Hello there everyone!

I am one of people who decided to migrate from Reddit, but I wasn’t a content creator or mod, just an average user who read some posts, liked one here and there, very rarely commented anything. But as someone with some IT knowledge that also read many posts regarding protest, I dropped the site like a hot potato once it started to show my support for mods.

The kbin experience for now is fine, obviously the site needs to get accustomed to recent user influx one step at a time. I wish the devs the best! Thank for your hard work <3

But the only issue I have is that not every community I have followed transfered here or not every sub found its magazine substitute. While some of them are already growing or I can deal without them, there’re few niche ones that still hold valuable information. I don’t want to help create an illusion that users don’t care at all, but there were times when I found solutions for work related problems there or resources and answers for questions I couldn’t find elsewhere. Not to mention the niche communities. Thus forcing me to go there lurking in these cases.

And here’s my question - how do you feel about it, mods and ex-redditers? In a few months that probably won’t be an issue, but I’m now troubled with that as I want to make moraly right decision.

  • reflex@kbin.social
    65·
    1 year ago

    Why not? Consume without contributing.

    Run ad blockers.

    Edit: Here’s the GOAT—https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
    Not well-versed with mobile solutions. Maybe use something like Brave with built-in blockers. Or run reddit through something like Hermit App which also has blockers.

    • DeGandalf@kbin.social
      37·
      1 year ago

      imho the important thing is to not give Reddit any money, so I’ll also continue using it, but only with an adblocker

      • ykonstant@kbin.social
        22·
        1 year ago

        By far the most precious resource Reddit gets from you is your insight; Reddit needs posts, especially posts with good insights on specific topics. This is the treasure trove they are sitting on and the value proposition for shareholders: a gigantic collection of long-form discussions on all kinds of niche topics that can be used for targeted and generic AI training.

        So by continuing to use reddit, you are providing them with the most precious resource they seek anyway. This is why I am anxious to see a genuine alternative to reddit.

        • DeGandalf@kbin.social
          4·
          1 year ago

          Yes, I get what you mean. I’ll stop posting content and comments, but I’ll keep looking at posts of interesting communities. Since I have quite a few posts made there so far, I’m also considering deleting them, but I’m not sure about that yet.

      • IncognitoErgoSum@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think there’s anything wrong with continuing to use reddit if you want to (I am, for now), but just be aware that part of the reason they want to block free API access is likely so they can sell all of the content they’ve collected for use in training large language models. If you post there, you’re contributing.

      • Transient Punk
        1·
        1 year ago

        Your eyes seeing ads is how they make money. Content creation and interaction are important, but only insofar as it brings additional users in to see more ads. Bumping unique visitors makes the ad space they sell more valuable. Just stay away.

    • Zana@kbin.social
      6·
      1 year ago

      I use AdNauseum which not only blocks ads but clicks every single one in the background completely messing up their data and making it useless. It runs on top of uBlock.

    • lolpostslol@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Well they still get view counts / active-user counts. Not being logged in (or not having an account) helps.

    • pizza_rolls@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      ReVanced is working on patches for several third party reddit clients to allow you to use your own API key to get around the API limits. There is currently one for Sync, hoping they come out for one for RIF.

      I will be deleting my content from reddit and only posting content here, but I may continue to lurk if I can waste reddit’s money with my API calls with no ads on a third party app. Their user count is heavily padded with bots and they are excluding bots from the API call changes for that reason. Even if they lose a bunch of active users we will be easily replaced by bots regardless