hey folks, new megathread is thataway since this one has like 500 comments already and news is quickly cycling out of date. we’ll lock this one down shortly. thanks!
The Verge has been pretty awesome about covering the ongoing Reddit implosion. Love to see these 1-on-1 interviews, too. It shows a certain level of journalistic rigor beyond the usual “people are mad, here’s why” articles that we’ve seen getting churned out.
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.
It felt like every other comment on popular subs (like r/AmITheAsshole) was a bot calling out another bot for having scraped and stolen a comment from someone farther down the comment chain. It makes me think that a significant portion of the traffic being seen still active on Reddit is just bots talking to each other. That, and porn subs, probably.
Yeah the problem with GPT is that is soo convincing that’s not easy to spot, unless you try to force it to say something unethical then it tells it can’t :D
It was more prevalent in cryptocurrency subs earlier on I think, but all the accounts shared a similar format for usernames and their replies would always just restate what the comment they’re replying to said, just worded slightly different. Has been going on for a long while before the OpenGPT/ChatGPT stuff blew up near the end of 2022.
A few small pockets of civility survived here and there, but everything else has drowned in bots, ads, and trolls for so long that it’s shocking to come here and be able to click on a random post and see civil discussion as the default. That tone needs to be set and maintained. Basic decency and civility are really not that hard, even when people disagree. We lost that somewhere along the way.
Frankly, I think it’s entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it’ll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
Yeah, but i feel there’s a lot to be done in the base lemmy protocol too - such as migrating your account to another server - should the current one fall etc etc
Of course mastodon is the most mature in this regard, I hope lemmy does too
Can you though? There have to be communities to join, and they are what get polluted. As I understand it, switching instances won’t help.
Someone then has to police a community if you want to “get rid of the riff-raff” and they will follow who-knows-what criteria for their policing. Just look at all the right-wing subreddits for an example of how policing doesn’t necessarily raise the quality of discussion.
Well, it’s bound to happen to some extent (e.g.: instances blocking lemmygrad), but you have a lot of power to mitigate this effect as an individual user. By default, nothing’s blocked, so it’s on you as a user if you choose to “live” somewhere that’s interested in proscribing undesirables.
It’s not a perfect solution. Perhaps leadership changes (or you change) and suddenly your interests are no longer aligned. Nobody wants to get stranded! Eventually maybe user migrations will be a thing, but for now we’ll just have to do our best to choose our home-bases wisely based on our own ideological and practical needs (SDF represent!)
I already found my way, commented and subscribed to other instances from beehaw and I wasn’t even aware I did it at first, tbh. I don’t know if they all connverse seamlessly like that, but hopefully we will be able to keep it nice and civil.
I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.
Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while
People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.
Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.
It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.
But I think a piece of this that’s important to remember is the messed up incentives that most platforms have had beginning around the time they took on serious funds from big investors.
From the moment you bring in serious investment dollars from Silicon Valley funds and SV wannabes, your incentive is no longer to build something that seriously delights users just for the sake of delighting users, everything is in service to shareholder value.
Reddit is perhaps the most classic example of our time of a truly wonderful platform being destroyed by shareholder value coming first.
I think the major turning point was around 2016. That’s the first time I began to feel like my guard needed to be up with every single comment from there on.
Thankfully I had the foresight to install Expanse a few months ago and it has been dutifully downloading my data all this time and puts it in a nice searchable GUI. Might be quicker than waiting for the download LOL
You should be able to… you’ll need to install GIT and then install Docker. Once you’ve done that you should be able to spin it up using the instructions.
Alternatively, since it runs as a “web app” on port 1301, you could easily spin it up on your server Linux PC as well under Docker, then just browse to that server on port 1301, authenticate and you should be all good. There’s then an option to download all your data as a JSON :)
A few months ago I got my data in less than an hour. Now though… I requested two days ago and still haven’t gotten it lol. They’ve gotta be massively overloaded
Glad to see them saying as “thousands.” Yesterday I saw a headline (can’t remember where) that claimed “hundreds” which felt disingenuous, regardless of how you feel about the protest.
It’s possible the headline was already old, everything happened quite quickly, better to check the time the article was written, or if you’re doing a search, reduce results to last 24 hours (last hour even).
I read somewhere on one of these federated sites (I’d have to dig through my history to find it) that it’s essentially the spaghetti code that is Reddit. This person, who claimed to have worked at Reddit years ago, said that the aggregation engine for things like r/all is very inefficient and when thousands of subreddits went dark it wouldn’t be able to parse (or something like that).
I’ve heard something similar. What I heard specifically was that the front page algorithm had to keep digging deeper and deeper to populate desired content; that this somehow tanked the site.
(I’m not a dev or programmer, apologies if my Info isn’t exact)
My guess is that it didn’t. I wonder if all of the subreddits going dark left the front page and r/all open to god knows what from more unsavory subs, and when Reddit realized that it was happening, pulled the plug until they were able to filter out anything less-than-corporate-allowable on the front page.
The “edit comment” feature, whether paired with deletion or used by itself, does not work due to hitting rate limits. The developer is aware, but don’t have capacity to fix it atm.
Some forks fix it. I didn’t have the patience to figure out which ones did, which ones worked, or how do use their modified versions, so I made my own fork including a working “release” of sorts. It it rate limited to wait 5 seconds between each edit:
I did not try, but it’s proooobably hitting a serverside rate limit. If you have the option to inspect the network responses, they may have some information.
New myself, but you seem to be doing it right.
However, the link only shows the first paragraph unless you have an account, at least for Firefox on Android.
It’s nice that you shared this info, but could you try and stay away from money locked websites?
A (granted European) student doesn’t have money. Or not enough anyways xD
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 misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
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.
However 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.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
Reddit is the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” and some of the subreddits that are “firmly in control” by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.
People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.
Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will “always come back” so long as those communities remain intact.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments are mind-boggling
Yep, just look at what’s happening on lemmynsfw.com… number of communities is blowing up.
I can unserstand commenting, cuz… maybe it makes you hard and you just wanna like let that gal/guy know that, in the miniscule chance he/she reads that comment, doesn’t have an OF and is actually trying to hook up… and is the original content creator… hope never dies.
Remember that quote from Dumb and Dumer “so you’re telling me there’s a chance 😏”… it’s like that.
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
Yeah, this too. The same image/gif/vid get’s reposted on several different subs. Sometimes with the same title, sometimes with a different title, but it is the same content. They don’t wanna crosspost cuz it reveals that they post the same image to several subs, which decreases their chance of actually getting some subscribers.
Concerning the karma farmers and other spam bots: A lot of active redditors who reported them as soon as they cropped up aren’t on the platform at the moment. And some people might make use of ‘the troubles’ to set up new bots or for promotion. The last I’ve seen of those (before blackout) were people gifting karma/coordinate upvotes via subs somehow affiliated with Temu (some newish cheap shopping platform).
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about I could perform my own research into the subject.
Look at the posts from users that post there, mostly OF promotions, you’ll see like 20, 30 posts back to back in 10, 20 minute span.
OF is a huge business now, litelarly get sugar daddies from OF subscribers, not to mention the subscribers themselves, they bring a revenue as well. Most of them just want a quick buck, don’t wanna work, live with their parents at 25+ years… bsiaclly, just lazy AF individuals that make pocket money from that so they at least don’t bother their parents when they hang out with friends. a large portion even show their faces now, don’t even care, their friends and family know, it doesn’t seem to bother them.
I can share some of those subs if you’d like, got an account for that on reddit 😁.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
As far as i understand it’s not 90% of all Subs but 90% of all the Subs who announced to participate in the Blackdown. Many Subs, especially ones led by Reddit employees but also many NSFW subs are still public
I got the 90% from here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ - So this site is only listing the subreddits which declared their participation? In that case, I misunderstood the purpose of this site. I thought that this is a mostly complete subreddit list (granted, I have no idea how many subreddits exists on reddit… I’m not sure you can even get a list or scrape them effectively)
In march 2023 there were 3,125,000 subreddits. So the total % of subreddits going dark is very low. However I assume a lot of subreddits are very small. It would be interesting to see how many of the top 1,000 or 10,000 subreddits are in private mode right now.
source for total amount of subreddits: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Thanks for the info and source. I should have figured. I edited my comment to reflect this, I think we see the long tail effect in action, and just goes to show that every subreddit and community should participate in the protest, no matter how small.
I’ve been watching the forked version, and the total number of subreddits and darksubs have been increasing. My first thought was that there were a heap on new subs being created. I’m now not so sure what I’m looking at.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
I just joined kbin and have no idea what i’m doing lol. ended up making this account on fedia and another on kbin.social since they can’t seem to see the same posts. not sure what to do long term…
Reddit kinda feels like a sinking ship right now. I wonder how many subreddits will go public again?
Both sites will give the same UI. Though the main kbin site is having some difficulties federating properly atm. hence why I’m on fedia right now. You just sign up with a username/password/email like normal and then you’re on.
Normally, yes! You’d be able to see threads across the Fediverse no matter where you signed up.
If you think of the Fediverse like a shopping mall, think of kbin and lemmy as two different bus companies that go to that same mall. It doesn’t matter what bus you take, both take you to the same place where you can browse the same stores. Maybe you like the seats in the lemmy bus better than the kbin bus so you prefer to use that one. That’s like if someone prefers the interface of lemmy more than kbin. While both go to the same places and see the same things, you might prefer the look and layout of one over the other so you use your favorite primarily.
However, keep in mind that kbin.social has had a massive amount of people sign up in the past few days, and as such it could not handle the large amount of new activity. They are working on a fix for this, but for now kbin.social has been cutoff from the Fediverse while it updates to handle the new load. Think of it like the kbin.social bus is not currently going to the mall – you can get on, see and talk to the people on that bus, but until maintenance is done it won’t actually go to the shopping mall where you can interact with everything across the Fediverse.
There is more to it but that’s a simplified gist of it!
kbin.social and fedia.io are two separate websites. They are called “instances”. Collectively, these sorts of sites are referred to as the “fediverse”.
Posts on one “fediverse” site can be see on another “fediverse” site. For instance, right now you’re apparently posting from beehaw.org, which isn’t a kbin instance but instead appears to be a lemmy instance.
I’m currently using fedia.io, which is a kbin instance.
The group we’re in right now is technology@beehaw.org, which is hosted on the beehaw.org website/instance, which is the site you’re using right now. But I can see and interact, since we’re together on the “fediverse”.
If you signed up for kbin, you have a kbin username as well, but it’s separate from your beehaw account. For example, I’m Otome-Chan@kbin.social but also April@fedia.io, I don’t have a beehaw account so any posts I make on beehaw groups will have to be from either my kbin account or my fedia account. whereas you can respond with your beehaw account as you’ve done here :)
So yes, it’s the same “fediverse” between kbin, fedia, and beehaw. Though notably kbin.social is having some issues with federation right now due to lots of people joining it.
The instances all store separate versions of the same data. However, federation only starts, when your instance gets a reference to the community. So say you are on a different instance. Initially, you won’t see your favourite communities, so you’ll have to start searching for them and linking them up in your instance. Once that happens, your instance will start receiving the posts, with the caveat, that old posts and comments will not be visible.
I think kbin.social is also struggling with federation as a whole right now. But as for the “starts only when youre instance get a reference to the community” what all counts for that? someone searching in the search bar? someone posting cross-instance?
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Honestly the subredditd for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
hey folks, new megathread is thataway since this one has like 500 comments already and news is quickly cycling out of date. we’ll lock this one down shortly. thanks!
The Verge has been pretty awesome about covering the ongoing Reddit implosion. Love to see these 1-on-1 interviews, too. It shows a certain level of journalistic rigor beyond the usual “people are mad, here’s why” articles that we’ve seen getting churned out.
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.
How Reddit set itself up for a fall (The Verge)
Great article thank you for the read.
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.
It’s been so enjoyable!
It’s so nice to not see GPT-3 bots replying to literally everything, like they have been for like 2 years now on Reddit.
It felt like every other comment on popular subs (like r/AmITheAsshole) was a bot calling out another bot for having scraped and stolen a comment from someone farther down the comment chain. It makes me think that a significant portion of the traffic being seen still active on Reddit is just bots talking to each other. That, and porn subs, probably.
That was happening? Well it explains a lot of recent reddit then, it really felt people had really weird reading comprehension.
This is interesting. I had no idea this was a thing!
Yeah the problem with GPT is that is soo convincing that’s not easy to spot, unless you try to force it to say something unethical then it tells it can’t :D
It was more prevalent in cryptocurrency subs earlier on I think, but all the accounts shared a similar format for usernames and their replies would always just restate what the comment they’re replying to said, just worded slightly different. Has been going on for a long while before the OpenGPT/ChatGPT stuff blew up near the end of 2022.
A few small pockets of civility survived here and there, but everything else has drowned in bots, ads, and trolls for so long that it’s shocking to come here and be able to click on a random post and see civil discussion as the default. That tone needs to be set and maintained. Basic decency and civility are really not that hard, even when people disagree. We lost that somewhere along the way.
Frankly, I think it’s entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it’ll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
It makes me giddy to think of how fast people are working on readers/apps for Lemmy that will make all of this way easier for more people to adopt.
Yeah, but i feel there’s a lot to be done in the base lemmy protocol too - such as migrating your account to another server - should the current one fall etc etc
Of course mastodon is the most mature in this regard, I hope lemmy does too
Couldn’t agree more, there’s definitely a bit of a barrier that potentially the average joe wouldn’t bother with.
But since we can make our own instances easily, we can get rid of the rif raf more easily than on reddit
Can you though? There have to be communities to join, and they are what get polluted. As I understand it, switching instances won’t help.
Someone then has to police a community if you want to “get rid of the riff-raff” and they will follow who-knows-what criteria for their policing. Just look at all the right-wing subreddits for an example of how policing doesn’t necessarily raise the quality of discussion.
I really hope this doesn’t lead to people forming their own echo chambers and instances become tribes who hate on each other
Well, it’s bound to happen to some extent (e.g.: instances blocking lemmygrad), but you have a lot of power to mitigate this effect as an individual user. By default, nothing’s blocked, so it’s on you as a user if you choose to “live” somewhere that’s interested in proscribing undesirables.
It’s not a perfect solution. Perhaps leadership changes (or you change) and suddenly your interests are no longer aligned. Nobody wants to get stranded! Eventually maybe user migrations will be a thing, but for now we’ll just have to do our best to choose our home-bases wisely based on our own ideological and practical needs (SDF represent!)
I already found my way, commented and subscribed to other instances from beehaw and I wasn’t even aware I did it at first, tbh. I don’t know if they all connverse seamlessly like that, but hopefully we will be able to keep it nice and civil.
I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.
Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while
People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.
Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.
It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.
But I think a piece of this that’s important to remember is the messed up incentives that most platforms have had beginning around the time they took on serious funds from big investors.
From the moment you bring in serious investment dollars from Silicon Valley funds and SV wannabes, your incentive is no longer to build something that seriously delights users just for the sake of delighting users, everything is in service to shareholder value.
Reddit is perhaps the most classic example of our time of a truly wonderful platform being destroyed by shareholder value coming first.
I think the instance thing makes botting a bit easier to avoid if they make them in a new instance. Idk
It really is a breath of fresh air, and has highlighted for me how dumb and angry so much of Reddit has become.
I think the major turning point was around 2016. That’s the first time I began to feel like my guard needed to be up with every single comment from there on.
Hmmm, I wonder what major event occurred in 2016… Lol
Thankfully I had the foresight to install Expanse a few months ago and it has been dutifully downloading my data all this time and puts it in a nice searchable GUI. Might be quicker than waiting for the download LOL
Is that available for windows? I only have a server linux pc
You should be able to… you’ll need to install GIT and then install Docker. Once you’ve done that you should be able to spin it up using the instructions.
Alternatively, since it runs as a “web app” on port 1301, you could easily spin it up on your server Linux PC as well under Docker, then just browse to that server on port 1301, authenticate and you should be all good. There’s then an option to download all your data as a JSON :)
How long were you waiting for your request to be processed?
A few months ago I got my data in less than an hour. Now though… I requested two days ago and still haven’t gotten it lol. They’ve gotta be massively overloaded
Think just a couple days. They’re probably being bombarded with requests, so yours might take longer, but can’t say for sure.
Why are more people requesting their data now?
still waiting for mine! then it’s delete content, delete account
CNN Business: Thousands of Reddit communities go dark to protest company’s controversial new policy
Glad to see them saying as “thousands.” Yesterday I saw a headline (can’t remember where) that claimed “hundreds” which felt disingenuous, regardless of how you feel about the protest.
It’s possible the headline was already old, everything happened quite quickly, better to check the time the article was written, or if you’re doing a search, reduce results to last 24 hours (last hour even).
Trace it to the root of the problem, if the subreddits going dark took the servers down, then what made all the subreddits go dark 🤔
I read somewhere on one of these federated sites (I’d have to dig through my history to find it) that it’s essentially the spaghetti code that is Reddit. This person, who claimed to have worked at Reddit years ago, said that the aggregation engine for things like r/all is very inefficient and when thousands of subreddits went dark it wouldn’t be able to parse (or something like that).
I’ve heard something similar. What I heard specifically was that the front page algorithm had to keep digging deeper and deeper to populate desired content; that this somehow tanked the site.
(I’m not a dev or programmer, apologies if my Info isn’t exact)
My guess is that it didn’t. I wonder if all of the subreddits going dark left the front page and r/all open to god knows what from more unsavory subs, and when Reddit realized that it was happening, pulled the plug until they were able to filter out anything less-than-corporate-allowable on the front page.
Just an ‘Oh crap investors can see r/sinkpissers shutitdownshutitdown’
Childish smirk of the day…
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
So is r/sinkpissers.
😂
PSA: Reddit Power Delete Suite
The “edit comment” feature, whether paired with deletion or used by itself, does not work due to hitting rate limits. The developer is aware, but don’t have capacity to fix it atm.
Some forks fix it. I didn’t have the patience to figure out which ones did, which ones worked, or how do use their modified versions, so I made my own fork including a working “release” of sorts. It it rate limited to wait 5 seconds between each edit:
https://codepen.io/Deestan/full/gOQagRO/#
I tried to use PDS to do a backup and it is only downloading the last 36 comments. I don’t suppose you have any ideas why ?
I did not try, but it’s proooobably hitting a serverside rate limit. If you have the option to inspect the network responses, they may have some information.
Thanks, I’ll try and work it out.
Reddit revolt puts CEO Steve Huffman in a tough position (Fortune magazine article)
EDIT: not used to posting to megathreads, am I doing this right?
Some would say Redditors have always been revolting!
New myself, but you seem to be doing it right.
However, the link only shows the first paragraph unless you have an account, at least for Firefox on Android.
I googled paywall blockers, and this one is working for me.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2023%2F06%2F12%2Freddit-revolt-puts-ceo-steve-huffman-in-a-tough-position%2F
Appreciate the working link!
Weird, there’s no paywall on my end, using kiwi browser on mobile
No paywall here, Firefox on desktop + NoScript and origin. Probably NoScript blocking the paywall.
It’s nice that you shared this info, but could you try and stay away from money locked websites? A (granted European) student doesn’t have money. Or not enough anyways xD
Generally 12ft.io or archive.ph will sort out a paywall, also there are a number of plugins which can unlock them
Or at least post the important text here
https://archive.is/NI1xW
Amen.
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 misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
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, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However 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.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
Reddit is the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” and some of the subreddits that are “firmly in control” by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.
People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.
Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will “always come back” so long as those communities remain intact.
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion suns. You have no idea how many posts they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments are mind-boggling
Yep, just look at what’s happening on lemmynsfw.com… number of communities is blowing up.
I can unserstand commenting, cuz… maybe it makes you hard and you just wanna like let that gal/guy know that, in the miniscule chance he/she reads that comment, doesn’t have an OF and is actually trying to hook up… and is the original content creator… hope never dies.
Remember that quote from Dumb and Dumer “so you’re telling me there’s a chance 😏”… it’s like that.
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
Yeah, this too. The same image/gif/vid get’s reposted on several different subs. Sometimes with the same title, sometimes with a different title, but it is the same content. They don’t wanna crosspost cuz it reveals that they post the same image to several subs, which decreases their chance of actually getting some subscribers.
Concerning the karma farmers and other spam bots: A lot of active redditors who reported them as soon as they cropped up aren’t on the platform at the moment. And some people might make use of ‘the troubles’ to set up new bots or for promotion. The last I’ve seen of those (before blackout) were people gifting karma/coordinate upvotes via subs somehow affiliated with Temu (some newish cheap shopping platform).
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about I could perform my own research into the subject.
Look at the posts from users that post there, mostly OF promotions, you’ll see like 20, 30 posts back to back in 10, 20 minute span.
OF is a huge business now, litelarly get sugar daddies from OF subscribers, not to mention the subscribers themselves, they bring a revenue as well. Most of them just want a quick buck, don’t wanna work, live with their parents at 25+ years… bsiaclly, just lazy AF individuals that make pocket money from that so they at least don’t bother their parents when they hang out with friends. a large portion even show their faces now, don’t even care, their friends and family know, it doesn’t seem to bother them.
I can share some of those subs if you’d like, got an account for that on reddit 😁.
Bots usually post to their own user page/subreddit to my knowledge.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
As far as i understand it’s not 90% of all Subs but 90% of all the Subs who announced to participate in the Blackdown. Many Subs, especially ones led by Reddit employees but also many NSFW subs are still public
I got the 90% from here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ - So this site is only listing the subreddits which declared their participation? In that case, I misunderstood the purpose of this site. I thought that this is a mostly complete subreddit list (granted, I have no idea how many subreddits exists on reddit… I’m not sure you can even get a list or scrape them effectively)
In march 2023 there were 3,125,000 subreddits. So the total % of subreddits going dark is very low. However I assume a lot of subreddits are very small. It would be interesting to see how many of the top 1,000 or 10,000 subreddits are in private mode right now. source for total amount of subreddits: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Thanks for the info and source. I should have figured. I edited my comment to reflect this, I think we see the long tail effect in action, and just goes to show that every subreddit and community should participate in the protest, no matter how small.
You can find the top 50 largest subreddits by amount of subscribers here: https://subredditstats.com/list/most-subscribers
Compare it to the list of https://reddark.untone.uk/ and you can see that not all the largest subreddits are listed, for example r/AskReddit.
It seems the subs that went private don’t show up on the stats anymore. /r/funny has more subscribers than /r/AskReddit, for example
I’ve been watching the forked version, and the total number of subreddits and darksubs have been increasing. My first thought was that there were a heap on new subs being created. I’m now not so sure what I’m looking at.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
The rust subreddit is apparently considering moving to Lemmy:
https://lemmy.ml/post/1205713
I just joined kbin and have no idea what i’m doing lol. ended up making this account on fedia and another on kbin.social since they can’t seem to see the same posts. not sure what to do long term…
Reddit kinda feels like a sinking ship right now. I wonder how many subreddits will go public again?
I have no idea how to join kbin. This is all too confusing
I know, you’re just used to the centralized approach. Give it a few days, things will start sinking in.
You just make an account like on a normal website.
The main kbin site is: https://kbin.social/
While I’m posting from an alt-instance right now: https://fedia.io/
Both sites will give the same UI. Though the main kbin site is having some difficulties federating properly atm. hence why I’m on fedia right now. You just sign up with a username/password/email like normal and then you’re on.
Okay so like is this website now on the same fediverse as kbin? Because I have the same username on both now
Normally, yes! You’d be able to see threads across the Fediverse no matter where you signed up.
If you think of the Fediverse like a shopping mall, think of kbin and lemmy as two different bus companies that go to that same mall. It doesn’t matter what bus you take, both take you to the same place where you can browse the same stores. Maybe you like the seats in the lemmy bus better than the kbin bus so you prefer to use that one. That’s like if someone prefers the interface of lemmy more than kbin. While both go to the same places and see the same things, you might prefer the look and layout of one over the other so you use your favorite primarily.
However, keep in mind that kbin.social has had a massive amount of people sign up in the past few days, and as such it could not handle the large amount of new activity. They are working on a fix for this, but for now kbin.social has been cutoff from the Fediverse while it updates to handle the new load. Think of it like the kbin.social bus is not currently going to the mall – you can get on, see and talk to the people on that bus, but until maintenance is done it won’t actually go to the shopping mall where you can interact with everything across the Fediverse.
There is more to it but that’s a simplified gist of it!
kbin.social and fedia.io are two separate websites. They are called “instances”. Collectively, these sorts of sites are referred to as the “fediverse”.
Posts on one “fediverse” site can be see on another “fediverse” site. For instance, right now you’re apparently posting from beehaw.org, which isn’t a kbin instance but instead appears to be a lemmy instance.
I’m currently using fedia.io, which is a kbin instance.
The group we’re in right now is
technology@beehaw.org, which is hosted on the beehaw.org website/instance, which is the site you’re using right now. But I can see and interact, since we’re together on the “fediverse”.If you signed up for kbin, you have a kbin username as well, but it’s separate from your beehaw account. For example, I’m Otome-Chan@kbin.social but also April@fedia.io, I don’t have a beehaw account so any posts I make on beehaw groups will have to be from either my kbin account or my fedia account. whereas you can respond with your beehaw account as you’ve done here :)
So yes, it’s the same “fediverse” between kbin, fedia, and beehaw. Though notably kbin.social is having some issues with federation right now due to lots of people joining it.
Kbin.social is going through some tough times handling the load right now, so federating a bit hard due to the cloud flare DDOS protection.
It should smooth out, then you’ll be able to see the same posts
deleted by creator
Hmm, note to BeeHaw or maybe it’s just me but it’s very easy to fumble the delete button on mobile web.
The instances all store separate versions of the same data. However, federation only starts, when your instance gets a reference to the community. So say you are on a different instance. Initially, you won’t see your favourite communities, so you’ll have to start searching for them and linking them up in your instance. Once that happens, your instance will start receiving the posts, with the caveat, that old posts and comments will not be visible.
Can you please explain how I can link them up?
I think kbin.social is also struggling with federation as a whole right now. But as for the “starts only when youre instance get a reference to the community” what all counts for that? someone searching in the search bar? someone posting cross-instance?
Someone from your instance subscribing to a community on that instance (server).
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Honestly the subredditd for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there