Arotrios

Arotrios, 11 months ago

As you wish...

Arotrios, 11 months ago

Here's a more more direct route if you're one of Dread Roberts' crew... just posted it over on the @13thFloor to preserve the link in case any of the mods here were Humperdinck agents looking for volunteers to test the Pit of Despair.

Arotrios, 11 months ago

Almost forgot to mention - just a heads up re: the finger thing - I think @InigoMontoya is looking for you...

Arotrios, 11 months ago

@PugJesus weren''t you looking for a spot to perform baptisms?

Arotrios, 1 year ago

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

Seriously this - @ernest has done a fucking incredible job. This software is flat-out amazing from a publisher's or author's perspective. It really encourages quality submissions as well, and the community is extremely positive.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

JFC I left just in time. This is literally encouraging me to go through the effort of deleting my old reddit accounts. Am I the only one that became notably nauseous when viewing that link? It's like it's been designed by the CCP for kindergartners.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

I wasn't gonna cry until I saw the drawings on the walls - that's a piece of animation history right there, and something you just can't recreate in a new space. If you framed some of that sheet rock and saved it for a generation or two, the cash from the collectors auction you'd get for it would probably pay enough to bring back Space Ghost.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.

In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.

I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.

What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.

Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.

But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.

And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.

Arotrios, 1 year ago

I think that while Reddit's user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn't participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.

Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we're going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.

It's clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.

You can't replace that with AI, but it's pretty funny to watch them try.