Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
God we need indefinite blackouts.
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
How is that an example of bad code?
Honestly, it’s probably not - if I’m actually right this is likely an issue that Reddit’s engineers never predicted would happen so never planned for it. I was being hyperbolic.
It’s not reactive. A proper reactive system can handle fluctuations in usage patterns more robustly.
I’m having a hard time believing the claim that Reddit’s code isn’t reactive.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a gigantic mess of nested if-else statements.
Maybe, but this was a huge increase in usage. Reddit never expected to deal with anywhere near thousands of subs going private simultaneously.
The servers run on the tears of bitter whiny CEOs.
Reddit is hosted on AWS after all…
Tildes’ dev Deimos used to work for Reddit and had this guess https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_during_blackout_day_1#comment-87v1.
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
Want Free API? Straight to down status.
Want cheaper API? Also straight to down status
Not enough people on Reddit because of protests? Also straight to down status
This comment is so good an upvote won’t do justice (without awards, a classic comment such as this now has some merit… it’s a new day boys & girls, a good day)
If Beehaw offered awards I would actually buy them, at least the money would be going towards keeping the lights on for a project that isn’t actively trying to screw over users for profit.
Give them some gold. Oh wait…
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
thank you, this comment made my day
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
They’ll find some people.
The reality is, not having (good enough) mods will take a while to really hurt the bottom line. Subs will slowly deteriorate.
But I’m 100% sure, within a few weeks you can establish a new order of more servile mods.
People on Reddit complain about the mods enough as it is. (And I include myself in that. I’ve had some less than stellar mod encounters in the past.) However, if Reddit were to force out existing mods and replace them with mods willing to toe the company line (and possibly ban people for mentioning the blackout, complaining about Reddit, or mentioning alternatives), it would just result in more user dissatisfaction.
Reddit won’t go out overnight. There are too many people who post there. However, this could turn into a snowball effect. Rebelling mods are replaced by bootlickers. Dissent is crushed in order to make it seem like everything is hunky dory before the IPO. Power users flee to alternatives like Lemmy. Slowly, normal users hear that some of their favorite content is on this new service and sign up. Reddit usage drops little by little until it’s limping around as a shell of its former self.
Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.
At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.
Is that what the subreddit coins or subredidt points idea was about?
I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.
Whatever causes the website to have trouble, I’m all for it, right now.
I already wondered if I got lightning-banned for sending too many API requests in a short time, when I used a script to auto-edit all my comments and text-posts.
Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku…
Bold of you to assume they had a keikaku to begin with
A significant number. Fantastic. I’m not sure I believe the stability issues, I’m just a a tin foil hat kind of guy though. I guess it’s possible.
Reddit didn’t design their systems around needing to deal with a huge number of subs going private all at the same time. It’s not surprising that it caused a short outage.
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
My hypothesis is that it’s probably because so much of Reddit posting is automated by their own bot network now that they DDOS’d themselves trying to auto-post to subs that are suddenly locked. Like they didn’t even bother tracking which subs would be blacking out and like…write exceptions to their post schedule.
I bet their shitty bots intended to inflate comments and content couldn’t be switched off in time for the blackouts, still sending requests and DDoS’ing their own site.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn’t a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted…
As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.
None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.
At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
I’ve had some of those. I’ve been responding with a link to Louis Rossman’s video and “Please consider limiting your own reddit use.”
Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.
Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.
You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.
I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).
I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…
in a way it does, when you’re building massive scale systems. Say you are the mitigation team and want to protect yourself against a malicious hacker/employee that starts shutting down web servers or removes posting permissions from the DB for everyone. You’re going to monitor the frequency of posts and if it drop too fast, you know something’s bad happening. You’re going to take automated measures against it - maybe freeze access to the DB completely, maybe switch to a (much less tested) backup region/system, etc… so you can see how things can snowball from there to strange scenarios…
yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).
I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.
I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation
I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.
The fail whale was iconic back in the day.
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can’t say I won’t miss it though, wish there was a “Lemmy is fun” already
Didn’t know we had an app. The RiF developer is working on an app for Tildes, which bums me out, RiF was my weapon of choice.
I’ve only convinced one real life friend to become interested in reddit, I asked her if she’d heard about all the drama there, and found out she’d been using the official app all this time…she was super shocked when I told her the stories about peoples’ phones heating up using that thing.
I’m still trying out Tildes now and then, but the lack of an app pretty much kills the experience for me at the moment. I feel like the Lemmy system is overall the superior option, but Tildes is still an interesting alternative from what I’ve seen so I’m excited to see what it looks like with an app.
I read that people were really impressed with how dedicated the RiF developer is working on their app - bugs or features were reported and bam! Fixed asap. I mean to join up at Tildes when they have another bidding round, it is interesting in its own way - same with Squabbles.
Any chance you could give me an invite?
I was going to join tildes until I saw a slew of posts talking about how they got permabanned for saying stuff like “I like tildes more than lemmy”. Lol… what?
started using jerboa, but as it stands i found browsing in firefox on the mobile interface better
Agreed. Jerboa has a ways to go to catch up with the mobile web interface.
And they both have a long way to go to catch up to the likes of RIF.
I guess I have the minority opinion here - I reallykme Jerboa. It’s not Apollo or Sync but it’s lightweight, all about the text, has bookmark, comment, up and down votes front and center, and gets out of the way.
I’ve also been over on kbin.social and the mobile interface there is really lacking so maybe Jerboa just looks especially good to me jn contrast!
The lack of a mobile app is what’s keeping me from trying kbin.social right now.
If folks are on iOS, you can beta test the app “Mlem” by following the instructions here:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
I like it!
I just downloaded it. I’m not sure how to log in though. I entered beehaw.org for the home page then Skyteck for username and added my password. Then it says could not connect to beehaw.org.
Try the full URL:
https://beehaw.org/That worked for me. Logging in was as easy as logging in here on browser.
Logging in is a major pain in the ass. It took me like 12 minutes to figure it out and if I got logged out, I’m not sure I remember how it worked.
Terrible UX. But better than nothing.
In one of the subreddits, someone mentioned an effort to make a “Reddit API->Lemmy API bridge.” Basically, you’d load this code and point your Reddit API calls to Lemmy instead. Then this bridge would translate your Reddit code to Lemmy. This could allow for apps like RIF, Boost, Apollo, etc to quickly turn their Reddit apps into Lemmy apps.
I hope this pans out. Jerboa isn’t bad, but having many third party apps to choose from would be great. (As a Boost user, I’d love to load Boost and browse Lemmy instead of Reddit.)
For me I want a LemReader a Lemmy version of RedReader.
The RedReader developer (QuantumBadger) said they’d like to make it a more general reader app and include support for RSS and Lemmy. It would take a while to to it though. They would have to abstract a lot of the Reddit specific code.
I hope they do it, it’s a really nice app.
I was using joey. Joey for lemmy sounds pretty weird.
Lol yeah. Traded one animal for another.
Same. We need better Lemmy apps
Jeroba is great and open source (and free)! Rather than “better Lemmy apps” why not just improve the one that already exists?
I don’t like the layout personally. I agree that we should improve existing apps but we also should create more options.
Reddit (and Boost, the app I used before) offered several different layout styles that you could pick from (e.g. cards, list). Are those the types of layouts you’re referring to? Those could be added, I expect, and the more the merrier
Or do you mean more specific layout details like where the voting buttons are?
Jerboa has “Card”, “Small Card”, and “List” modes under “Look and Feel” -> “Post View”
Jerboa is a pretty nice app overall already. I use an iPhone as my main device, and Mlem is very incomplete at this stage (but it’s quite new). I loaded up Jerboa on a Pixel, though l, and was very impressed. Jerboa is far more polished…shame it’s Android only
Did the same this morning but with Boost. End of an era, really
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!
That’s what I did!
Same here!
I’ve also done this. It makes it really easy to forget about Reddit, to some extent.
Honestly, all I need is something to occupy my eyes and fill that reflex that has me tapping an app on the tray of my home screen when I’m stressed or need a distraction.
This place isn’t the most efficient (yet) and there are many gaps from what I used to read back in my Reddit days but that place was beginning to be too toxic for me anyway.
The newness of this, and the energy here is much better for my mental health. I can see googling something +Reddit to read an opinion about a TV show or something but if they don’t allow unauthenticated browser access to the site, I won’t even be doing that anymore. And I’ll almost certainly be better off for it.
My solution to this was to put Jerboa there, and add Tachiyomi (Manga reading app) above it, for when I’m just looking for “something” to busy myself.
I might suggest getting ebooks? I have found reading a book to be a lot less stressful a lot of the time, and bonus, you don’t need to deal with data after you dl the book to read it.
I switched it out for the PWA of my instance
I put mlem in the spot where Apollo (sob) used to be
Mlem is kind of ass. I’m working on an iOS app now for Lemmy and others. All of your posts and communities across all of your services and servers in one feed. I’m really excited about it.
Oooh. Make a sub or whatever they’re called so we can follow the progress? :)
Same, but for me it’s Apollo! I had to take it off my home screen. I am committed to the 48 hours and beyond, if necessary! And got everyone in my house to join in too! But damn it’s a hard habit to break!
Stick around the cute animals are growing by the day! Seriously on Saturday I could only find one community dedicated to animals. Today while browsing I found like EIGHT!
I’ve become partial to animals eating food 🥺 where do I go for this content 😭
I’m not sure, but here’s a photo of my son’s blue parakeet eating to hold you over until you find it. (Also, let me know if you find such a community.)
Nom nom nom. (But if you find fruit bats or capybaras eating, let me know!)
Same, I just kept instinctively looking for Boost throughout the day to scroll and then catching myself amd going “godamn it, you made accounts in other places a week ago for this! Just go there!”
I got better at it by the end of the day, by tomorrow hopefully I’ll hop here or tildes first instead of mindlessly trying to open reddit first.
The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I’ll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn’t coming naturally.
And, yes, I know the username doesn’t match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.
So instead of removing RIF, I removed my entire phone homepage. D’oh.
I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website’s core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I’m aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they’re going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg…
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I’ve learned anything it’s that Reddit’s admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that’s come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don’t see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don’t expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it’s becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I’ve commented loads on here that I haven’t felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it’s getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It’s become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I’m really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it’s more engaging. IDC if it doesn’t become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I’m 100% down.
Agreed, feels like a fresh start without some of the noise. Reddit will be bleeding users for a long while. A large number of power users have jumped ship and many of them technically apt. Lemmy will improve very quickly now. New UIs and features.
I’m excited.
Same man. I’m also trying to get out of my shell and contribute as well. I have thousands of reddit comments, but only a few posts in 12 years, mainly because I didn’t see the point. But here, where there are 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer users, what I have to say or post may genuinely interest somebody AND be seen by said person. If people don’t like it, that’s fine, at least it was there for them to see and not like!
Well your username certainly wins my everything for the day!
Thanks! My reddit name got shit on frequently, so I’m not sad to see people appreciating the new one!!
This is it. The algorithm amplifies the popular and in doing so mutes the rest.
Whether the algorithm is upvotes from the community times hotness or likes from the whole world times your social graph.
It is still inevitably muting more people than it is promoting.
People are worried today that there might not be a single place to find the one true forum, but in wanting that they are silencing the decentralized voices who can only get attention in a smaller group.
You can’t have a sensible discussion when everyone is in the same room.
Yeah I was super surprised to see just how many improvements hit the Jerboa Android app in just a couple days since I installed it. So many PRs lol
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted “free speech.” I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don’t like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn’t seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
IIRC it wasn’t within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.
Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.
There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it…
I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of “this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that’s great,” which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.
If there’s something I’ve learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it’s that they can’t be reasoned with. It’s like a cult where people are brainwashed.
I’ve also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there’s no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it’s most likely a bad-faith ploy but I’ll still take the gamble even though I’ve never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.
I don’t like eating any kind of shit
This is some terrific no context life advice.
I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users’ mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.
I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover – the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.
I think the Digg v4 moment will be when/if Reddit bans porn. And if they’re gunning for an IPO, they’re going to do just that.
I miss pre-G4 TechTV so much
Thanks for the fond memory of TechTV. I also listened the heck out of the SecurityNow podcast.
Call for Help and The Screen Savers! Take me back 🥹
Those shows literally drove me to a career in software development.
I’ll never forget Leo telling a young kid about my age about a new programming language called Python. I like to think he shaped a fair number of future careers with that one call
undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this
Sure it will survive. And it’s certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn’t fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won’t know until long after the fact.
Even as a reddit addict I didn’t know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn’t even a mobile app user.
I don’t know if it will ever fall or fail, but I think the days of reddit being a place for the future of the internet to happen is over. People just plain don’t trust the site anymore.
Like why build fun tools for it? Why help moderate a community? Why do anything on reddit if the post quality is insanely low, bots are everywhere, and trolls have taken over.
Companies do this a lot. They sacrifice good will and community for money because it can’t easily be put down on a profit graph. So reddit seems fine to burn most of their genuine community to make a profit. And that’s fine, they’ll go elsewhere.
My hope is that somewhere like lemmy can stop the need to keep changing platforms.
If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we’ll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch. Long term that might still mean a transition.
Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn’t around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn’t know this stuff.
By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I’ve heard that before but I obviously had no problems.
It’s not intuitive to find communities on other servers. You have to be adamant that one exists it order to get it to come up in search after multiple attempts. Communities I’ve created on midwest.social still aren’t showing up in the search on lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz and I would rather people find my community than create a new one by the same name on their server.
In its current state, and if it stays in this state, this is why it will not replace Reddit. It’s not just unintuitive, it’s about as hard as you can make it without purposefully making it hard. You can blindly grope in the dark slapping r/ in front of a topic. Here it’s a totally different story. And splintering the discussion does not a (viable) Reddit competitor make. If a first time user is expecting Reddit communities and gets the sub 1000 community counts Lemmy currently has they’re gonna drop it like a lead balloon.
That’s all okay with me because at the end of the day I personally don’t care. For me I’m happy with what community there is. What itches I have that Lemmy doesn’t scratch that Reddit did are replaceable with other content from other sites.
topic aggregation and finding communities faster is being worked on, as well as improvements to the cross-instance synchronization.
If there are multiple communities with the same name you should eventually be able to aggregate them together into one feed.
This influx of users will give the system a real test, as many users are lumping into a handful of large servers, rather than spreading out as there is no good way to find a local server with free capacity and a low ping.
Oh yeah. If nobody on your instance is already subscribed, that’s true.
Off-topic, but I’m glad you’re a Midwest llama who eats casseroles instead of hot dish!
I think it’s down to the communities page more than anything else. Don’t know if it’s a bug with Beehaw specifically or Lemmy in general not having the feature, but you can’t sort/filter the list of communities by number of subscribers or by instance.
Still a tonne better than Mastodon… My biggest complaint about Mastodon and the reason I barely use it is that if you look at all posts outside of your instance, you get riddled with bot spam. All I saw in the ‘All’ feed outside of my local instance were posts from a hentai reposting bot that regurgitated posts from various imageboards and anime porn subreddits. Some of the content it posted was problematic to say the least.
undefined> lemmyNSFW.com
My use case for Mastodon is quite different than yours. I only look at what I have subscribed to. It was the same way I used twitter. And in this case Mastodon works fine for me and it doesn’t even matter what instance I signed up on.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before…
It was getting really bad.
Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.
I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit
Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.
Why?
-
It directly falls afoul of Reddit’s rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.
-
There’s an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with simp culture, or the notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.
-
In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them…
-
It’s ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you’d otherwise have feel genuine, that’s if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.
-
More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn’t agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so put an Automoderator filter so I’m effectively shadowbanned from using words like “OnlyFans” or “e-girl.”
-
All those OnlyFans links and not a single photo of a fan!
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist the dad joke.)
There’s already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about “What if this fails? What next?”
I don’t think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven’t figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn’t cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.
OTOH, I do like Lemmy.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen power mods collectively band together to form their own Reddit clone.
It’s so frustrating. I deleted Apollo and don’t see myself downloading the garbage reddit app, so I really hope a new website can come out on top. I wish one of this community driven platforms followed suit of Wikipedia and allowed donations to pay for site costs but didn’t try to become profitable. These kind of community-run (aka free labor) pillars on the internet are bigger than just a dumb tech company
Fwiw, Tildes is non-profit and accepts donations. However they are gated by requiring an invite and are intentionally not growing quickly
"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "
lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you’re right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it’s going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be “the front page of the internet” anymore.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Reddit has a worse power-user problem than Digg. I mean at the very least Digg didn’t give its most active users the power to remove other people’s content. The difference is that Reddit already existed as a better alternative to Digg until it imploded, whereas until the recent API changes and blackout happened, there was no viable alternative to Reddit and a lack of people seeking an alternative.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Time will tell. My concern about Lemmy is that it’s non-profit and server hosting costs are great. It’s all well and good until you see some of the smaller instances shut down because they cannot afford to host.
I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.
I’m totally not going through withdrawal.
Uh huh.
Deleted my account and took Apollo off my phone. My hands feel… itchy.
I’m doing the same on 6/30. I had to move Apollo off my front page to stop me from reflexively opening it every ten minutes.
I deleted RiF in the line for the bagel shop this morning. I feel exactly the same way.
Save and import:
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.011Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Reddit to Beehaw", "exampleUrl": "https://reddit.com", "exampleResult": "https://beehaw.org", "error": null, "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)?reddit.com(.*)", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Reddit to Beehaw", "redirectUrl": "https://beehaw.org", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] } ] }Is there a way for the extension to replace only the domain? for example, https://lemmy.ml/c/memes will become https://sopuli.xyz/c/memes ?
Yes, that can be done like so:
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-06-01T00:00:00.011Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "LemmyML to Sopuli", "exampleUrl": "https://lemmy.ml/c/memes ", "exampleResult": "https://sopuli.xyz/c/memes ", "error": null, "includePattern": "^(https?://)([a-z0-9-]*\\.)?lemmy.ml/(.*)", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "", "redirectUrl": "https://sopuli.xyz/$3", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] } ] }Copy that to a file, save it and then import into Redirector.
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
Praise porn-Jesus, horny be his name.
NSFW always seems to push technology forward, be it video streaming, or VR, or now federated link aggreagators.
Niche communities reign for now! I’ll wait to create an alt account until the influx dies down, but this is, uh … handy to know.
We’re trying to expand it to cover more topics currently
Are we blocked from seeing NSFW communities on Beehaw? (Not an issue, I would create an alt for that anyway. Just curious)
I have an account on lemmy.world and can see more NSFW communities while browsing all communities. IDK if that’s just a bi-product of them being more active or something beehaw does on their end and it just hasn’t caught up with the influx yet, but either way it’s fine with me. Beehaw ain’t about porn, I’m perfectly fine having a separate account somewhere that is more about it.
Check your profile settings. There’s a nsfw setting in there that might be blocking you
I believe (could be wrong) that they just are against hosting NSFW communities on beehaw. You should still be able to view things from other instances if NSFW is enabled in your account settings.
I think so. I am not sure but I remember reading somewhere that beehaw blocked nsfw. There is a stickied SFW post on lemmyNSFW that is for linking NSFW communities to those who wouldn’t be able to see them.
I can see it on mobile with jerboa so I don’t think so
Caught myself googling “something something Reddit” today and realized this is gonna be harder than I thought. Really liking it here though and hopefully this gets the user base up to a point I can start googling “something something beehaw”
I’ve had multiple times when I launched Boost (my third party app of choice - at least until it’s forced to shut down) out of force of habit.
Thankfully, I planned for this eventuality. I installed a “focus” app and set it to block Boost and the Reddit app for 2 days. (I’ve since also moved the apps away from their usual spot on my phone to prevent launches.)
Ask chatgpt what Reddit things about something something. It has probably scraped everything on Reddit anyway.
Yeah this is the main reason I won’t be giving up reddit 100% once the 3rd party apps go down. I definitely won’t be doom scrolling on my phone like I used to, but I 100% will still use reddit on my desktop as a research tool. There’s just nothing else like it for the amount of quality niche information atm.
If I’m forced to the official Reddit app, I’ll go from following 30+ subreddits to only 5 or 6. And even those, I’ll likely comment less on.
There are communities like /r/LEGO that I don’t know of a replacement for. (Maybe there could be a thread where people post the Reddit communities that they miss and people reply with alternatives. Someone could even keep a list to make it easy to search.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried the official app, but that strategy wouldn’t even help most likely. Every 3-5 posts that you see from your subscribed subs, they throw in a “recommended for you” nonsense post to try and drive your engagement. It’s infuriating
Made one for yah
Hero
Same, I’ve got an ad blocker and I won’t be using it for content. But reddit still has an amazing repertoire of knowledge.
I wonder how long that’s going to hold. If they’re blocking google api to read for their AI, they also have to block google search (or else google not being stupid will just feed the seach readout into their AI).
As the other commenter said, this is also why I won’t give up reddit 100%
Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.
It’ll be interesting to see if/how we’ll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It’s gon’ get old fast to type
[x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it’d be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something likesite:!social.lemmy.What’s interesting is that a bunch of subreddits have disappeared from my multis in Apollo, perhaps because they were dark for over a day? Not sure.
Just woke up and first thing I do was open Apollo (lol) and this is what I noticed.
Apollo shutting down completely is going to disrupt my life like crazy!
deleted by creator
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on false information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, it might be the case that these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Can someone confirm this perhaps?
However if the above is true, I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
