Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Well that kinda aged poorly.
To his credit, Ohanian hasn’t been involved with reddit for a while. He and u/spez sold the company years ago, then spez came back.
Fuck u/spez.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez.
Simultaneously looking like a 12 year old and crib death warmed over and we’re supposed to be impressed by this chud lol fuck him.
Everything does unfortunatelly… remember Google’s “do no harm” quote?
“Don’t be evil” was their actual quote. The fact that they removed it says a lot about their new direction.
Yeah, probably, forgot the exact quote 🤷.
Digg executives had to get a job /somewhere/
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
Want Free API? Straight to down status.
Want cheaper API? Also straight to down status
Not enough people on Reddit because of protests? Also straight to down status
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
“It’s merely coincidence. But starting Wednesday, our servers will be more robust and you can browse the site using our official app.” - Spez, while sniffing a decanter of human shit
God we need indefinite blackouts.
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
How is that an example of bad code?
Honestly, it’s probably not - if I’m actually right this is likely an issue that Reddit’s engineers never predicted would happen so never planned for it. I was being hyperbolic.
It’s not reactive. A proper reactive system can handle fluctuations in usage patterns more robustly.
I’m having a hard time believing the claim that Reddit’s code isn’t reactive.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a gigantic, mess of nested if-else statements.
Maybe, but this was a huge increase in usage. Reddit never expected to deal with anywhere near thousands of subs going private simultaneously.
Tildes’ dev Deimos used to work for Reddit and had this guess https://tildes.net/~tech/163e/reddit_appears_to_be_down_during_blackout_day_1#comment-87v1.
The servers run on the tears of bitter whiny CEOs.
Reddit is hosted on AWS after all…
Probably a drop in usage flagged some internal test
They’re lying. Fish swim, birds fly, sun shines, Reddit lies.
This comment is so good an upvote won’t do justice (without awards, a classic comment such as this now has some merit… it’s a new day boys & girls, a good day)
If Beehaw offered awards I would actually buy them, at least the money would be going towards keeping the lights on for a project that isn’t actively trying to screw over users for profit.
Give them some gold. Oh wait…
thank you, this comment made my day
Rebelling moderators, we have a special jail for rebelling moderators.
Lol, this made me chuckle out loud. Good job Sausage man!
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.
At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.
Is that what the subreddit coins or subredidt points idea was about?
I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.
If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.
They’ll find some people.
The reality is, not having (good enough) mods will take a while to really hurt the bottom line. Subs will slowly deteriorate.
But I’m 100% sure, within a few weeks you can establish a new order of more servile mods.
People on Reddit complain about the mods enough as it is. (And I include myself in that. I’ve had some less than stellar mod encounters in the past.) However, if Reddit were to force out existing mods and replace them with mods willing to toe the company line (and possibly ban people for mentioning the blackout, complaining about Reddit, or mentioning alternatives), it would just result in more user dissatisfaction.
Reddit won’t go out overnight. There are too many people who post there. However, this could turn into a snowball effect. Rebelling mods are replaced by bootlickers. Dissent is crushed in order to make it seem like everything is hunky dory before the IPO. Power users flee to alternatives like Lemmy. Slowly, normal users hear that some of their favorite content is on this new service and sign up. Reddit usage drops little by little until it’s limping around as a shell of its former self.
A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue.
My hypothesis is that it’s probably because so much of Reddit posting is automated by their own bot network now that they DDOS’d themselves trying to auto-post to subs that are suddenly locked. Like they didn’t even bother tracking which subs would be blacking out and like…write exceptions to their post schedule.
A significant number. Fantastic. I’m not sure I believe the stability issues, I’m just a a tin foil hat kind of guy though. I guess it’s possible.
Reddit didn’t design their systems around needing to deal with a huge number of subs going private all at the same time. It’s not surprising that it caused a short outage.
Whatever causes the website to have trouble, I’m all for it, right now.
I already wondered if I got lightning-banned for sending too many API requests in a short time, when I used a script to auto-edit all my comments and text-posts.
Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku…
Bold of you to assume they had a keikaku to begin with
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!
That’s what I did!
Same here!
I’ve also done this. It makes it really easy to forget about Reddit, to some extent.
Honestly, all I need is something to occupy my eyes and fill that reflex that has me tapping an app on the tray of my home screen when I’m stressed or need a distraction.
This place isn’t the most efficient (yet) and there are many gaps from what I used to read back in my Reddit days but that place was beginning to be too toxic for me anyway.
The newness of this, and the energy here is much better for my mental health. I can see googling something +Reddit to read an opinion about a TV show or something but if they don’t allow unauthenticated browser access to the site, I won’t even be doing that anymore. And I’ll almost certainly be better off for it.
My solution to this was to put Jerboa there, and add Tachiyomi (Manga reading app) above it, for when I’m just looking for “something” to busy myself.
I switched it out for the PWA of my instance
I put mlem in the spot where Apollo (sob) used to be
Mlem is kind of ass. I’m working on an iOS app now for Lemmy and others. All of your posts and communities across all of your services and servers in one feed. I’m really excited about it.
Oooh. Make a sub or whatever they’re called so we can follow the progress? :)
Stick around the cute animals are growing by the day! Seriously on Saturday I could only find one community dedicated to animals. Today while browsing I found like EIGHT!
Same, but for me it’s Apollo! I had to take it off my home screen. I am committed to the 48 hours and beyond, if necessary! And got everyone in my house to join in too! But damn it’s a hard habit to break!
I’ve become partial to animals eating food 🥺 where do I go for this content 😭
I’m not sure, but here’s a photo of my son’s blue parakeet eating to hold you over until you find it. (Also, let me know if you find such a community.)
Nom nom nom. (But if you find fruit bats or capybaras eating, let me know!)
Same, I just kept instinctively looking for Boost throughout the day to scroll and then catching myself amd going “godamn it, you made accounts in other places a week ago for this! Just go there!”
I got better at it by the end of the day, by tomorrow hopefully I’ll hop here or tildes first instead of mindlessly trying to open reddit first.
The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I’ll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn’t coming naturally.
And, yes, I know the username doesn’t match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website’s core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I’m aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they’re going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg…
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I’ve learned anything it’s that Reddit’s admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that’s come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don’t see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
dude same. 13 years. Reddit has been a huge part of my life for a long time. I even lurked for a year or so before making an account. It feels like a break up in a weird way, but lets remember we’re breaking up because they’ve become a controlling abusive spouse and we deserve better :)
Now we’ve entered a polyamorous relationship (multiple Lemmy instances)
Honestly it’s all pretty confusing to me I’m getting better and better but I think its gonna take a couple weeks.
Honestly? I fucking love it.
Its SO fast (I have my own instance), and instead of subscribing to subreddits and one server, now I subscribe to communities and multiple instances.
The people are responsive.
Only problem is missing niche communities, and discoverability, but that will improve with time hopefully with something like multi-reddits.
See like I dont even know what you just said lol. I don’t know what an instance is or what a server means in this context, and i know what a community is kinda but no idea why they are called something.something//Lemmy.something.biz.kbin haha. and I dont know what multiple instances is.
I’ve got a lot to learn. But hey I managed to reply to this so im getting somewhere.
Okay, here’s how I explained it to my kid.
You’ve got the united states, that’s lemmy.
You’ve got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.
Communities are cities.
Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they’re working on the same basic principles.
The fediverse is the UN.
It ain’t exactly right, but it ain’t exactly wrong :)
This has helped me more than anything else I think lol love it.
haha that gave me a good laugh :)
Think of lemmy as like an email (except everyone can see it). You have an email address “steakfries” and the domain you registered your email on “@lemmy.one” so if I want to email you I have to enter in @steakfries@lemmy.one
I can “email” you from any domain, be it Gmail, yahoo, my own server, etc and you can likewise respond.
Yeah that’s the problem I think, is that the majority of people aren’t familiar with how web technologies work and how all the communication happens.
Basic users can just signup on lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org forever and just treat it like their new Reddit home.
I also have my own instance. But it feels so lonely being the only one on a sever haha. That being said, do you know if upvotes and downvotes are also federated? In fact, I’m using jerboa on beehaw and I don’t think I see any upvote / downvote metrics
beehaw disabled downvotes, but other instances haven’t. the sidebar said disabled downvotes encourages more active discussion, and prevents unpopular opinions from being silenced by a flood of downvotes. they want people to engage by saying “i disagree with you, here’s why” instead of passively downvoting and moving on.
you should be able to see you the upvotes on your comments though.
Fairly sure upvotes/downvotes on my comments have been federated into my instance. I can’t see it on Lemmy’s webUI but it appears via the mlem app.
and like why is your name so long. it says @nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev that just seems ridiculous. why not just nii236
Says you:
I’m chatting to you from lemmy.jtmn.dev, and you’re chatting to me from lemmy.one, on a community on beehaw.org.
okay I’ve learned a bit because I’m pretty sure I understand that now. Like I said it’s gonna take a few weeks but I’ll get there. I’m pretty determined to leave reddit and have been for a long time just needed a push. I’m already making my way around my new “frontpage” alright. I do like how fast everything is and how comments and upvotes seem to be live.
I keep having to force myself to use Lemmy instead. I literally just caught myself on Reddit. Ugh
I solved that problem by deleting the app I used for Reddit. I mean, it’s going to stop working in about two weeks anyway, so might as well delete it now.
I made my reddit app not have access to data over wifi or the cell network, so when I open it, it opens and forever is “loading” until I realize my mistake.
I’ve had the best day. Most I’ve accomplished in a while IRL. And of corse exploring around this place.
That’s awesome!
13 year club here too. It’s sure seems like a lot of us long timers have been the first to move. I guess there’s a certain sense of ‘I’ve seen where this goes’ from experience with other sites in the past.
Also part of the 10+ year club (long time lurker). You’re right about that “familiar sense”, but for myself it comes with a forgotten sense of optimism.
Reddit’s been on the decline for years before the Vitoria incident or The Great Purge… but as long as I had my niche communities, baconreader, and old.reddit.com - I could “get by”… as Reddit became more and more aggressive in selling “me as the product”.
The federated and open source nature of Lemmy will solve the issue of “corporate presence”, but it will require us to “roll up our sleeves” - which I find refreshing.
No bots or astroturfing here yet though (or ChatGPT posts), so who knows, maybe Lemmy will spiral faster than expected
It’s really strange how civil and relaxed the discussions have been. Makes me wonder how much of Reddit is either children or bots stirring the pot constantly
I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.
The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.
Security through obscurity!
Though be careful, too obscure and you’ll get the most horrible people hanging around. I discovered this while Bitmessage community…
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.
Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.
But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.
only 12 years for me, but almost a decade of premium ends now
Same here. been on reddit for around 12 years, of nearly constant daily use. it’s a weird feeling.
There are dozens of us!
I’m getting my 13yr badge in November. Idk. I don’t think I’m deleting my account. I couldn’t even muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account that I’ve had since 2009, that I’ve barely used for the last several years.
So to delete my reddit account, that I use everyday – except at least today and tomorrow; probably first time in several years, maybe even a decade – feels wrong.
My goal, however, is to reduce my activity on reddit over time. Give up my remaining mod positions. Start unsubscribing from subreddits little by little. Maybe just use it for researching work related thing. So far, Beehaw/Lemmy and Tildes and Mastodon have been holding my attention pretty well. We’ll see.
I can relate. I’m a sentimental digital hoarder, I guess. But I’ve beaten my impulses to get on reddit today at least!
This is how I feel, too. I’m leaving my posts and comments up; ironically, I used to habitually purge my profile every year or so because I was worried about IRL people finding me through my activity, but now, I’d prefer to just leave it. Even if I stop being active on Reddit, it’s currently one of the best ways to find answers to niche problems; I’d like to keep my stuff accessible for anyone looking for extremely specific answers. I’ve been fairly private on Reddit, though, so it feels less sentimental and more practical. (Twitter, on the other hand… I never use it, but everything on it is way too sentimental to nuke.)
Yeah, I’ve learned so much from people on that place.
Caught myself googling “something something Reddit” today and realized this is gonna be harder than I thought. Really liking it here though and hopefully this gets the user base up to a point I can start googling “something something beehaw”
Ask chatgpt what Reddit things about something something. It has probably scraped everything on Reddit anyway.
Scraped, but rearranged into a perfectly readable word salad.
Yeah this is the main reason I won’t be giving up reddit 100% once the 3rd party apps go down. I definitely won’t be doom scrolling on my phone like I used to, but I 100% will still use reddit on my desktop as a research tool. There’s just nothing else like it for the amount of quality niche information atm.
If I’m forced to the official Reddit app, I’ll go from following 30+ subreddits to only 5 or 6. And even those, I’ll likely comment less on.
There are communities like /r/LEGO that I don’t know of a replacement for. (Maybe there could be a thread where people post the Reddit communities that they miss and people reply with alternatives. Someone could even keep a list to make it easy to search.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried the official app, but that strategy wouldn’t even help most likely. Every 3-5 posts that you see from your subscribed subs, they throw in a “recommended for you” nonsense post to try and drive your engagement. It’s infuriating
Made one for yah
Hero
Same, I’ve got an ad blocker and I won’t be using it for content. But reddit still has an amazing repertoire of knowledge.
I’ve had multiple times when I launched Boost (my third party app of choice - at least until it’s forced to shut down) out of force of habit.
Thankfully, I planned for this eventuality. I installed a “focus” app and set it to block Boost and the Reddit app for 2 days. (I’ve since also moved the apps away from their usual spot on my phone to prevent launches.)
I just uninstalled BaconReader a couple of days ago. I replaced its shortcut with Jerboa yesterday.
I logged into old a few times since to check for any orangereds, but it’s been long enough now that I never need to go back to check on anything.
What’s interesting is that a bunch of subreddits have disappeared from my multis in Apollo, perhaps because they were dark for over a day? Not sure.
Just woke up and first thing I do was open Apollo (lol) and this is what I noticed.
Apollo shutting down completely is going to disrupt my life like crazy!
On the official app and site, subs that went private completely disappeared from search and subscriptions, even if you’re still able to go to the url. I figure the same is true across various apps.
Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.
It’ll be interesting to see if/how we’ll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It’s gon’ get old fast to type
[x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it’d be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something likesite:!social.lemmy.As the other commenter said, this is also why I won’t give up reddit 100%
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can’t say I won’t miss it though, wish there was a “Lemmy is fun” already
The NSFW community (lemmyNSFW.com) has exploded due to the blackout.
Praise porn-Jesus, horny be his name.
NSFW always seems to push technology forward, be it video streaming, or VR, or now federated link aggreagators.
Niche communities reign for now! I’ll wait to create an alt account until the influx dies down, but this is, uh … handy to know.
We’re trying to expand it to cover more topics currently
Are we blocked from seeing NSFW communities on Beehaw? (Not an issue, I would create an alt for that anyway. Just curious)
Check your profile settings. There’s a nsfw setting in there that might be blocking you
I have an account on lemmy.world and can see more NSFW communities while browsing all communities. IDK if that’s just a bi-product of them being more active or something beehaw does on their end and it just hasn’t caught up with the influx yet, but either way it’s fine with me. Beehaw ain’t about porn, I’m perfectly fine having a separate account somewhere that is more about it.
I believe (could be wrong) that they just are against hosting NSFW communities on beehaw. You should still be able to view things from other instances if NSFW is enabled in your account settings.
I think so. I am not sure but I remember reading somewhere that beehaw blocked nsfw. There is a stickied SFW post on lemmyNSFW that is for linking NSFW communities to those who wouldn’t be able to see them.
I can see it on mobile with jerboa so I don’t think so
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion subs. You have no idea how many posts/comments they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling. Trust me, they make up well over 80% of all post/comments on reddit.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments is mind-boggling
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about and I could perform my own research into the subject.
Look at the posts from users that post there, mostly OF promotions, you’ll see like 20, 30 posts back to back in 10, 20 minute span.
OF is a huge business now, litelarly get sugar daddies from OF subscribers, not to mention the subscribers themselves, they bring a revenue as well. Most of them just want a quick buck, don’t wanna work, live with their parents at 25+ years… bsiaclly, just lazy AF individuals that make pocket money from that so they at least don’t bother their parents when they hang out with friends. a large portion even show their faces now, don’t even care, their friends and family know, it doesn’t seem to bother them.
I cam share some of those subs if you’d like, got an account for that on reddit 😁.
As far as i understand it’s not 90% of all Subs but 90% of all the Subs who announced to participate in the Blackdown. Many Subs, especially ones led by Reddit employees but also many NSFW subs are still public
I got the 90% from here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ - So this site is only listing the subreddits which declared their participation? In that case, I misunderstood the purpose of this site. I thought that this is a mostly complete subreddit list (granted, I have no idea how many subreddits exists on reddit… I’m not sure you can even get a list or scrape them effectively)
In march 2023 there were 3,125,000 subreddits. So the total % of subreddits going dark is very low. However I assume a lot of subreddits are very small. It would be interesting to see how many of the top 1,000 or 10,000 subreddits are in private mode right now. source for total amount of subreddits: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Thanks for the info and source. I should have figured. I edited my comment to reflect this, I think we see the long tail effect in action, and just goes to show that every subreddit and community should participate in the protest, no matter how small.
You can find the top 50 largest subreddits by amount of subscribers here: https://subredditstats.com/list/most-subscribers
Compare it to the list of https://reddark.untone.uk/ and you can see that not all the largest subreddits are listed, for example r/AskReddit.
It seems the subs that went private don’t show up on the stats anymore. /r/funny has more subscribers than /r/AskReddit, for example
I’ve been watching the forked version, and the total number of subreddits and darksubs have been increasing. My first thought was that there were a heap on new subs being created. I’m now not so sure what I’m looking at.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
Bots usually post to their own user page/subreddit to my knowledge.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that’ll auto-ban accounts that post in “free karma subreddits”—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of
But, a bot that’s aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn’t need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.
Reddit is the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” and some of the subreddits that are “firmly in control” by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.
People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.
Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will “always come back” so long as those communities remain intact.
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I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Honestly the subreddits for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
