- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
There’s still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
Twitter and Reddit went so much to shit and lowered the bar so much that Meta actually became almost not bad in my eyes, almost.
Meta is still on a whole other level when it comes to data privacy.
Gee are you implying that storing passwords in plaintext is a bad thing? /s
That’s security, not privacy.
That’s security, not privacy.
helenslunch - the slayer of untruths
How much privacy do you have when someone has your account password?
You have none, because your security has been compromised. This is a flaw. Poor privacy is intentional.
I’m still pissed off that I’ve never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don’t know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
That shouldn’t be allowed. I did not consent.
There’s a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy “You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!”
They’re doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
I really don’t understand how people use Instagram. I’ve tried, but it’s about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don’t follow, it’s not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it’ll show me about 40 posts before saying “You’re all caught up from the past 3 days!” and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I’m here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I’d rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don’t regret it for a second.
Don’t worry that’ll change, they haven’t owned it for that long yet.
they haven’t owned it for that long yet
they acquired it in 2012.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they’re used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
at least they are developing affordable vr
And locking it behind their account system
Yeah they’re subsidizing the price to get between you and reality.
Affordable purely by the money you pay upfront. They earn more by the ridiculous amount of tracking they do, and they’re also forcing you to stay within their services.
As with so many other things, you’re paying with more than just money.
The problem is that FB is the “core forum” for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Additionally FB Marketplace killed Craigslist, at least in my area (also US). Nextdoor somewhat is a counter but that has its own problems.
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
It’s also the main organization tool for “groups”. I have tried to migrate mine to other platforms with no success.
And also the biggest online classifieds marketplace for trading goods. Even though it’s a fucking awful experience and simply ignores any filters you give it. If you want to actually sell your stuff, or sell it for market value, without shipping, you just have to use it.
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
You can create the community and begin the migration
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It’s super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
I feel like internet users have become so lazy, stubborn, and resistant to change. I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo, IRC, ICQ, AIM… people used to try new things
I’m pretty sure it used to be easier to get people to move to new things like new forums, Xfire, Ventrillo
In some respects it was somewhat easier to get them to be on multiple platforms instead of moving. Think of the original messenger proliferation, where sometimes people would be on IRC, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or etc. so much so that you had software like Pidgin and Trillian to help consolidate server/chat rooms and friends lists to more easily chat with all your contacts.
Even with Ventrilo, I remember being open to also switching to Mumble or vice versa if there was some hiccup with either.
Companies have done this on purpose. They all want you to stay in their walled garden, their “ecosystem” of various products. So they make it easy to get into and get connected to people and things, and then make it hard to leave because you’re “invested.”
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it’s now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
No, because then they’ll all flood here. Then I’ll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I’m bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I’m good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
Nope.
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it’s going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
…I’m gonna go ahead and say it.
I like it better here.
I honestly believe that Lemmy is cool, but it either needs more content or I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting, and the “small community, small town” vibes gives charm to it.
I’ve been here since August 2024 or so.
I agree, so I’ve been posting photos and things. What we don’t need is a bunch of autoposting bots.
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
Yeah, this helps, but it’s not always topics that really interest me. We kind of need more diversity of content around here.
I prefer scaled to active sort for that reason.
I agree though, more content and more content diversity would be great.
The small percentage that contribute content regularity in social media platforms instead of just consuming are great.
I’m too boring to have much content that would be good for anything other than microblogging myself though.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
That’s been my experience as well. I’m using a Lemmy client that allows me to tag users, and I’ve been tagging people who have posted comments that annoyed me. A few are obvious trolls, but the rest have posted many comments that I liked or agree with since I’ve tagged them. It’s been refreshing to see, actually
It’s a lot better than August 2023!
Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you’re generally out of luck, for example.
Reddit startled the same way. It’s aways first the tech weirdos, early adopters and Foss enthusiasts that start it.
since August 2024 or so
So, two months? Lol
Same. This place is great, even with the tankies from lemmy.ml and the fascists from hexbear, at least we somehow still get along.
Not all of us are tankies fwiw, I just wanted to be on the largest and most well-supported instance with generally the least amount of downtime.
Isn’t it lemmy.world?
That one isn’t the largest, no. The largest is .ml and it’s run by the two Lemmy maintainers.
I am confused, every statistic of .world seems bigger. What am I missing?
Looks like I was mistaken, then. Looks like .ml isn’t the largest, it’s just the one run by the two Lemmy maintainers, which for me (combined with .one keeping going down when I was actively using it) made it my home instance.
Fair 🤷♂️
What’s the deal with having a .world user complain about ml and hexbear in every single thread lately?
It’s crazy. Almost like we all have the freedom to say whatever the fuck we want, including complaining, because we fucking can.
hexbear isn’t fascist
They are heavily biased towards China and Russia, two countries with fascist governments. That kinda speaks for itself, even if they claim to be communists or socialists.
They share the same positions on global politics as pretty much every Marxist-Leninist political party on the planet. You may not like those positions, but trying to characterise them as actually far-right extremist is absurd horseshoe theory nonsense.
Liberals & social democrats on lemmy.world acting like NATO, the US Democratic Party, and capitalism are the real bulwarks against fascism is amusing.
The guy punching me clearly espouses a pacifist ideology, so calling him violent is absurd horseshoe theory nonsense.
Don’t confuse authoritarian regimes with fascism. China is an authoritarian state running a diluted version of communism, but it’s not fascist. Russia under Putin is leaning more towards fascism these days for sure, but they’re not fascist outright yet.
Maybe what the hexbear folks gravitate around the most is the idea of authoritarianism. The flavour doesn’t matter as much.
a diluted version of communism,
Is there still something communist in their economy? Are the people working 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week, owning their means of production?
Lemmy was better before the Reddit exodus last year, when people started insulting others by calling them tankies and fascists. Before that, it was much more peaceful.
It was still full of tankies though, lemmygrad was the second biggest instance and you’d see it everywhere
He says from his 7 month old acct.
No chance that is an alt account?
No chance whatsoever to hold alternate accounts on this federated social media website that are all incapable of account consolidation and OTP validation like reddit can /s
No chance they were a lurker?
They were tankies and fascists before anyone ever came here and found out that they were.
Calling them such didn’t create them.
This place feels like old reddit. When we could have actual discussions and not just be downvoted by bots. It’s so much better here
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don’t and there’s tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don’t have a reason to go back
It’s so much better. Personally I don’t hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I’m super OK with that.
I’d argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.
Then just go to a different Instance. I agree the powermods are a headache, but at least with Lemmy they have way less power. You can start a new sub with a matching name on a different Instance, and draw people away from the power mods. People get pretty sick of the power mods, pretty fast.
The only way to win the reddit game is to not play.
How about a nice game of Chess?
Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia
Can we launch it against Spez?
I just lost The Game
LOL!
Very good Joshua
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
There was this one post for a call for mods about “doing a social good for the community”.
Like bro, this is a video game subreddit. And you’re doing it for free, to help another dude get really rich.
Ideally, it would be because they care for the community they moderate, which I believe is the reason most mods do it.
Then you have creatures like awkwardtheturtle, who knows what motivates them.
I would assume Awkward is motivated by narcissism and/or because they’re a power-hungry freakazoid, but who knows? 🤷
If all mods quit that’d be perfect. Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to). But if no regular users wanted to pick it up then they’d have to pay admins to moderate. I don’t think we’ll see it though. There’s always going to be someone who wants it enough who has enough time for whatever reason.
Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to).
But, their business model doesn’t work unless those mods are working for free. So, while they may replace mods, unless people keep signing up to work for free to help a for-profit company deliver value to its shareholders, eventually it’s going to collapse.
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
Well it used to be (when Reddit was FLOSS and Reddit didn’t take communities off the founders who created them, at most they’d close the community) that people saw it as choosing Reddit to host the community instead of creating it somewhere else. However, Reddit has since changed the rules drastically, and essentially taken the communities people created there.
Best response for mods is to move your community somewhere else, and put in an automod rule redirecting people to the new community on Lemmy or whatever. Reddit will probably eventually try to take over and keep competing with your community under the original URL.
I was reading this post recently: https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ - I guess it applies to communities equally as much as it applies to anything else.
You know what’s not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
It’s possible but reddit isn’t the only one looking for engagement, so are individual users. If a site has more users, it has more engagement and content. It is also not impossible to drop the lemmy name when you do go back there to make people aware of the alternative.
My thought exactly. They can always do like me and nope the fuck out of there.
I left and joined Lemmy. After a couple of months of being flooded by politics in /c/memes, actually it’s everywhere and very little new content I started going back. Now I doomscroll both. I usually head to reddit after a couple of posts which portray me as a fascist because I’m not a Marxist.
That’s not a good method though on it’s own, there needs to be effort to undermine them. And since they don’t want to do peaceful protests, the only option left are the more violent and less legal ones. The ones that compromise their platform and its data.
And moving to a different, more decentralized shithole?
Lemmy has the same power tripping admins and mods, just more of them and each with a new and unique bias. You don’t hate AI? Ban. You acknowledge certain genocide? Ban. You made fun of my typo? Ban.
Wrong instance I guess. Yeah, Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic as hell, but there are really nice instances out there. I chose dbzer0 and it’s great here. We also have many interesting threads about locally hosted FOSS AI. db0 himself is quite involved in this topic, he’s the initial author of things like AI Horde. Basically everyone on db0 I’ve seen acknowledges the active genocide that’s being conducted by the Israeli fascist government. Other topics on the instance are anarchism and of course piracy.
Unlike the reddit, you can always make your own instance and host your own communities and nobody will ever ban you. That’s the whole point of being distributed.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you’re a leader. but they’re better than the alternative. that’s the whole point.
They’re better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don’t mind the new alternative.
I have made like, idk, maybe three reddit posts in the past year. Apart from incredibly specific niche topics which don’t have enough folks here to get a good answer, I don’t use Reddit.
i’m not yet sold on this “old vs new” thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn’t been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn’t even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i’m open to changing my mind on it.
The new alternative is becoming obsolete
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I’ve seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there’s a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn’t there even for casual users. They can’t really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
A boycott that doesn’t hurt has no leverage.
It’s sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
Digg still exists. Death of websites is rarely a complete shutter, but usually more of a steady decline into obscurity
Wow!! It’s the Divide By Zero admin!!
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won’t change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They’re just grifting different groups in different ways.
That’s why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won’t implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn’t cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
Not just AOL Internet, but also the email service. Same for Hotmail. I used to work at iHeart, and the number of those email services (from prize winners) was not insignificant.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn’t matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
At least you’re not the sucker doing it for free for the shareholders anymore.
I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.
That’s when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
“But we’ll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday.”
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
lol no if anything they’ve become far left shitholes.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to “nsfw” because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn’t really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
…so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course “accurately reflecting the subreddit” wasn’t what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said “remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we’ll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing”.
Thanks for sharing this I guess I left before all of this happened and I haven’t heard any of it.
Reddit would close the sub for being unmoderated until someone asks to be the new mod
A lot of subreddits have done that. The problem is nobody notices…
Reddit mods are such cucks for power that they cave when it’s threatened to be removed
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it’s a move towards ‘negative engagement’. I have not seen it myself (I don’t use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of “Social Media for Dummies,” I don’t think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally…
So that’s what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit…
Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.
Reddit vacillates between operating as a clearing house for the most ugly, racist, reactionary propaganda currently in circulation and doing pogroms against the six subreddits that got popular posting current events about a new kind of genocide we invented.
I’m glad I left, but it’s hard not to look over my shoulder and notice they’re doing the same fascist bucket carrying from 2020 and 2016 and 2012 and 2008 and…
Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”
You mean like killing all third-party apps and selling user-data to AI companies? That kind of harm? Oh no, you meant “harm” to your personal finance.
Harm? That is what would happen to their company if they explained what they meant by “harm”
…we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm
Seems like that’s about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
My account was banned because I kept reporting people and it was easier to get rid of the complainer than it was all the bigots she was complaining about… but… now I feel very “You can’t fire me, I quit” about it
There’s an irony seeing Redditors creating threads and complaining about it as if they did anything during the API-gate saga
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.