• 6 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’s wrong for Spez to charge for API access, but the rates he’s vowing to charge are excessive and clearly designed to nuke third-party apps from their ecosystem.

    As for how I’d make money from Reddit in his shoes, I’d:

    1. Add more features for Reddit Premium, like being able to view more than 1,000 items on the front page, video uploads in comments, or enhanced search functionality.
    2. Add OnlyFans-style subscriptions or revenue sharing for partnered subreddits/users, with a 90% to 10% cut between content creators and Reddit.
    3. Bring back RPAN as a full time streaming platform to compete with the likes of Twitch/Kick.

  • I’ve been a lot more active on Beehaw over the past few days than on Reddit. Tried to get into Kbin but the servers have been remarkably unstable and I don’t like the fact that you can only view 25 comments at once.

    I think a lot of subreddits will fold. Your typical reddit moderator is hungry for power and having that power taken away from them is probably more terrifying to them than losing Apollo/RIF/BaconReader/Sync/Relay.







  • Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.

    Why?

    1. It directly falls afoul of Reddit’s rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.

    2. There’s an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with simp culture, or the notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.

    3. In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them…

    4. It’s ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you’d otherwise have feel genuine, that’s if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.

    5. More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn’t agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so put an Automoderator filter so I’m effectively shadowbanned from using words like “OnlyFans” or “e-girl.”




  • Reddit has a worse power-user problem than Digg. I mean at the very least Digg didn’t give its most active users the power to remove other people’s content. The difference is that Reddit already existed as a better alternative to Digg until it imploded, whereas until the recent API changes and blackout happened, there was no viable alternative to Reddit and a lack of people seeking an alternative.

    I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.

    Time will tell. My concern about Lemmy is that it’s non-profit and server hosting costs are great. It’s all well and good until you see some of the smaller instances shut down because they cannot afford to host.







  • I think it’s down to the communities page more than anything else. Don’t know if it’s a bug with Beehaw specifically or Lemmy in general not having the feature, but you can’t sort/filter the list of communities by number of subscribers or by instance.

    Still a tonne better than Mastodon… My biggest complaint about Mastodon and the reason I barely use it is that if you look at all posts outside of your instance, you get riddled with bot spam. All I saw in the ‘All’ feed outside of my local instance were posts from a hentai reposting bot that regurgitated posts from various imageboards and anime porn subreddits…


  • IIRC it wasn’t within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.

    Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.

    There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it…



  • 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.