Lemmy is having some stability issues across its instances because of this growth curve: https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/693866c7-8f65-4046-8781-58aee70...
Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.
And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.
In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.
As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>
One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
(I'm OP in the event it's not obvious.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14faqrt/is_redd...
Same for always-NSFW.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fjbtt/our_subre...
Look. This is always going to happen with user-generated content ("UGC") sites where the users who create the content don't own the platform. The owners will always reach a point of trying to extract as much value as possible from those users. Personal subreddits? Well they don't provide value (to the owners). We're long past the point of subsidizing users to grow Reddit. Now it's just value extraction.
And it happens to every UGC site and people are still somehow surprised. It's the most Lucy and the football thing I've ever seen.
This is why Wikipedia being owned by a foundation rather than a private venture-backed company is so important. Same for ICANN not being a for-profit company (remember how private equity tried to steal the .org registry [1]?).
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/private-equity-firm-trying-to-take-over-...
and here's a comment excerpt from this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."
So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.
- https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-land...
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
Or the absolutely abysmal and tonedeaf responses every chance they had?
- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755640/reddit-api-change...
- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve...
Or the easily disproven libel? https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...
That's been doubled and tripled down on? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...
Or literally changing or removing user's posts and comments? https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fafpp/the_admin...
That all sounds abusive to me. If anything, the API price was the straw and focusing on it and ignoring literally everything that happened since is just being disingenuous.
This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
- Cory Doctorow
I will say that doing so on the "new comments" sorting type did still yield a good number of no-comment posts.
1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/20/how-john-...
Reddit, on the other hand, makes <$1 per user worldwide.
So, a reasonable price would be somewhere between $4 and $200 per year
/s
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.
But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.
https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...
But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.
When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews
https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...
How many more you want?
I can understand the sentiment, however users of Reddit employ private subreddits for a variety of reasons. Top of the list is in order to facilitate safe discussions, secure from prying eyes. For Reddit Inc it is a benefit, since it encourages moderator groups and communities to remain within the platform. e.g.
> r/ArmyofScience
> A private community for the comment moderators of /r/science to organize and discussion moderation of the subreddit.
If such private communities were forced open, it would require moderator groups, or those other private communities, to join the exodus to other platforms.
There are also some more personal collections on the site, without a doubt. Switching those to public would constitute a huge violation the trust which users have placed in Reddit and only further erode the company's image within communities that make their home on the site as well as with the public at large.
Lastly, there are over 3 million subreddits in existence [0], so even changing this manually would be a sizeable task.
[0] https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/
I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.
But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.
As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win
It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.
> You retain ownership rights in your Content.
1. https://postimg.cc/PPRMGw7k
2. https://postimg.cc/mcNMrzmk
3. https://postimg.cc/7CVG4vLT
I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.
Having said that, it doesn't seem very active at the moment which isn't a good sign. Granted, I have no idea how active the subreddit is to compare.
Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14ae739/this_...
https://preview.redd.it/qty5883w6h6b1.png?auto=webp&v=enable...
https://preview.redd.it/c7o7zce1tb6b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...
And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy.
So, there's 1 for you.
Here's an example of a community:
Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ...
The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.
Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)
That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.
Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>
That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:
Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":
<quote>
Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.
TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.
And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.
(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)
Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.
Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.
That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.
I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.
</quote>
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>
Links:
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.
And in this case, that one person happens to be me.
Having a specific subreddit affords the ability to:
- Curate the content presented. It's not everything I've ever posted to Reddit, it's a specific set of interests. Visiting via the "old" view shows those topics, visible at the Internet Archive presently: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredm...>
- Style the subreddit, as noted.
- Provides other subreddit-specific features including the Wiki (which I'd made heavy use of), moderation tools, and the like.
TL;DR: It's different in many ways.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/148w58w/vote_s...
As usual, dang is reasoned, articulate, and fair. I have a better understanding of HN's policies and actions, even if I disagree in part on how this is being conducted.
I'm told (via email) that it was largely the flameware detector which adjusted this particular post's page ranking.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
(OP, FYI)
Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.
This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
