear but in a different capacity.
I would think stepping down has some risks at the moment because you don’t know who’s replacing you. Someone who also cares about the niche topic just like you, or someone on r/redditrequest who just wants to collect the subreddit as their 483th moderated sub and won’t do anything? Less of a big deal if you have several mods, but if you’re the only one…
"I would think stepping down has some risks at the moment because you don’t know who’s replacing you"
You could literally give an notice to the Reddit admin or whoever you are in contact with that you disagree with the way they handle things, that you are gonna step down but would like to pick your replacement personally.
Reddit would likely agree because it means that they don't have to search for a mod themselves and if the mods have such a strong connection with the community than finding a replacement should be in the realm of possibility.
The whole striking saga gives a whole lot of "We tried nothing and we are all out of ideas" vibe.
"A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited."
Call it what you want. It is power tripping or having a sense of superiority or higher self for whatever reason.
Since when is Reddit the beacon of all that is right in regards of information? Why not pack up and start an community somewhere else?
Reddit is just a medium and nothing more.
The problem I have with these statements and the course of action overall is the following;
Why even protest? The most ironic thing should be that r/AskHistorians should know of all people what happens with mutinies or strikes that have weak or no resolve.
Why would you even strike when you would fold by the first sign of friction that is coming your way?
Just again, keep modding your community and ignore everything but don't act like they are so very wronged and need to have some sort of sympathy when they are literally happily providing labor...for free.
For example:
2 months ago there were strikes in my country regarding distribution centres of one or the biggest supermarket chain in the country.
In these distribution centres are working around 5500 people and 2700 of them are "migrant workers".
Quoting the union;
"The temporary workers in the distribution centers are almost all migrant workers. Hundreds of them have joined the strikes. That is special and very courageous, because they are in a weaker position and are often put under pressure to keep working."
The end result?
"After months of negotiations and eleven days of strike, the Union has achieved a result with the supermarket group. In it, salaries will increase by 10% and austerity of the Sunday allowance is off the table. Temporary workers also get more certainty about their schedules."
this fucking sucks. i am very disappointed that the protests lost steam and everything is just back to normal, swept under the rug. they showed their hand, acted like fucking dictators, and everyone is just like "welp thats it!" and gives the fuck up. it's just sad. it feels like 90% of the people who said they were in this were all just being performative.
so many of us dedicated a lot of time to the protests, left our communities, migrated, all for everyone to just go crawling back. i won't go back. i am staying on kbin. but man, it fucking sucks to see reddit face 0 consequences because Spez was right, "this will blow over"
I think this has done damage to Reddit, but it'll be death by a thousand cuts rather than a big instantaneous failure.
To be honest, I really don't care what happens to Reddit at this point. I'd rather have Kbin be a smaller, more dedicated community than have it "kill Reddit".
I don't necessarily know if I agree with your take on "smaller" but it definitely would help stem the tide of enshitification. We could be that glowing bastion on the hill that always pops up in zombie flicks.
Most social networks have this "growth at all costs" mentality that is usually the root cause of enshittification. When I say 'smaller', I mean it more in terms of fostering a healthy community of dedicated contributors rather than trying to make the fediverse grow as much as possible as fast as possible. This is why I mostly support the notion of preemptively defederating from Threads. While it would help the fediverse 'grow', that's not necessarily what I want out of it. I don't want us to win, I want us to be good.
Yeah, this. It often takes a lot to kill titans of any particular industry... and like it or not, the old tech bro sites like Reddit, Twitter etc. have grown too large to kill with a single arrow or a single trip of their own.
Instead their death often has to happen as a slow and gradual reforming of opinion. The most popular media sites have been thrown into chaos, and have lost most all of their goodwill (or what amount they may have had of it anyways) leaving them gasping for air. Facebook didn't become "a place for old people" over night. It was a gradual thing.
Reddit will die off. Them locking the API behind a huge paywall will hurt them, not help them. VC's have already lost a lot of faith in the tech industry including social media. They'll have to find a way to make money... and I'm sorry to say, but if they couldn't make money all this time, they probably won't really ever be able to.
The age of high valuation with promises on return are gone.
There's always some people walking around dead malls, even if the mall died years ago. Reddit will be around for at least 5-10 more years but it's overall influence will start to decline. It will be slowly at first but I'd bet three years from now reddit will just be seen as a forum site for scammers, bots, incels and alt-right lunatics (more than it is now).
Let’s be real, Joe Public doesn’t care about the changes that caused the protests. They just want somewhere to go to see content, and reddits algorithms serve them content. If they have to scroll past some apps on a less-than-ideal app or the regular website, so be it. Most of the internet is shit anyways, reddits clients aren’t much better or worse in that regard.
It’s introduced a lot of people to the fediverse, which is awesome. And will probably have done a non-zero amount of damage to Reddit. But it’ll survive so long as Joe Public is willing to put up with it to see their cat pictures.
You get used to it. Change is slow and a website like reddit won't die overnight. Much better and productive to focus on building up a new community than tearing down the old.
The goal here shouldn't have been to kill reddit. The goal is to start fostering the next community for the inevitable next meltdown. Start the fire, not set the toen ablaze. Which I feel is a when, not if.
I'm betting before the end of the year they start to make a big hit on sexual content on reddit. THAT is going to make the fire really rise.
The saddest part of all this is the countless hours of work unpaid people have poured into the site, moderating, developing, and content creating only to see it end the manner it has.
I'm okay leaving it behind. I didn't contribute much over the 12 years I was there. I mostly lurked. I'm just sorry for all the people that worked hard to make the community better.
True, but the communities are built around people not the platform. We are once again learning that no platform will be around forever, older people have seen it plenty of times already.
Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad's PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren't even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…
Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.
I remember how excited I was to download the trailer for The Phantom Menace in 1999. Took almost an hour on a 56k modem. Or how it took under 10 minutes to download a 8 megabyte song off Napster on DSL.
Lol, man I remember in ‘99 having a stack of 100Mb Zip disks, using the college’s computer lab to do all my downloading on their T1 then walking my goods back to my dorm room. I’d load up a queue in the morning, then swing back by in the afternoon after classes. Such simpler times.
i just shut down a worlgroup server a few years ago... mostly up for majormud.
i with those asshats at the majorbbs restoration project would just release all the source code. they clutch those pearls like theyre valuable in some way
Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually "proper" dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.
Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.
Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.
I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit...now here.
EDIT
I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too...Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn't like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green...if my account still exists.
Does anyone remember Plastic.com? I believe it used the Slashdot engine but was more focused on news and interesting internet stuff. I never see it listed when someone waxes nostalgic but I lived on that site until one day it just died.
Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I've been around since the earliest days of the web. It's kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student's pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.
The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.
I've noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That's probably the smart way to do it.
In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn't remember what a lot of them were.
Yeah, but people move on too. Do you expect every single person who ever contributed to repost their content when a migration happens? Of course not. It's just not realistic. But actual info gets lost. Old game faqs vanish. Answers to niche questions poof out of existence. Yes, the world isn't over and things will move on. But actual, tangible value was lost with the death of reddit. A large portion of the internets "How To" guide just went up in flames. And a lot of that won't ever get rebuilt. Many of us who have been around long enough have also seen that dark side to these things.
It's a shame, is all. But time keeps moving and so will we.
Honestly, spez and the Reddit C-suite and board are in the process of finding out that a lot of what made their platform so good and popular was run almost entirely by community power users, enthusiasts, and developers, in addition to all the obvious utility and value that mods provided.
"the mods decided to revert the NSFW designation because the community is a helpful resource for veterans experiencing mental health crises. The mod said that if Reddit removed the team, it could put the community at risk."
Bitch fudging please.
Please tell me again how these people are not power tripping their eyes out.
Imagine having no Reddit community to fall back on or having different mods into your community.. The horror!
Can these people;
Stop acting as if they really want change to happen.
Just start to bent over further for Reddit.
Get on with their life.
Admit that they really like their little power trip.
From the post: TL;DR With the API changes now in place, we no longer believe we can effectively perform our mission so we are sunsetting BotDefense. We recommend keeping BotDefense on as a moderator through October 3rd so any unbans can be processed.
The link is fixed in the post body. I don't get this at all. I only copied the BotDefense link which is available through clicking the title, yet it pasted the next post from Reddit in the post body? Weird, but the link is fixed.
The difference was Reddit had already built up a reasonably comparable audience when Digg imploded so the migration was easy. If you look at a similar graph of Reddit today and Lemmy/Kbin, you probably wouldn't even see these tools register with the active user base of Reddit so high. I think "rhyme" of history is that another service will eventually win, and it might be ours, but it's more akin to the fall of the British Empire than an overnight event.
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