Exactly as the title says, do you guys think Reddit will buckle and at least be more reasonable or maybe even reverse their current decisions?
Edit: if not lemmy to the moon 🚀
Their MBAs already crunched the numbers and included users like us in the “acceptable loss” category
They would rather you all be gone to be replaced with casuals who can be more profitable
The things that happened first with Twitter and now with Reddit, proved to me that it’s pointless to put trust in closed-source. So even if they decide to revert changes (which they won’t do), I lost my trust already. Why do I have to rely on them if alternatives are available?
Decentralization and FOSS are the solution. They have their problems. True, but they solve many BS in social media.
Hell will freeze over before they change course. “It’s all in the game.” to quote one of my favourite series ever.
There you go giving a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck.
I’m not convinced it’ll completely back down but I suspect there is a chance they’ll lower the pricing structure to a more ‘reasonable’ amount.
If I put my tinfoil hat on I’d say this was the plan from the start;
- Announce something ludicrous
- Get the users a bit fired up
- Backtrack to what you’d always planned
- Play it all off like “See, we listen to you guys, aren’t we good?”
I just can’t see that being the plan with how heavily spez burned bridges with some of the app devs.
Accusing the Apollo dev of blackmail then doubling down once caught in the lie pretty much guarantees Apollo won’t continue with any pricing level.
That seems to be the way it works with a lot of platforms and products.
Only just a little, to try to get back valuable users without disappointing shareholders, probably with some vague and fake promise.
In any case, the AMA has caused a permanent trust damage for many users
No. They are trying to finalize an IPO. No amount of anything is going to stop them from this cash grab.
The IPO will catch on fire, burn up and fall over into the swamp. The last thing you need in the 11th hour of an IPO is bad press and protests.
The move overall smacks of desperation. The investors aren’t blind. Spez is openly calling out that they’re not profitable, on the eve of the IPO.
Honestly, all things considered in his rock solid stance I’m expecting more of a fire sale.
Eh. The more bad decisions they make, the better it will be for the Fediverse. And with the way things are with corpos across the board, I prefer that at this point.
Agreed. They showed their hand. Better for everyone if they just double down. Rip off the bandaid.
Honestly I think the AMA showed that they are not backing down. Spez answered like 14 total questions on an AMA with 30k comments the last I checked. They don’t seem to care, and I don’t see there being a significant number of people actually leaving reddit either, the alternatives just don’t fix the problems people are having with reddit. If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app?
If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app?
We’re here, aren’t we?
Reddit has done many shady, anti-user, and blatantly corporate things over the years, but effectively killing off the way I’ve interfaced with Reddit for over a decade is the biggest and final nail, of many, in the coffin of Reddit’s death to me. Rest in Piss.
I agree. I found it easier to transition because I follow mostly smaller tech subreddits that already had a presence here, or quickly started one. I only posted 70 comments total and almost nothing recently. I am more concerned about the power users, mods, and people who need things like screen readers not being able to make the jump. In my opinion Lemmy needs those users more than lurkers.
I feel it. I followed a lot of innocuous bullshit, random stuff, and most of my comments followed suit. It’s been a long while since I felt like I could have a conversation on most parts of Reddit. There are some niche communities, and things that don’t work well without a lot of users, that I’ll miss, but I’m mostly glad to be not spending so much time on Reddit.
I do hope that the open-source nature of Lemmy, and the fediverse in general, will foster a better relationship between developers/admins and users/mods, and more development towards what the mods and users want and need out of the platform. I do have optimism for the future of such an open platform, although I do remember a time when Reddit’s software was open-source too.
I can’t personally speak for the accessibility issue, so I don’t know if it’s a problem here, but open-source should definitely help with that too.
although I do remember a time when Reddit’s software was open-source too.
Reddit used the MIT license which is dogshit. It not only allows people to steal your work and not contribute back, but it also allows you to revoke the Open Source nature at any time.
Lemmy uses AGPL, which is pretty much the best pro-Open Source license out there. It is copyright violation to run a modified Lemmy instance and decline sharing the source code.
Edit: and just following up on this, it’s thanks to AGPL that Truth Social had to release their source code too.
It doesn’t really matter. Spez burned all the bridges with the main 3PA devs. None of them will want to invest time and effort again for a company that treats them like this and could change its mind again on a whim.
This is the important part, I think: Spez showed that he will grind up his marketing partners - as 3PA devs are - into today’s lunch … and likely hope there’s more to eat tomorrow.
Reddit doesn’t seem to make a lot of choices or take much action in its own good interest. I moderated a 25+ million subscriber sub there for a number of years. The minimal effort the admin put in to assist was laughable. The brigading against the sub, mod harassment, chronic abusers, the mediocre tools, it was just a poor experience. Four things stand out to me:
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At one point this user harassed us via modmail over and over so we got his account suspended from all of reddit for 24 hours. This prompted them to create a throwaway, mail us, claim to be law enforcement and state that he was essentially going to hunt us down. The throwaway was banned, but the original account allowed to serve out its 24 hour suspension and then just carry on. We never got an answer on why nothing happened to that account. The decisions they made were mind boggling. We had a banned user make a new account, and it took a few months to realize that it was him. It’s not like the account didn’t cause trouble, it’s just they were previously banned for making chronically bad posts to karma farm. Just really subtle, but not egregious rule breaking. They’d been contacted numerous times to not post low effort/low quality/inappropriate stuff and after numerous attempts to correct it, with no real come back from them, we banned them. After awhile, and many many removals of their submissions, I realized this new single purpose account was them, sent it in for a ban check, confirmed, only to find out an account which had been used for no more than chronic ban evasion (it posted in no other sub) was handed a 2 week suspension and then just allowed to carry on. It was very frustrating as a mod trying to address abuse when the admin didn’t really seem to care.
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I found this guy spamming hundreds of subs selling fake masks during the pandemic. I had to personally write 3 bots and chase him around Reddit for weeks to eventually shut him down because the admin were so slow and so inept at dealing with him they simply couldn’t do anything. This guy was operating by leaving his posts up for around 15 minutes when he posted so the mods would never get reports and ban him unless they happened to be right there when he did it. He also had dozens of accounts and kept buying more. By the time the admin would show up to ban any of his accounts he’d stopped using them for days and was through several new accounts since. It really didn’t take me long to write a bot to identify his posts with 100% accuracy (except for some archive bots that some people had that copied his posts), but they couldn’t do a thing to stop him
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Pushshift was both the bane of our existence and the biggest tool I used. Bots obviously used it to find old posts to karma farm off of. We used it to track abusers in detail, notify other subs when we saw something up, etc. Without the ability to see deleted posts and comments we would have missed quite a bit. It was really the one tool that made moderating effective.
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The horrendous block tool. Which essentially boils down to ‘I want the last word and I’m going to shut this discussion down entirely, even though I’m not a mod in this sub and have no business having that kind of control over a public discussion’. The best part was users who’d block someone, wait a bit, unblock, because you have to wait to reblock, then after that time passed, make another sniping comment and then immediately reblock. The old blocking method wasn’t perfect, but the new one was a mess. Someone blocking you meant that if a third party entered an on-going discussion, replied to you to discuss something, you couldn’t reply to them because the thread was downstream of someone who had blocked you.
This kind of behaviour just demonstrates a site that really doesn’t give a crap about its users or the community they try to build and participate in.
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