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…
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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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 lonk 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).
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 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…
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yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
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.
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’s practically the same reason reddit and other online communities were so much better a decade ago - idiots simply couldn’t find their way to them / it was “icky nerd shit”.
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
But since we can make our own instances easily, we can get rid of the rif raf more easily than on reddit
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!)
If Lemmy grows to significant size the politics are going to be crazy, if just as ignorable as the Reddit mod politics. There’s many times more moving parts now, it’s like going from a single city-state to feudalism.
Also, 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.
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 mean, you could have a tightly moderated subreddit over there too.
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.
Couldn’t agree more, there’s definitely a bit of a barrier that potentially the average joe wouldn’t bother with.
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
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.
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!
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.
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’s been so enjoyable!
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.
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.)
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/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.
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 on List mode is closer to RIF than I thought.
It is very pleasant on the eyes and the no BS ui is very appealing.
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.
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
I’ve done the same. I miss RiF but I have to say, jerboa is nicer than expected. The main thing that gets me is that tapping on a comment hides it, I’m used to just selecting it to upvote lol
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before…
"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.
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
You can discover content beyond your instance with apps
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.
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 ?
I changed my RIF link on my home screen to open Jerboa.
I opened Apollo once and got a special splash screen. I moved Apollo off the front page of my phone display.
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
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 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 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 @[email protected] 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.
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.
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion subs. You have no idea how many posts/comments they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling. Trust me, they make up well over 80% of all post/comments on reddit.
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 is mind-boggling
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).
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 off 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.
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 😁.
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.
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 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.
Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that’ll auto-ban accounts that post in “free karma subreddits”—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of
But, a bot that’s aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn’t need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.
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.
