@HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social

HandsHurtLoL

@HandsHurtLoL@kbin.social

Fiber arts. SoCal. Social justice. Snark.

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HandsHurtLoL,

The Golden Shower water benders have found their next victim.

HandsHurtLoL,

Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn't think bestof communities were lame.

As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.

I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.

Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo's carapace?

What are your thoughts, @arotrios ?

HandsHurtLoL,

So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn't arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn't have to think about reddit's corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.

This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn't have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I'm on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I've since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian's mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.

You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?

HandsHurtLoL, (edited )

I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don't mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn't make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.

What gets my goat is why didn't reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That's what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.

Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.

HandsHurtLoL,

I had no idea that was the history involved. This makes more sense now why maybe reddit has a vendetta against quality developers. haha

HandsHurtLoL,

Okay, this helps me a lot. In essence, as someone using a 3PA, I represent 1 API, so for wildly successful 3PAs like Apollo, we're not talking 1000 API per minute, we're talking like 500k API per minute.

This is interesting also as it pertains to what you said about bots. When I used reddit for knitting and crochet, there was a bot that a community member had created that would reference a website that we all got patterns from, and then would generate a comment with a direct link to that pattern's page. In the lead up to the blackout, the bot's maintainer (not creator) was still in the dark about whether that bot would be shut down or not because reddit provided very little clarity when asked specifically about that bot. That bot was probably called up just a few dozen times per hour, so I imagine it would have been allowed to continue operating, whereas bots for AutoMods in subs with millions of subscribers were probably pulling huge numbers of API.

Thanks for chipping in!

HandsHurtLoL,

Can someone give me some perspective on the 100 API per minute versus 10 API per minute in terms of me - a dirty f'ing casual - trying to use reddit via a 3rd party app?

I get that API is when my 3PA is talking to the reddit server, but is that happening for, say, every post that loads up on my infinite scroll? Or every time I open a post to read comments?

In other words, would my usage need to be as slow as "don't browse more than 10 posts per minute" to have stayed in the free lane?

HandsHurtLoL,

This is a fancy bookmark from wherever your browser is. I have the same "app" and so do people who use Firefox on iOS. What you're looking at is essentially the same thing as kbin on the mobile internet.

The apps in development will have other QoL features that will be more similar to Apollo (but I hope more similar to Infinity for Android).

banning and defederating communities

Hey all, I recently left reddit like many of you. I have a question regarding lemmy and the fediverse on the history of banning and defederation. I have noticed several posts calling for varying communities to be disconnected. were these removal requests as prevalent before the mass migration? Usually I am all for communities...

HandsHurtLoL,

I am hoping that the new users are coming here with the intent to learn how this community works, before we try to remake the community we just left.

I counter this part of your post by throwing in there that for me and my time on reddit, the worst parts of the broader experience were the fact that communities of neo-nazis (r/conservative, r/conspiracy), Donald Trump cultists (r/the Donald), incels (numerous subreddits including r/incels and r/theredpill), and pedophiles (r/just18 among other porn based subreddits that were quarantined and banned several years ago) were allowed their own communities on the platform for as long as they were. This gave these horrible ideas time to draw attention and build a userbase that then degraded the quality of reddit across multiple other communities.

If kbin or lemmyworld immediately start banning or defederating these instances or communities/magazines, then to me that is how this larger community works and it is inherently not former redditors migrating here to shape the Fediverse in the image of reddit.

HandsHurtLoL,

Okay, but I honestly would have been okay if spez had announced that this would have gone into effect July 1 instead of API changes. I would have loved to live on reddit forever in a walled garden.

HandsHurtLoL,

Next bad decision: no usernames, you must use your actual government name and verify not by email, but with a photo or photoscan of a government-issued ID. This will be done in the name of cracking down on bots and troll farms, but will have the unintended consequence of driving off anyone with half a brain cell about how your internet history can come back to haunt you straight off the platform.

HandsHurtLoL, (edited )

Okay, it appears that I'm going to be the only dissenting opinion here.

The discussion around karma here is all centered on the SFW side of reddit, it appears. I used to operate on the NSFW side of reddit to find sexual partners. After I would make a post explaining the kind of connection I wanted to make, I would get like 150 offers over the course of 3 days, both over direct messages (orangered inbox) and chat requests (chattit).

I would only respond to users who had any sort of karma, post history, or more than just a few months on their account. My thought process was that I don't want to meet people who are 100% lurkers, I would favor people who had comment histories on normal subs and were contributing members in those communities (gave me hope they would be interesting conversationalists on the date), and I wanted to see some longevity in the account so that there was a clear sense of the decorum of old reddit versus all the sally-come-lately users.

ETA: I suspect that I was getting so many offers because I myself had made several submissions (lending to my own non-zero karma score) both text and photo and I had a long-standing account. I think I would have been viewed skeptically by everyone if my account was 3 days old and I had zero content, but was trawling for sex. That's how men show up with 2 kidneys but leave with 1 in the morning.

HandsHurtLoL,

@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.

HandsHurtLoL,

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.

Overwriting Comments w/ AI Output Is the Quickest Way to Make Reddit's Data Useless to LLM Firms (arxiv.org)

A new study shows that LLM models that are fed too much content that was generated by LLMs eventually collapse. Essentially, text generated by AI is poison if it makes its way into an LLMs training data. If the model eats too much of this poison, the model dies. By replacing your Reddit comments with AI generated text, you can...

HandsHurtLoL,

I used a free download called Redact to go through all my comments on June 11 and replace with AI language garbage. I did not delete submissions at this time, however, though that is an option in Redact. This process took almost 4 hours because I had two 11+ year old accounts.

Because I started this late at night and am in a specific time zone, a few of the subs I commented in the most had gone dark (midnight of June 12) and my comments could not be edited on my SFW account. In doing this, I was permabanned from several subreddits on my NSFW account.

Today, I opened Redact again to see if I could alter comments/remove submissions on my account that had the most subs go dark. Redact wouldn't even run for my SFW account so I logged in to reddit directly and saw a message that my account had been deactivated, which is why I think Redact was throwing me errors. I manually deleted all my submissions from both my accounts and manually deleted any comments that were original language from me.

I left up the AI edited comments and then deleted both my accounts.

HandsHurtLoL,

I can't help but think that people who describe the Fediverse as complicated joined reddit after the redesign...

Kbin is exactly like an old, stripped down version of old.reddit.

HandsHurtLoL,

I would have been willing to pay reddit $3 directly if it meant avoiding ads entirely before all of this blew up.

HandsHurtLoL,

Ehh, don't interpret me as being in favor of HOAs, but like, if $3 helped me connect with a huge userbase over the hobbies I enjoy, I'm willing to pay it to live in a gated online community.

My hobbies are not tech related. I have not found a new home or sense of community on kbin. That's just the reality of what I've lost by boycotting reddit on principle. In my offline world, I have paid to be a member of hobby communities just to offset the costs of organizing events and reserving group spaces. Arguably, I'm paying for the privilege to go there and "share content" through my presence. This isn't a big deal to me if I'm engaging the platform.

$3 would be a steal if I were a power user. $3 might be not worth it if I'm just a lurker.

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