I wish someone would actually invest in competing product, with less censorship and no braindead mods.
If you don't like the mods/censorship you can host your own or go choose a new instance. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different
Not saying it's bad for everyone, just my personal experience. It chases me away.
The advantage of going the proxy route is that you only have to do this once after which you can access those sites from all your devices without needing to install separate apps.
"Check out Reddit. Pick a subreddit: can start with https://reddit.com/r/popular or start your own. It's where everybody flocked to. It's decent, has decent content, decent users.
If you don't like the mods/censorship you can start your own or go choose a new subreddit. content will be the same, mods will be different and what they mod will be different."
So if one community like say, https://lemmy.world/c/linux So .. /c/linux has mods and they're questionable you can go find a server/setup that you might think has better mods or a better mission behind them and their /c/linux will be moderated different from lemmy.world's /c/linux but they will all still have the same posts/comments, upvotes downvotes etc. Lemmy.world's deleted posts wont be the new one's deleted posts.
It's a federated Reddit (decentralized) - It gained millions of users when Reddit users jumped ship. It gains more every day because they're getting sick of the astroturfing, left swinging bias, bot bloat, and terrible mods/reddit policies.
So while you can't oust the mods per se you can just go find a different webserver that hosts a lemmy and it'll have different mods, admins etc
Most people on Lemmy are leftist and left-biased, in fact there're some pretty big and problematic tankie instances, right-wingers are a rarity and they're ostracized. If anything, people moving to Lemmy are sick of all the neoliberal/right-wing bullshit.
Well, if it's like that, where's the _decent_ websites? I don't use reddit. I block X, Facebook, everything. All that's left is HackerNews. I just want to enjoy higher level discussions.
I'm not down with neo-nazis though.
There's also Kbin, which for all practical purposes is Lemmy, and interoperates with Lemmy, but is developed by different people.
I'm not? Are you replying to the wrong comment?
>Go and find a rightist echo chamber Lemmy if that's what you're looking for.
I don't want that, nor am I looking for one.
>This is like going to /r/socialism and complaining Reddit is leftist.
This doesn't make any sense. Again, are you replying to the wrong person?
>There's also Kbin, which for all practical purposes is Lemmy, and interoperates with Lemmy, but is developed by different people.
Never heard of it.
Are you replying to the wrong comment?
>Don't be obtuse. It's against the guidelines.
"Don't be obtuse" is nowhere to be found in the guidelines, where as your shallow dismissal is. Please don't post shallow dismissals. It's against the guidelines.
Why do you always ask this? No, I'm not. And the parent comment was replying correctly to you. The whole thread reads very clearly to anyone but you it seems.
Your response to /u/immibis was very strange and I cannot help but think you're doing it on purpose.
Pretending to misunderstand everything and doing the whole "are you sure you meant to reply to me" bit is cringe. And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the spirit of the guidelines.
Because these responses are nonsensical non-sequiturs. They read like if you fed ChatGPT reddit comments.
>No, I'm not. And the parent comment was replying correctly to you.
No they weren't, it's nonsensical.
>The whole thread reads very clearly to anyone but you it seems.
Just because you delusionally believe that doesn't make it true.
>Your response to /u/immibis was very strange and I cannot help but think you're doing it on purpose.
How was it strange? Doing what on purpose?
>Pretending to misunderstand everything and doing the whole "are you sure you meant to reply to me"
It's not pretending, the response is just nonsensical. The last part of the GP I understood and responded to, you clearly missed that.
>bit is cringe.
"No one understands my delusions so I'll call him cringy!"
Cope.
>And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the spirit of the guidelines.
And yes, you wouldn't do this if you followed the actual guidelines.
I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs.
I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on Android. Relay survived the API changes and adopted a subscription model.
But thanks to Revanced I was able to patch an old version of Relay to use my own API key for free.
Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days.
HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline.
Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your user experience will be so horrible that you won't use it.
X simply doesn't allow you to use it, atleast it doesn't pretend.
I think we need more simple websites again, but I am not sure about the incentive structure.
Then go make one. It’s easier now than ever. The social media mistake was trying to make one site everything to everyone but the web is still there.
I only browse old.reddit logged out and log in if I want to to comment before logging out by deleting my cookies. I started doing this after seeing the first "year in review" thing they sent to my account, which creeped me out. Especially not being able to disable this type of data collection, on either of the two sites.
I may be having an easier time of it by using RES though.
Almost every app now degrades quickly after startup capital fades, maybe we should just all quit social apps the minute they show signs of degrading, because right now most of the content, ads, and people on these social apps are now just as uninteractive, repetitive, mundane, and unrewarding as watching TV.
The internet has always had nice discussion forums that were labors of love of generous people. In the case of HN, the generous person running the forum is actually a company managing billions of dollars. In the absence of a better funding model for the internet, maybe that’s the solution: altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly.
The exponential growth required of publicly traded social media companies drives different motives in moderating and promoting the discussions.
Even if you run across a “news” subreddit and comment on something that doesn’t seem Left, you will get banned right now. It’s very toxic.
Best to stay away from Popular
When you comment to complain, you get "Star Trek has always been political", "The Simpsons has always been political".
Yeah... but Star Trek memes hasn't always been. /r/SimpsonsShitposting used to be funny, not just sarcastic eye-rolls about [current-republican-bogey-man/woman strawman].
also any sub related to anything remotely gender specific immediately gets overrun with incel content (or female equivalent)
but I do think niche or regional community oriented subs are worth frequenting
Some stayed, of course, but I feel anecdotally that content on reddit now is mainly posted by casual users and bots.
Reddit is one of those great examples were management and execs all feel like they need to show their impact and justify their salary and just make the platform worse.
Bots and propaganda are literally everywhere. The platform keeps getting worse but I admit it is to some extent addictive.
I am somewhat happy that HN is one of those places where politics are generally avoided.
I am sick of people arguing about geopolitics and national politics like it was some fan battle while not even knowing their mayor candidates programs, hell many don't even know who their mayor is or what their city council is working on.
This stems imho from the dead of traditional newspapers who were often local, in favor of internet media which is in its nature global.
I swear most people in Italy know more about US politics than what's happening in their own backyard, completely backwards.
HN is avoiding it because somebody else pays to run it and there's zero images or videos.
Also re: politics, stuff the federal government does affects me a lot whereas most local governments seem pretty similar and powerless. If the pendulum can swing so broadly ever 4 years I'd better watch it, right?
To be clear, amidst this, reddit was still growing. So from an Excel sheet management perspective, nothing seems wrong. But most of that growth could be found in low effort content that honestly can be found on any social media platform. Where the sort of unique content that did set reddit apart slowly started to decrease in both quantity and quality over the years.
disclaimer: i created it to scratch my own itch for the reason you list
The bigger problem is the amount of lazy comments on the site, which are invariably highly upvoted.
I'm so sick of pun threads, and office references and any other popular culture reference.
They've just about made me start to hate Monty Python, which is quite an accomplishment.
The latest is that everyone is beating Dune references absolutely to death.
If someone wants an AI project idea, then a browser extension which used an LLM to score all the comments in a Reddit thread and filter out all the lazy comments would be useful. If it works, most of the comments on front page articles should disappear.
It would probably eliminate most of the actual bot comments as well.
Actually the genuine content (and votes) seems to be a minority now?
Reddit and X are both very bad, where is the non-video fun these days?
dont follow the very large subreddits
i mostly follow it for game specific subreddits, and my hobbies such as woodworking etc
lots of great users in there
The project got a (small) grant from NLNet a couple of months ago for me to work on having the functionality built-in into the Voyager client (a PWA Apollo clone). If more people or companies would like to help/support, hit me up.
My shared IP has been network blocked by Reddit and anonymous browsing is disabled. I also see about fifty captchas per day. I really, really miss the old web and plain text too...
Also, they are part of the API much of which is actually restricted behind authorization.
Drug trade, online. The first taste is free. Authenticating it digs into the profits.
It has a single redeeming feature - network effects on good user conent. That's it...literally everything else about it is a dumpsterfire, including how they treat devs.
This is actually still working! Trying on one of the top posts right now, if you change
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
to
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ezq3po/asked_for_my...
you get all comments as json, with no need for authentication. So it's probably trivial to develop a client that would use this and have a nice ui and bypass any and all ads. Interesting.
AFAIK, you don't actually get all comments, and it's impossible to enumerate all comments to a post via that method. Give it a try to enumerate based on the data that gets returned, and you'll end up with a way smaller number than the reddit UI shows on the website.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cxh3a/we_just_...
Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped.
I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.
/a/? MAL? I think anime discussion is one of the few topics readily abundant elsewhere on the web, it's the other niches that are really hard to find.
The only API you need is HTTP. Those who try to pervert you into thinking that they can decide what user-agent you can use are only trying to control more than what they own.
Given that rss is _designed_ to be read by "bots" i.e. computer programs, what is Reddit's stance there? Do they also consider it "bypassing API restrictions"?
My trick: subscribe to the "top weekly" feeds for each of your subs, which keeps the fire hose at a very manageable level.
Management and SWEs being paid very comfortable salaries to build critical features like... an online indicator, or products that just get shut down after a year because they never bothered interfacing with the community and focusing on a better user experience.
Or, as it's better known, resume driven development.
It was my togo app, i spent hours browsing and reading random comments and articles, my English got surprisingly better than most of my peers and all it took was a mild internet addiction.
Now it's short form content for me. YouTube mainly (premium helps a lot, tiktok enshittified a little with shops and the slideshows).
I mourn RIF and count the days untill old.reddit is no longer supported.
Videos take much longer than reading text . And they mostly say the same things. It's just that the better content has moved to youtube, where it can be monetized better
But I’m a late boomer, so I come from the last century. I consume video content, but also, a great deal of written stuff.
"This is so ridiculous and funny " was my first reaction but then mind broke at the realization that this is the new future.
The same with ChatGPT...it's sad that it answers better than Google for generic information search, especially if you aren't familiar with specific terms in that field.
Text is dead
It was surprisingly easy to abandon it.
I miss the old Reddit, I hate the new. I used to use it a fair bit (and even contribute to niche topics) but deleted my account and content when they announced the API changes.
Reddit is a zombie site now, it’s effectively dead. Unless you’re into arguing US politics then that’s where the party is.
How the fuck was reddit not profitable?
The founder said it but i still don't belive it.
Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?
I could see Reddit as being a large source of content so worth the effort, at least until it's disabled--but that hasn't happened so far.
I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.
I wouldn't, but I left reddit when all of this happened anyway.
Honestly if they banned you it's because it threatened their IPO. Spez and co don't care about communities or the people. They never even gave mods their mod tools. They just left AutoModerator to sludge along laggingly on a single core after firing the creator of it that went on to create https://tildes.net - a better 'reddit'.
Reddit just sold everybody's data to google for the AI data and are going to sell the same data back to reddit users with walled gardens and its new 'search'. Fuck 'em.
I'm sure it's a decent app. I won't use reddit. it's an astroturfed left-swinging graveyard where even Alexis Ohanian quit its board and left completely due to its racism years ago.
There's libreddit and redlib for self hosted frontends similar to geddit, but yours as a mobile app I can see would be appealing since reddit's as I've heard is less than ideal.
You can slap on .rss and .json at the end of the URLs and get your favorite subs from a decent rss reader. No need to comment anyways.
With reddit, you're just commenting amongst bots such as these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU4sGCVZqWo
The dead internet theory I've found, isn't a theory.
Good on ya for making Geddit. Keep up the cool stuff.
Would it be viable to add a setting for your own Fediverse account so that you could click on the communities to redirect them to your own server? For instance, if I search for /r/switzerland, there would be a button by the Fediverser suggestion of switzerland@feddit.ch to open it on my own Fediverse server - like the 'Take me home' button on the Mastodon web client.
If your problem is in discovering the "canonical" community in case there are duplicates, then I'd invite you to take a look at https://fediverser.network
The one thing that I have noticed is that I have been reaching to quite a good number of mods on Reddit to see if they would be interested in migrating their communities, but the absolute majority of them seem to really act like "landed Gentry", they complain about Reddit, but are downright apathetic to any type of change. They keep saying "being a mod is not fun/thankless/source of abuse", yet they refuse to let go of the position.
This results in companies rapidly growing until no more profit can be made in the short term at which point they start cutting costs to continue show profit. The cuts result in destroying the long term value (firing valuable know how etc.) for a short term profit. At the end the company dies or becomes a sad zombie.
Rinse and repeat.
Before all this, before an IPO was considered an option, they actually did try to make the platform sustainable for a while. I can't remember the details, but buying gold (and getting some perks) you supported reddit. They actively promoted this and even had a counter that showcased how much you contributed to server costs and all that. This is also the only time I remember that reddit reported numbers in the black.
They could easily have built further on this and increased income sustainably and slowly growing over time. But clearly at some point it was decided that this approach was not enough and that they needed more rapid growth and work towards an IPO. Which is the point where they massively scaled up their staff, started attracting investments and started working on the redesigned reddit. Which truly marked the beginning of the end.
Not to say that things were perfect before that, far from it, the platform had enough issues back then as well. But there was a very distinct and clear point where things still could have turned around and reddit would be a radically different platform from what it is today.
The real users probably aren't worth much, advertising wise. The key young demographic doesn't use it, and only a small portion of the next most valuable does.
One of the founders admitted that they had created thousands of fake accounts to give the appearance of traction.
Well they have alienated the power users and made the site focused on the 9gag audience then wonder why the value per user goes down
Developers are cost centre and very expensive one when they spend time on things that do not generate any meaningful new revenue. On site like reddit as long as core product is decent users would stay due to network effects.
2019 350 million users
2024 504 million users
"It worked" but for what? Usually the idea is to focus on user growth first, and then eventually turn a profit, but what difference does it make if you succeed with the first step if you haven't even thought about the second step, much less be able to succeed with it?
What I'm more surprised is that it wasn't profitable in the yishan/ellen pao era. They had reddit premium unlike the founders first run at the site, and they were still run by a handful of people in Conde Nast's back closet.
I miss the old web, the old browser based games. So I'm digging out my old code from shareware I made 15 years ago and turning some of them into free games.
Likewise my blog, converted it from Wordpress into plain HTML. I have more control, at the "expense" of not having a visitor counter system that might go up to 100 if I post a link here but otherwise only goes up to 1-4 views.
This means no need for ads, which is a better user experience directly.
It also means no built-in tracking cookies that I can't remove, and by extension no need for a popup that parrots "we value your privacy" like it's a magic phrase to keep demons at bay even though they "value" the privacy in the same way that a pirate values the cargo of the ship they're taking from at cannon-point.
A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it.
If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gatekeeping that comes with it.
Also I’m not sure what you had in mind for altruistic. There’s a difference between financing people’s nostalgia fetishes and financing the repairing of society, but either could be squeezed into the definition.
What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.
If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.
Xitter obviously made a lot of mistakes, but the appeal to society wasn’t one of them (the execution is another story), but that’s the only reason it is still around. There’s obviously a demand for it that isn’t being fulfilled.
I’m not referring to “free speech”, I think that is the wrong message to focus on, though I do think big tech and Reddit had that wrong. Social media is responsible for the enshittification of society at large. It just takes a click to make someone an un-person at the slightest offense. Whether that be to exclude them from their social community with a block or ban, or expose something they said out of context.
It’s not really a censorship issue as much as it is a self-censorship issue with the secondary effects that has on society as a whole. To put it more plainly: people are too afraid to express themselves, even under pseudonyms. There are exceptions but when they stand out it has a tendency to look weird, so it’s passively discouraged in that way as well. Even if you are allowed to do so, that doesn’t stop cancel culture from taking things you said or did out of context. You can’t have the old web culture back until that’s solved, and I don’t even know if that’s possible to do.
So instead, we are stuck with gatekeepers and overzealous moderation (though the latter was a problem in the old days too). What a way to live, eh?
The spend to grow. Sales and marketing $71 million, R&D $142 million. They could easily switch into 25% profit margin business if they stop investing into growth.
You’re saying that you look explicitly for things that conform to your political views, comment things with your political views, then get banned?
Do you have a link to an example?
I was banned from r/Damnthatsinteresting, for example, because they said r/Conservative supports abortion. I have never seen that. It’s mostly just Trump leaning articles.
The last mayor of my city decided to make the entirety of the fields in front of my house (in Italy, countryside near Rome) buildable and completely ruined the view from my house and filled it with traffic.
Honest question: If, other than voting every 4 years, you have no ability to impact change, why spend the time watching it? Why not spend the time doing something more constructive that you have the ability to impact? (aside from prior to the election to inform voting, of course)
Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?
Differences in policy. There are wildly different ideas about what is and isn't acceptable.
> Sure, you can pick a random one like fediverser.network apparently does. Looking at one line from the list, I see that r/manga points to ani.social/c/manga which has 561 subscribers, when lemmy.ml/c/manga has 3,480. What?
That's not random. There was drama. The lemmy.ml admins are hostile to a lot of anime-related content and drove off most of the community that was accumulating there last year. ani.social is where the active, non-tankie communities are now. It's run with what seem like fairly reasonable policies and actually welcomes the subject matter. If you were relatively happy with the handling of anime-related content on reddit a few years ago then the communities on ani.social are probably what you're looking for; it's a good recommendation.
That just makes it worse. Not only is it too large a field to bring a community together, but it's a minefield?!
Lemmy.ml was the first instance, so naturally many people created communities there before. This does not mean that it's still where the anime fans want to congregate. The admins of lemmy.ml also said that they want to promote decentralization so they want as few communities there as possible.
The key demo of 18 to 34 is mostly uninterested. Of the next demo, you only have one slice of the pie who interacts much at all. Compared to most other social media, it's not worth much.
This, however, is an anecdote of one data point of course.
Edit - Also, why pay to advertise when you can just make a shill account for free?
Because it does not guarantee visibility.
"Why pay for advertising on Facebook when you can have a Facebook page?"
Plus, the users are self segregated, what a dream.
Imagine you wanted to sell drop shipped backpacks. All you'd need to do is create and prime, or buy, a dozen or so accounts, and start recommending your own brand subtly in every recommendation thread in r/backpacks or whatever the most popular sub for it is.
People trust Reddit because they assume they're other real users. Many advertisers already know and take advantage of this. It's nearly impossible at this point to know who or what is authentic.
This view may very much be the answer. Like, if the 18-34 "key demo" (which, incidentally the Millenials you mention are a part of) is "mostly uninterested", it's dumb to chase after them. Reddit had - and surprisingly, still has - its own, large core demographics, which they somehow failed to monetize. Hell, for a good while that demographics was upstream from Facebook, providing content for Facebook users to repost.
I guess the VC rules are that you either shoot for the Moon or get written off, even if you have a perfectly good submarine.
If anything, just by the logic of commodity economics, they should in theory be - at best - borderline profitable. They don't provide any obviously useful or difficult service apart from an easily recognisable domain name and they face global competition. No obvious moat, no obvious profits.
Channel operator drama was a major thing with IRC back when it was popular (sometimes ending to like channel splits or even whole netsplits if the people involved were related to the server operators, bot/flood wars, etc), so yeah, there isn't anything specific to Reddit about it. I wasn't part of it but i am pretty sure you'd see the same patterns in Usenet back when that was popular (and despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September").
Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.
The result was that newsgroups were very different for insiders vs outsiders: insiders saw nice clean message feed, outsiders saw tons of low-content messages with no replies and rare nugget of interesting info.
This was one of the big reasons why Usenet died for me: too much spam and useless messages, as there is no group-wide authority (and no, cancel bots never seemed to work)
Today, if you want heavily moderated group, there is plenty - they are simply scattered on the web. Many of them are phpbb-style forums, some discords and slacks (ugh...).
Also the cycle/churn of software is so quick nowadays that manuals are often written as a second or third thought for majority of the projects. So I can not really blame folks for just directly probing for tribal knowledge.
Most of my issues, especially before LLMs have been regarding misunderstanding documentation, knowing I'm somehow misunderstanding it and just needing someone to rephrase it since I'm burnt out going in circles yet have to finish X before the end of the day so I can't let it marinate in my head.
My impression is that communities trying hard to enforce doing your research prior to asking often end up skill issueing plebians. In that line of thinking it might be cool to see a "question difficulty" option on sites like SO. I've never really had a question where I couldn't roughly gauge how complicated it is and if trying to answer questions it'd be cool to be able to roughly filter like you'd do in leetcode.
TBH this doesn't sound awesome, it sounds exactly the hotbed that spawns community drama, passive aggressive behavior and other human stuff you still see to this day :-P.
This would destroy the eusocial for-free moderation by people who simply want to create an environment they value and others benefit from in the process.
human population. Most people are stupid and the only way to have something nice is to gatekeep. Every single time any community grows too large it becomes shit.
That's what advertisers would like their customers to believe.
The truth is closer to: advertisers are lazy, Reddit users aren't complete idiots, subreddits are moderated, and spammers are (rightfully) despised. Effective shilling takes more effort in actively moderated environment so I wouldn't be surprise if sponsored posts had a better ROI than the much more dishonest plays.
That site wouldn’t have any spam, true. Though not because of the cost, but because it wouldn’t have any users to make it worth spamming. No one wants to pay per message. Everybody would be too nervous and quadruple-thinking “is this message worth a cent?” Once in a blue moon someone would post, get no reply, and be even more unlikely to post next.
And yes, yes, not literally everyone, but enough that it becomes a rounding error.
So the wealthiest people get to spread the most propaganda?
I think that's well below the threshold people would care.
The problem is that $0.01 is too low, it'd be well worth spending to advertise or propagandize. For context, USA presidential elections will spend billions, they could make ten billion posts for a fraction of their war chest.
People don’t even pay 0.99$ for apps they use all day every day, opting instead to suffer through ads and have their batteries drained. There’s no chance they’d pay 0.01$ per message.
For the vast majority, there are two price points: free and not free. The psychological difference between free and 0.01$ is magnitudes larger than the difference between 0.01$ and 1$.
People were saying this about email 20+ years ago.
Not sure if it's the case here but there's a tendency for those in tech to think people problems can be solved with code.
Many of the bad things on the internet are a layer 8 issue and collective human behaviour isn't an easy problem to solve.
Sure, clever analogy. The internet barely facilitates many best practices for congregating on a communal basis, barring a user's self-sovereign strive to cultivate, recognize and then compensate for its failings with whatever sort of information, interactions and dealings one happens to seek.
20+ years ago, i just settled for lurking whatever boards popped out of the ether and playing EverQuest, RuneScape and Habbo Hotel, to soak in its novelty. Such persistent asymmetricity should never be lost.
[1] https://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works
You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee.
Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.
Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.
Someone built this (a 4chan clone) on ethereum, I can't remember what it's called. It was pretty dead, but the project exists.
Check out this paper:
https://people.duke.edu/~dandan/webfiles/PapersPI/Zero%20as%...
From a purely theoretical level, there's a very broad range of incomes worldwide, so any price point you use to keep spammers out makes it unaffordable to the average person in many nations, and varying pricing by nation just means the spammers pretend to be from the cheapest nation(s).
We also have a demonstration of payment-based messaging systems in that price range with SMS and voice calls, which still get junk. (Nation-specific: my German SIM gets none while my UK SIM gets a lot… but only when I actually visit the UK).
For subscription-based payment filtering, similar — while it's hard for me to determine which of Musks's statements I should take seriously or literally, twitter premium pricing it's still a test of this idea even if it wasn't the true intent behind Musk's assertion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY
> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"
> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]
The psychology is already there, "all" that's required a snowball to start adoption in the online media space.
Was this the initial idea of the Brave browser? Did that succeed to some extent?
Also it tends to be made illegal for obvious reasons (even if in practice, everyone but the most careful user eventually gets identified by their IP, the logs of which Web servers are legally obligated to keep in most states).
Otherwise, if you actually meant pseudonymous payments, well, Flattr actually tried to do it. Flattr 1.0 basically died in the 2012-2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, while Flattr 2.0 never managed to get enough reach, unlike the Silicon Valley backed, new competitor, Patreon.
It should cost at least 10 cents. And I think your idea is the future.
It seems like there are things reddit could do to squelch spam that it doesn't seem to be doing, like disallowing duplicate text in posts as one example. Beyond a certain karma it seems like posting rate becomes unrestricted and I think more than one post every 10 seconds is spamming regardless.
So I think reddit right now doesn't have much incentive to squelch spam since it's not doing that much, it would take effort, and effort == money.
I think the for profit model is reddit's biggest problem right now. Others have pointed to USENET's problems, but in an open protocol those were things that could have been surmounted with effort. The for-profit problem with reddit looks to be insurmountable and the rate of enshitification will only accelerate.
Probably a clone of the old reddit is in order. Like cleddit (.com is squatted on but not .org or .net) or something like that. Or a new version of the USENET protocol. For all it's problems USENET did reveal what made scientology 'tick' behind the scenes on alt.religion.scientology. Some new version of USENET might also address DMCA abuses also.
Something that is free is an unlimited resource. Something which costs even $0.01 is a limited resource (even if the limit is very high).
People naturally deal with limited resources different than unlimited. If it’s unlimited, each usage requires no further consideration. If it’s limited, each usage requires evaluating whether to spend dollars/credits/capacity on it.
I use a paid search engine. I paid extra for the “unlimited” option even though I should have fallen well under a lower tier. It wasn’t because of payment friction. (I was already paying a monthly fee, the only difference was the amount.) I paid the extra because as soon as this transitioned from unlimited to limited, I needed to keep a mental accounting of every usage. I needed to consider if each usage was worth buying.
If you give me a sheet of stickers for free I will struggle to stick them on anything. They are, by their nature as a physical thing, a limited resource. Payment doesn’t matter because they were free. What matters is I can run out so I need to ensure I’m making the best use of a limited resource.
The worst I see on Twitter when I peek in come from checkmarks. Cryptocurrency shills are some of the worst offenders and they seem to have taken over.
On top of that, they are effectively paying per word to post through paying for tokens. This does not stop them.
Assuming the Fediverse was as popular as Twitter/FB, they could simply run their own instances, no need to pay for access through any specific server.
There was a spam wave some months ago. The spammers were using Mastodon and Sharkey instances that had open registrations. They were not signing up to paid-only instances to become "legit".
Anyway, my point is that charging for access to a network where access is already open is good enough for a filter to avoid spam originating from your node. Spammers are not going to be interested in paying $29/year to be able to send posts via Mastodon when they can just create a bunch of accounts on servers with open registrations or simply running their own botnet.
Hell, I don't even have to be a complete cynic to make the argument that basically any news piece today only gets to be written if it serves the economic interests of its publisher. That is valid from the NYT and Washington Post to an indie game developer talking about their project on Mastodon.
If everything is "spam", then there is no ham. If there is no ham, there is no way to build an classifier. If there is no way to build a classifier, then what is the problem we are trying to solve in the first place?
Bots spreading misinformation are bad and a problem on Twitter/Facebook/TikTok, sure. But the reason that an entrance fee does not solve this problem is because these networks are built on the idea of controlling what content people get to see. On the "open social web", people are in charge, there is no "algorithm" and manipulation becomes a lot harder.
No? That doesn't mean they aren't spam, though.