The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
why did it have to be aaron swartz
why couldn’t it have been huffman…
Good people do good things and get punished by bad people.
Bad people do bad things and get rewarded.
oof. Kinda dark and morbid. But I get it.
Conspiracy theory time. Huffman murdered Aaron and made it look like a suicide because he didn’t want Reddit to sell out.
I have an article Aaron wrote about the Freemont GM plant business case that I read every few months to remind me of the point he was making. And every time I read it, I am reminded of the ridiculous sequence of events that took him away. Sometimes, it really does seem like only the good die young.
" A policeman beats up a protestor and we think “what an awful person,” not “what terrible training.”
Yeah… that aged like milk.
Death to reddit!
Well we’re here basically figuring it out. Time to show them they aren’t needed anymore.
reddit is just a frame. it always was and will always be, despite the efforts of a few dumb cunts.
the content is the people. that’s the secret sauce. just provide people with a framework, and they’ll fill the empty space. try to monetize that, and you’re just a dick.
i have faith in defederisation. my autocorrect says that isn’t a word. let’s make it a word.
It’s not defederated it’s federated and decentralized
oops. don’t drink and post, y’all.
The thing is, they COULD’VE monetized it and still kept it alive. What they’re doing instead is killing the golden goose for a quick cash-out.
Edit: I hate your username. A lot of trauma associated with that failed tongue-twister.
I am glad that this happened because Lemmy is very interesting platform.
I’ve barely been back to Reddit recently and with Apollo gone, I’ll only ever duck my head in when I really have to. I find it a lot easier to leave Reddit behind than Facebook. On FB I’m connected to real world relatives and friends who I just would lose contact with otherwise. On Reddit I converse with strangers and that’s easy to replace. Lemmy has already done it. Is there anything unique about the hobby forums on Reddit? No. They can be reassembled or restarted elsewhere. In some ways it’s probably good to dump the old structures and shake things up. Some subs were better managed and some really just coasted on their name.
I totally agree. I’m on Android and never used Apollo, but I’m using the wefwef web app and it’s fantastic. People are saying it feels like Apollo!
wefwef is changing my mind about how good webapps can be. The UI is a copy of Apollo but the execution in web tech is absolutely top notch.
The only thing that had me back on Reddit was searching for something on DDG and getting 99% Reddit results. I see why they are un-deleting people’s comments and posts when they close their accounts. Hopefully other forums take those spots.
That explains why I kept trying to purge my history and having some posts keep popping back up.
Get yourself banned. I don’t think they restore content of banned accounts.
deleted by creator
I came from days of dialup and gone through yahoo groups, Myspace, tons of geocity sites, ask jeevs, LiveJournal, and so on. Sites will only be an attraction tell something comes that offers more. With federation and decentralized systems coming up, the hold on people and corporations trying to use you as a commodity will only tarnish the shine that it once was. When companies hold a noose around your neck thinking there isn’t another option, telling you to go ahaid and jump, thinking no one will and when something comes by that makes the jump just a step down and you can take off the noose, there is nothing that they can hold onto anymore. They cannot say you have nowhere else to go. With the choice around in a federated system, you cannot be held hostage by a single entity. When people have the freedom of choice, the people win.
I’ve got a similar history and agree. Platforms may seem to big to fail, but they really aren’t. Sometimes growth is slow, but once a platform hits a critical mass it’ll explode. I’m new to Lemmy, but Reddit has done the platform a favor, it’s got some great ideas. And with wefwef it feels great to use already. Reddit just payed forward the favor digg did for them ;)
Just vile
The enshtification of reddit has reached a head.
So traffic is back to normal but ad clicking is way down? Have they not figured out how to make their bots click the ads?
Traffic to the page for people to buy ads is down. This has been the trend for the past week or so. People are still using reddit, but companies aren’t looking to advertise on it.
This seems intentional at this point…
Just wait for July 1st! Once millions of people find their apps not working anymore and their porn gone there’s no way going back for Reddit.
Make sure to point everyone to wefwef.app and Sync for Lemmy!
Also Lemmynsfw.com 🤨
(Mandatory plug: [email protected])
Edit: Fyi nsfw content isn’t visible without an account
Lemmy NSFW is mostly just full of accounts posting non-NSFW images of celebrities in a way that looks like they are all run by the same person. Other than that it’s basically dead.
It’s that last part that’s going to break their knees, lol
I literally made a reddit account a few days before the hullabaloo started, specifically to buy advertising on reddit.
- The ad interface is terrible. Most of my experience is with Google Ads, but in general, platforms try to be super-nice to their advertisers and give them a good experience. Not reddit. The same overall shittiness the infests the rest of the site is also in their ad portal.
- Most of the clicks were fairly poor quality (high bounce rate).
- Whatever I tried to configure to limit geographic reach to US+Canada either wasn’t set up right or was just ignored. I got plenty of clicks from all over world.
I stopped advertising on blackout day for moral reasons regardless, but it also seemed like it just overall wasn’t worth it in general. And, my observation of the ads I see as a user has been that they aren’t at all tuned to what I would be likely to want, or constructed so I’d be likely to click on them. Some platforms I have to consciously avoid clicking on ads or scroll past them deliberately when my natural tendency is to click on them. On reddit it’s just weird nonsense that I want to scroll past anyway.
In short, my brief experience with reddit ads made me conclude that it’s probably a waste of money anyway.
Too many people ad block everything on Reddit in any decent category that you might want to target.
The real way to do it is an army of paid shills making posts and comments by a third party.
I’ve never once considered paying for advertising on Reddit, because a) I use an adblock and always considered their implementation of ads on the site just clunky and ineffective and b) why pay when you can just post something as content and have people organically ask and be curious about it.
Every time I saw a post of a “cool barcode in the shape of a genie” or whatever I suspected that it was just stealth marketing, because it probably was.
So I generally agree with you on (a), but I do like to just try stuff and measure how well it works, and sometimes I get surprised. I did try (b) also, and I actually had a pretty hard time sorting out where to post where my promotional posts wouldn’t instantly be removed, how to post in a way that made it clear I’m here to sell my stuff without being overbearing about it, etc. I actually did figure it out eventually and had some level of success with it in terms of people engaging with my stuff, but it didn’t lead to any sales (for the short time I did it). I mean, it makes sense. Most people don’t read a post and come away from it with the idea “I gotta run out and buy that thing!”
Some subreddits actually specifically say that if you want to advertise your stuff, that’s what ads are for. I’ve got no problem with either paying for advertising or just being honest about what I’m there for; mostly I just care that it works, which is far as I can tell reddit’s ads didn’t for me.
Honestly, advertising on the internet is a big cluster fuck. It isn’t like how cable was where it used to he organic and clever. It’s just shoved into people’s faces wherever, whenever and however the advertisers possibly can. Of course no one wants to see ads and uses ad blockers. I dont care how interested I was in an article if I go to read it and the page is littered with ads I’m leaving and never visiting the site again.
Personally the redditbusiness page marketing to advertisers reads like wishful thinking or something straight from /r/boringdystopia.
“Look there’s places where people come to discuss flashlight options and other users/google results trust them! Pay us money to look like you’re part of that! It’s not creepy to try and co-opt at all!”
I’m not surprised that their interface isn’t great, they haven’t paid for developers to do anything other than try to look more like twitter/facebook in a long time.
I had no idea about this. This is the weirdest goddamned thing. I found so much that I made a whole separate post. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea.
I would assume that almost all clicks are from people on the mobile app accidentally tapping ads while they try to scroll past them, because they’re in the main feed. So click quality being garbage doesn’t surprise me.
This was my experience. Almost every ad I clicked on was a mistake; either I thought it was a real post and wasn’t paying close attention, only to navigate away in disgust, or I clicked on it purely by accident. I had like 50k+ karma (to give you some idea of much I used reddit) and might have honestly clicked an ad once.
Reddit ad targeting is a joke and I dont even understand how. How can they not tell what my interests are when I’ve literally subbed to them? It’s the easiest targeting set up in the world and they still can’t make it work.
(1) Because the more irrelevant ads they show, the more accidental clicks they can collect, and the more ad revenue. There will be individual clients (e.g. Adobe) who probably have some measurable results, but my guess is that most of their advertisers show pretty good metrics in terms of “cost per click” etc, and aren’t paying close enough attention to realize that their real return on ad spend is extremely low.
(2) Reddit’s just as incapable / uncaring about writing good ad targeting as they are about constructing the rest of the site.
Pick one. Aaron Schwartz would be furious at the current state of reddit.
Agreed. I deleted my 15 year account. Mods should just leave.
Reddit can’t exist without the free labor.
Other side is I don’t know what the mods that stick it out get. I’m guessing there is some monetary benefit to the bigger community mods I don’t know about.
It’s too late for you, but I’d suggest anybody who wants to delete their account consider first editing all of their comments to overwrite the data, there are lots of reports of deleted comments being restored, I’ve not heard of reverted edits though. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I just tried Power Delete Suite about an hour ago. I beleive reddit has slowed down the allowable edit rate, something like one every 5 seconds. PDS runs through as fast as it can, meaning it’s a 1 in 10 success at best. I tried Redact as well, but that just blanks out white after giving it permission. I’m not having much success. But Shreddit seems to work OK? Though that doesn’t address the undeletion possobility
Try the fork in this comment. It has the 5 second delay put in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/comments/mgshmh/a_heads_up_for_those_who_are_using_the_edit/jpkpdhq/use the PDS fork with the 5 second delay. it’ll take forever but it’ll get the job done!
I manually overwrote my post about 2 weeks ago and have been checking as subs came back online. a few reverted but most didnt. I deleted my 9 year old account last night and checked and its stills gone
PowerDeleteSuite screwed me over around 6 months ago. I got 2 replies to comments it was supposed to delete but they were still there, user name, content and all, they were just not linked to my account. If I search my username + reddit I still get results. My name is not attached anymore because I deleted my account.
Thankfully I started manually editing and deleting my comments after using PowerDeleteSuite, and those remain gone as far as I know.
For June 20 and 21, the most recent days for which Similarweb has estimates, the ads site got in the range of 7,500 to 9,000 visits, Carr explained, meaning that ad-buying traffic has continued to drop.
I’m glad Reddit is feeling something from this, however, at the same time. I kinda don’t care. It’s a shame it went the way that it did. But spez can’t take back his terrible attitude and decision making on what happened. Most people were sympathetic and wanting Reddit to be profitable and rooting for Reddit. However, spez just decided to come out swinging from nowhere hitting his allies in the face.
The only thing reddit can do is improve the first party app and mod tools. The rest is lost.
That being said I doubt the protests are reddits biggest priority. Even if reddit ipo’s perfectly and gets a injection of capitol (which might itself be difficult since investors don’t seem to care about userbase growth anymore) they are going to need to find ways to increase profits each year (like every other publicly traded tech company).
Advertising revenue is also limited given trend to cut “unnecessary expenses”.
It’s worth mentioning the article said prior to the blackout ads saw ~14,500 clicks so they’re currently down 40-50%
It’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are the ones which think the current state of affairs provides a good ad platform for their orgs.
Yeh I’m in the same boat. The day the internal memo came out about how everything will blow over, I deleted Apollo. I haven’t been back to reddit since and after the first week, I don’t even miss it now.
I wish lemmy was a bit busier, but outside of that the general atmosphere and quality here is better. Even if everything was reversed and Spez was booted, I won’t return now.
Actually, I like the small community vibe of Lemmy. It’s the dead sub vibe I have a problem with. There are lots of really interesting communities, but you don’t see people posting anything yet.
I like a lot of the tiny vibe but I miss girl Reddit. It was such a unique social media atmosphere and I haven’t managed to find it here. I hope more of the women from Reddit come here
I miss GirlGamers, honestly. It was such a refreshing perspective compared to the constantly angry/circlejerky dudebro vibe of 90% of gaming communities
Took a long time for that to become a thing.
It’ll come here though for sure. I think most people are trying to filter into whatever communities exist right now to get a feel of how federation works but once everyone has a decent idea I think you’ll see an explosion of communities.
Yeah that’s where I am. Also its important to remember that the apps are nice but very beta, and what we have now are early adopters. Like part of why I’m here is that I oppose the increasing corporatization of the internet enough to sacrifice a better experience for it. We need the people who care but not that much so we can get the people who don’t care but think this is a better space.
It’s a long and slow process and if lemmy gains steam like we hope the real competition may start pushing centralized communities to quit their bullshit.
I was talking to my wife about me joining here and she pointed out that Lemmy really is the best use case for the fediverse. Forums were hard to centralize unlike Microblogging and other more social media-y social media. It’s less individual user dependent of a format
My girl subreddits are my big miss too. Even my silly pop culture ones. Actually especially those.
Using this to plug my community [email protected] for League of Legends stuff. Trying to make it a bit more popular but it seems like there’s only one other person posting so far
lemmy.ml is defederated from all kbin instances, right? that might make it a harder place for a community to congregate. Just going off what I was reading in this reddit thread
I was apprehensive of moving over to Lemmy, but I’m starting to get the feel of the fediverse and finally made the switch over.
I think the community can grow over time. It honestly feels like early Reddit, I’m quite enjoying Lemmy!
While I want to it be a little bit busier, I’m pleased that we’re not at the low-effort comment point e.g. every other comment being a pun or a shitpost or “this”
“Came here to say this”
^^^ THIS X 10000000 xDDD
🤣
I’m old enough to remember the Eternal September on Usenet when AOL allowed their users to access it and there was a huge influx of people just posting “me too,” often in replies to replies to replies to replies of someone saying “me too.”
Let’s hope Lemmy never reaches that level.
Just wait till the third party apps shut down tomorrow, loads of people will be rolling in here. Then when the RIF and Sync developers release their Lemmy apps (with the same names) even more people will come. If you want there to be content right now though just keep contributing to posts you see. The more content we make right now, the more likely it is for new users to stay,
I have accounts on a bunch of instances, just in case the traffic takes some down.
You should check out lemmy.dbzer0.com if you haven’t already. It’s pretty useful;)
What’s different about it? I’m on mobile, can someone explain?
Where did you see an announcement about RIF for Lemmy? That’s awesome!
As far as I know, talklittle is focused on making a Tildes app called Three Cheers for now, and had been working it even before the announcement from Reddit. As much as it would be nice to have a Lemmy successor to RIF, the closest we’ll probably get any time soon is an app that’s just inspired by the RIF design.
Thanks for the info!
I can’t wait for Slide for Lemmy. Always loved that app!
But it’s awesome to see so many developers already working on stuff for Lemmy. It’s simply bonkers to me that reddit looked at all these people who created so much for them and basically told them to go fuck themselves.
Literally watchredditdie
