The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
For me, no matter what Reddit is dead. Lemmy is enough for my time wasting and has enough content that I have not missed it one bit. I feel like the communities are smaller, less toxic, and I want to contribute more here. They could completely reverse their decision and I will not return and I hope there are enough like me to make a difference. It just amazes me a site that exists to link to other content on the web and store text comments about said content isn’t profitable.
Lemmy is also ad free. Love that.
I’m always astounded at how few people use ad blockers. Fuck the entire ad-based system, it is cancer.
Any instance or community can include paid content, but the numbers are still a bit low for that now.
Thing is, if there was in instance or community doing ads, I now can simly block, mute or defederate them. With reddit I had to use an adblocker, scriptblocker and the reddit enhancement suite to be adfree. And I could not be sure it’d stay that way.
I do fee so much better now that reddit is dead to me. I check lemmy few times a week.
Fuck u/spez
(That was missing from this post.)
They did say he’s “the Kmart version of Elon Musk” which I thought was quite funny.
Right now it looks like it’s a decisive victory for spez, contrary to the article’s title.
Of course, the long-term consequences aren’t clear yet, the moderator exodus might result in the whole platform becoming too low-quality to sustain the user interaction, leading to people moving away from it.
Sure, and Digg got its way with the redesign back in the day.
Back then, there was an easy and viable alternative. Lemmy, sadly, is neither of those two.
Why isn’t Lemmy viable?
It’s not nearly as user friendly as reddit yet. People won’t spend the time to figure it out.
I’m curious why this is classified as “losing battle”… seems pretty successful so far to me.
Only if you define mods winning as ‘things go back to what they were’.
The CEO is only ‘winning’ in the sense that things will never return to what they are. He will undermine the protest at every turn, and then he will release his changes as intended.
His contributing users however, are leaving in droves. His ‘victory’ will be pyrrhic at beast.
Users were working for free in mutual trust; now they are expected to produce and moderate for free, and then buy back their own product. Moderators are booted because they’re locking subs as private, and then subs stay private anyway because nobody wants to moderate for free. Even those who would see moderating as a grab for power (the expected scabs) are less inclined to moderate while admins are proving they actually have little power at all (just unpaid labour).
We are his livestock. We thought we were meeting in a community hall to socialise, and then Huffman revealed we were congregated in his barn. The content we produced is to be sold off for his gain; it’s not ours. The space isn’t in any way ours, it merely shelters us while we produce his product: content.
Well, what’s happening right now is that the people who produce the content are leaving. Reddit will still have a ton of users, but they’ll mostly be the 90% lurkers and low-effort users that went there to consume that content contributing users aggregated for them.
Contributors are readily welcomed in almost any community; they don’t need to stay. It is the consuming users that are addicted, that Huffman (correctly) predicts will accept it.
Huffman will still have most of Reddit’s chickens, and that’s why he thinks it’s worth it. But the hens are leaving the barn, and Huffman will be left with the confused roosters who’ll produce nothing for him other than noise.
Mods are losing… but so is he.
Dude runs one of the world’s most popular websites and he can’t turn a profit with 20 years of free content and free labor.
You tell me who’s the fucking loser…
