[alwayslikethis]

The issue is for every person like you and me, there are 10 or 100 others who put up with this crap, and reddit attracts people, centralizing communities, giving you little option for alternatives. It drains activities from forums, etc, toward itself as it is presented as a more convenient solution. I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline. The blackout is unlikely to work, but I hope it can be longer (a month or something) to encourage people to find alternatives.

[_zzaw]

I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.

The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.

I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.

And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.

tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.

[pixl97]

Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.

I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?

[rusticpenn]

We had at least 2 instances of users supporting admin decisions which looked like responses from chatgpt in r/programmerhumor yesterday.

[rusticpenn]

By that time, these guys will cash out and leave.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.

[matkoniecz]

Your claim that currently noone posts on Reddit and moderates Reddit is wrong and they were purged is wrong.

[mandmandam]

OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.

Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).

And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.

[matkoniecz]

They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")

Only some small groups were actually driven off.

[CapstanRoller]

>Only some small groups were actually driven off.

Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.

When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').

When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?

Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.

Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?

[ImaCake]

Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.

Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.

[balder1991]

I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.

[sdwr]

I never wanted to use the reddit app. Must have caved and installed it one day. I use it now, and it doesnt feel different from the site.

Say what you want about HN, but at least the contrarians bring out opposing views. The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me. People are itching for a chance to hate, and pile on from every angle. It's childish, naive, and most of all vindictive and bitter.

[GuardianCaveman]

The point isn't that it's different or the same, the point is that the very definition of the site is that all content and moderation pretty much is created by users, and that the users hate being forced to install yet another app when it works fine for years as a mobile webpage. There was/is a spirit to reddit and it's being destroyed and if you love something and someone takes steps to change the thing you love into something you don't then you're going to resent and hate it. There's also the idea of not feeling powerless and at the mercy of every corporation by banding together to try to effect change. But you act like it's just a bunch of immature kids who are pouting about something silly. It's deeper than that.

[kredd]

I agree with the poster above, since at this year most of people are accustomed to install an app to interact with a website. It’s not where we wanted the web to be, but also it’s a minority that find it annoying.

[losteric]

My parents are technical sheep. They'll do what a site tells them to, even if it bogs down their phone, adds notifications, and inserts yet another advertising tentacle into their life. They won't be mad because they don't understand. As an engineer, I think it's reasonable to be mad for myself and those that don't know better.

[hnlmorg]

I’d be interested to see some actual data on this

[rightbyte]

> The bigger reddit subs have a mob mentality that use to annoy me, and now scares me.

It has gotten way worse right? Or is it me getting older? Many subs are like sects with a razor thin point of view allowed that is shifting constantly. It feels like insane people are pushing every BS problem as a do or die proposition and that those are dominating.

[balder1991]

Especially /r/iOS is a sub that will downvote you for pointing out objectively true facts (not opinion based).

[davewritescode]

The Reddit app is a worse experience than users currently have on mobile with 3rd parties. Reddit let this go on for years and has now decided, without warning, to make the product worse for a lot of users including myself.

I use Apollo to aimlessly scroll through Reddit (probably too much) and now I'll use that time to learn something and find other communities that are less disruptive.

There's a million ways Reddit could've gone that would've been less user hostile.

[weinzierl]

Also bust because it doesn't feel differently for you doesn't mean it makes a difference for Reddit if you use it.

[SturgeonsLaw]

> I for one will try to undo my past contributions to accelerate its decline.

This is a great idea. I'm going to bulk edit then delete my old comments (I recall reading somewhere that editing them overwrites the original field in the database whereas deleting just sets a deleted flag).

Destroys the value that I've created for free for that shitheap, plus it's helpful to make doxxing me harder.

[rx_tx]

Look into Shreddit [1] which does that for you. It needs API access though, so make sure to do it before June 30th...

[1]: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit

[abenga]

Can you edit posts and comments that are more than six months old?

[rx_tx]

Yes, I had to run the script several times, but it eventually edited and got rid of stuff that was super old. Basically every single comment made by me is gone (which I wanted). I ran it before the blackout though, not sure how it would work with Reddit in its current state.

[mlyle]

I just bulk-edited them so I could leave a message about why the comment is gone.

[chuchana]

Would you mind sharing how?

[mlyle]

I used shreddit and wrote a message of my choice in the conf file. I commented out the line from the script that deleted the comment.

[chuchana]

Thank you!

[freddie_mercury]

I lurk in a few subreddits that have well established forums outside of Reddit (decades old with tens of thousands of users) that are the top Google results and I'm always a bit amazed that people will still post on Reddit instead of using those other forums where they will get much, much better answers.

[sxg]

Your own comment doesn’t include any specific examples of these communities, which I think reflects the big problem: discovery. As big as HN is, I rarely see it mentioned anywhere that’s not HN-adjacent. I’d love to hear about some of these other communities, but I do suspect they’ll each have varying features, cultural norms, and suboptimal onboarding guides for newbies. Especially if they’re decades old.

I think if you’re “in-the-know” and have grown with some of these high quality forums/communities for years, you’ll lose touch with understanding what new users need to join as the quality and depth of discussion become higher and deeper.

[shmatt]

They need to create a username and password to ask that question? If they already have a Reddit account that wins

[freddie_mercury]

Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.

[Zak]

It's not just creating an account.

The forum software itself may be unfamiliar. Does it have better features than Reddit? Some do; others don't. Does the forum have really bizarre rules or conventions? Subreddits can too, but it seems to be less common. Will my first ten posts get held for moderation? They probably won't on my 17 year old Reddit account.

It would be nice to see a federated identity/reputation system take off though. I'm thinking of OpenID plus [some other technology that probably exists, but isn't popular] where any of many service providers or my own website can confirm my identity, then offer vouches from other forums along the lines of "Zak has been a member of [community] for 2 years, posted 473 times, and has not been banned as of [date]".

[safety1st]

I don't know about this argument. "Everyone else is doing it so there are no alternatives." I believe less in this argument every year.

* There are alternatives. Like for me it's Mastodon, IRC, SDF and the Tildes. Now there's this thing Lemmy bouncing around out there which is a straight up federated clone of Reddit. Are they all kind of different from Reddit yeah, are they smaller yeah, so what? The alternative is you can go help make them better. You can help create.

* None of this stuff is essential for life, work etc. Reddit is not an essential service. So why would it be such a big deal if you totally changed your media consumption habits to basically anything, like let's say just start reading one newsletter from one publisher you think is ethical, and that's it. Seems fine to me. Your world will keep on turning. You'll get more fresh air.

* I just don't feel that what the masses are doing is such a huge issue. Fuck em. I read stuff on and participate in a bunch of little communities now, still use Reddit too but will never use their app, I would absolutely survive if Reddit disappeared tomorrow.

Not trying to pick on you btw, just trying to address the mindset of "<insert dickhead Internet site here> has all the users and therefore is the only option." I just feel like this is all much ado about nothing. Reddit's not a big deal. Let it burn, let it shine, let it do whatever, life's gonna go on and as humans we're creative so if they suck we'll find better things to do.

[xeromal]

I would add a small counterpoint to your second point. For me, reddit is becoming pretty essential in my life. Since Google has been taken over by blogspam and ads, I struggle to find reviews or opinions of things I buy or use. I use google to search reddit to find comments relating to thing I'm interested in. Those comments might be astroturfing or paid support too, but it's easier to sus that out by searching past comments and painting a picture of the user. It's not perfect, but it's much better than trusting the authenticity of random blogs save a few I have bookmarked.

[balder1991]

Well, considering Reddit is becoming infested with bots now, I’d say Reddit is next after the Google takeover.

[xeromal]

Such is the way of the internet. Something will form to counteract that when it turns to shit. It's no where close yet though!

[chaosjevil]

That's another reason to poison the well - people are attracted to content, not to gibberish.