I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit.
This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.
This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API.
The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. They seem to have forgotten this, and by violating the unspoken contract with the actual creators, they are at risk of losing them entirely. Social media platforms are useless without creators.
I imagine that this was, in fact, spoken -- in the terms of service. Not that anybody reads the terms of service (and I'm doubtful that any of them are really legally airtight).
It sounds as if users expected more, though I'm not sure what. Even as an unspoken contract, "free access forever" is a lot to ask. Those users can ditch Reddit, but I don't know if they'll find a (spoken) deal that's any better.
(Though I'm not sure why. Servers and bandwidth cost money, but not that much money.)
Unfortunately Reddit is probably right that this will simply blow over eventually. Most people are entirely captured by platforms nowadays, used to the slurry of the algorithm and without much ability or drive to really leave the lazy river to either find content outside of that or create content outside of that.
This is a direction I would like to see things going. It could just be that I mostly frequent tech-oriented communities, but with "self-hosting" as a hobby growing the way it has and servers being much cheaper than they used to be, I think (hope?) a lot of communities will retreat from these places to ones where they have more control.
I think 'slim' sites like HN really show that you do not need a lot of hardware to run a forum.
When you own a forum you can preserve the knowledge indefinitely, even if the forum is taken offline.
Reddit can close down your subreddit just because, they own it.
Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.
Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.
Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.
This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable.
Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on the API pricing issue, they are unlikely to win back support from the moderates themselves in the immediate future.
Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord... Which is awful, with how siloed and noisy Discord is.
I hope I am wrong, and that a good alternative gains traction.
- No alternative is going to show up which can host anywhere near the amount of traffic that reddit receives/received. That takes a lot more money than any new contender can drum up.
- reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit
- A lot of users are going to wander back over to post-blackout replacement subreddits
- A lot of communities are just going to disappear. It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute. If I were in charge of a sports league, I might be working on some sort of equivalent because for me personally a lot of the joy of watching a sport is sharing reactions with others. I can see my interest just fizzling out.
I'm in the same boat. I love /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball, from the consistently formatted game threads and post-game threads, to the clever offseason shitposting [1]. It's sad to see reddit putting on the brakes on their API that power the moderation tools which make those subreddits so good.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/5nbcgu/examining_the_e...
They could, however, take a saner approach to making a profit. If profit was their actual goal, for instance, it's entirely likely that they could actually make more money by either reducing the API pricing or charge it to the user (by making it a function of Reddit Gold). Of course, that assumes that money is the goal of the API changes, which was never obvious to me.
Now I'm considering starting up old-school forums to replace the first two subreddits. It would be a lot of work to manage them over time and I'm not sure that's the best use of my time. However... they would be communities fully under my control.
Decisions, decisions.
Then again, that appears to be the future of Reddit, doesn't it? I've never created a subreddit but from what I've been able to gather you all are using tools to assist with your moderator duties and now those tools are going to have to pay Reddit for API access, meaning soon enough you're going to be paying for using those tools.
Either way it looks like you're going to have to pay. It's going to be a question of how much are you going to have to pay and how much freedom of control you'd like.
I've decided to go ahead and do it. Now I'm looking at my options. Flarum and Lemmy seem reasonable.
I used shreddit[1] to remove my account's posts/comments. It's infuriating to read this line:
> Back in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the site wanted to start getting paid for helping to train some of the big AI chatbots.
I hope this protest shows the leadership that users have the power.
Lol, no; this is why I rarely worry about developers encroaching on operations concerns. A completely trustworthy site (https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-comments-are-pub...) states that that reddit had 303 million posts and 2 billion comments, in 2020. Could you imagine, how long it would take, and how much you would need to spend, on compute, to scrape 5+ million comments a day, using something like Selenium? I am guessing that it's a number approaching infinity. Plus, they would figure it out and just shut you down.
Is it possible to implement an alt-reddit in git? Every comment is a branch of the parent. Every post thread is a tree after all. If you could attach metadata to a branch you could keep counters (for upvotes-downvotes), golds given, etc. I know not much of how git works internally so there are probably many caveats (how does editing a comment work without branching). Sharing whole posts could be a matter of letting someone else checkout a post URL and you could dig to get all the comments under there. You could also have 'post aggregators' (like torrent) and some sort of UI that displays what reddit does today. So technically you could have decentralized alt-sub-reddits that advertise themselves/content to aggregators.
I'm hoping that a 3P developer brings some of their UX skills to Lemmy or Kbin, which would be really beneficial for bringing new users into the ActivityPub world
Don't be surprised if Reddit starts taking some pretty drastic action here on the grounds that they're violating one of the site's oldest rules which is "don't break Reddit".
Not saying it's good or bad, but just that this is almost definitely not going to go the way these people think it will.
teddit.net
It uses the free "unofficial" API like Nitter or Invidious. So users can use Reddit without it being awful, and deprive Reddit of their over zealous ad revenue without actually leaving Reddit.
Power users aside, I suspect the typical reddit user's experience is virtually unchanged.
Seems like the blackout is not working even a little bit.
e.g. Look at anime_titties, the ill-named main alternative to News and Worldnews, and tell me if you can see a problem with that being promoted. I sure can.
Blackout had next to zero impact in the short term, and I doubt it will have any lasting impact.
Your experience is yours, mine is mine, but given the objective fact of how many subs are currently private, I see no reason to think your experience is typical.
One should try googling anything with reddit.....most of results will be private.
This was Occupy Wall Street all over again. A disorganized mess of a protest with no chance at making a difference.
For Apollo it was the api (for which they were willing to pay if the price was fair)
For Reddit is free labour and content, which they still want for free
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1491zmn/moving_...
I know it is incredibly inefficient with the same questions being asked and answered constantly, but it appears to be what we do now. But even with that downside, it creates more intimacy/connection instead between members. So it likely leads to more engagement, even if it is inefficient.
I wish they'd at least try Discourse first.
Discord is where knowledge goes to die.
The fact that topic replies are presented sequentially and not as nested threads makes large topics downright miserable to navigate, and responses almost impossible to follow. And I will die on this hill, I don't care how many grizzled old timers try to tell me this is better. I'm not a zoomer who doesn't remember the internet pre-2010, I've been here since the '90s. I know exactly how bad it was, and the better UX is a massive part of why Reddit largely replaced these old communities over the last 15 years.
Also how come there is no more open, not CCP-aligned Discord alternative yet?
I'm hopeful the atmosphere changes, but I believe discord or hive might be the best positioned to be the refuge. Discord is awful for anything not transient. Hive has the whole web3 nonsense behind it. But they both seem more....balanced in their audience who uses them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/how-occupy...
That's not a winning formula.
I meant not replacing Discord but rather connecting to it / siphoning the user-generated data to a more open place
Yeah, the way to avoid racism other cess pools on Mastodon seems to be choosing a server that mods and frequently updates ban lists.
https://hachyderm.io tops that list for me.
I recommended Discourse for it's overall approachability and lack of confidence in my ability to convince a community moving to Discord to something more complicated.
People don't like upfront investment for longer term gains so sequential is a way easier sell.
I guess I'm saying my Discourse recommendation is damage control much like a tourniquet and not my ideal.
I installed Matrix and Synapse to my local server, but the installation process is not good, and the usability is bad. Clients are super buggy. Unusable, basically, as information got lost all the time.
I'm a game designer and a low-level game engine programmer, grumpy about slow hard-to-use software, so maybe there's a higher chance of doing more good than harm, lol.
You can always go down the ActivityPub rabbit hole (maybe starting with something like https://dev.to/thasmin/getting-started-with-activitypub-2mgm) to understand the federation protocol, but this may be less useful if you're interested in the UX problem
But that has not stopped some servers from exploding in size. And its "fine" if you are just trying to shoot the breeze or shout into the void, not look for specific information (which is truly horrendous) or answer FAQ (which is even more horrendous than reddit).