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!

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    hey folks, new megathread is thataway since this one has like 500 comments already and news is quickly cycling out of date. we’ll lock this one down shortly. thanks!

  • DianaHasWings@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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 😂

  • KillaBeez@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • raf@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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

        • SpeedyCat2014@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            I might suggest getting ebooks? I have found reading a book to be a lot less stressful a lot of the time, and bonus, you don’t need to deal with data after you dl the book to read it.

      • the_nightman@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • DarthSnarker@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.)

        Dewey eating food.

        Dewey going for more.

    • LemmyAtem@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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!

    • GiantBasil@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:

      knock knock

      “Who’s there?”

      ”Mods. Hired mods.”

      “Hired mods?”

        • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          If the volunteer mods hold their ground and force Reddit corporate to oust them, Reddit would need to step in to fill the void.

          • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              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.

    • LemmyAtem@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Ah, “expected”, such a wonderful word! They expected for their infrastructure to explode, just according to keikaku

    • Luvs2Spuj@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • democracy1984@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Crotaro@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • steakfries@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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 :)

        • steakfries@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Honestly it’s all pretty confusing to me I’m getting better and better but I think its gonna take a couple weeks.

          • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • steakfries@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • Aninjanameddaryll@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                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 :)

              • Ryumast3r@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                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 @[email protected]

                I can “email” you from any domain, be it Gmail, yahoo, my own server, etc and you can likewise respond.

              • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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                1 year ago

                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.

              • DudePluto@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                I’m probably only really a week into all this stuff and I feel like I have a solid layman’s grasp of it all. You’ll get there too :)

            • PancakeFriday@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              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

              • longshaden@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                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.

              • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • steakfries@lemmy.one
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

            • AdminWorker@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              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.

            • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • steakfries@lemmy.one
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                1 year ago

                yeah i deleted Sync :( and just replaced the app with the Jerboa app for Lemmy. Now i open my phone and automatically click Lemmy and its working pretty well for me.

      • Be Here Now@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had the best day. Most I’ve accomplished in a while IRL. And of corse exploring around this place.

    • 🦘min0nim🦘@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      13 year club here too. It 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.

      • LedgeDrop@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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        1 year ago

        No bots or astroturfing here yet though (or ChatGPT posts), so who knows, maybe Lemmy will spiral faster than expected

        • KillaBeez@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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

          • woteorin@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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              1 year ago

              Security through obscurity!

              Though be careful, too obscure and you’ll get the most horrible people hanging around. I discovered this while Bitmessage community…

              • woteorin@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                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.

    • JCPhoenix@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • trufax@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I can relate. I’m a sentimental digital hoarder, I guess. But I’ve beaten my impulses to get on reddit today at least!

      • Fox@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.)

    • April@fedia.io
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      1 year ago

      Same here. been on reddit for around 12 years, of nearly constant daily use. it’s a weird feeling.

  • Clbull@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • makeitso@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • pre@fedia.io
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    1 year ago

    If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?

    Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?

    It’s like the kids today don’t know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?

    Dunno. I’ve never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.

    @Gaywallet

        • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgOP
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          Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month

      • pre@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        @Gaywallet Replying in your mega-thread. KBin here is tagging you when I do that and I didn’t delete it.

        Haven’t used Lemmy much, perhaps that behaviour is different?

      • steakfries@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        I think you may actually be the only one. whoa. I’ve never downloaded it so I wouldn’t know. But doesn’t it have ads? Because I hate ads so much and would never use an app that pushed them. Fuck ads honestly, I actually put in a good amount effort to make sure I see exactly 0 minutes of ads per day.

        • reric88🧩@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, my wife uses the official app and she complains about the ads. Constantly, certain subreddit posts show up in her feed as an ad.

          I tried the official app and didn’t like it. It was too bloaty, comment chains felt annoying, navigation was annoying, lack of features was annoying.

          I initially used Reddit Is Fun, then moved to Sync for some reason. Then moved to Boost after the Sync dev went MIA last year.

          Each one of those was leagues above the official app.

          • ඞmir@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            If you’re on Android and tech-handy you can remove the ads from the official app with Revanced Patcher.

          • steakfries@lemmy.one
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            1 year ago

            Thats funny my wife had the official app for a while and deleted it when I showed her Sync, I didn’t even realize she wasn’t using Sync to browse reddit i just assumed she did and never asked. I used Sync for years and years. Alien Blue I think before that. I assumed reddits app probably looked something like they’re new browser site and I hated that thing. I only ever used old.reddit with RES. Now I’ll never go back there again if I don’t have a good reason too.

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I used it for a good long while but what inevitably pushed me away were the absurd loading times and the ads. Things just took forever to load. Like, multiple minutes to watch a video, even more to load a subreddit. And there were ads every 5 posts.

      • ඞmir@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Have you even tried the alternatives? This might just be a “not knowing any better” situation

    • b000rg@midwest.social
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      I paid for the Apollo app when I used iOS, and I do not regret it in the slightest, because I’ve never been paid for any of the programming I’ve ever done. In fact, it’s all been done under the auspice of a student loan that I never earned a degree from. I’m happy to see someone get paid for their programming work and the fact that a multi-billion dollar company is trying to extort these programmers disgusts me to the highest level.

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      The mobile web interface sucks diarrhea geysers, so yeah, those of us who use our phones more than our, ahem, desktop terminals prefer an app that’s actually optimized for mobile.

      • pre@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        @CeruleanRuin their website says right there on the nag popup. This website is deliberately user hostile, to drive you all onto the app where you can be efficiently transported towards the rotating knives.

        I mostly just didn’t look at Reddit much to avoid the trap.

        @Gaywallet

  • jboyens@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.

        A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).

        • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.

          I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.

          • mizmoose@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.

            None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.

            • Gork@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.

            • setsneedtofeed@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.

              • surrendertogravity@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦

        • chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.

          • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.

            You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.

        • darius@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m just speculating of course, too, but could be some kind of sharding e.g. in the DB level. I can imagine the little subreddits draw little traffic hence fewer shards are allocated to them (like how S3 works).

      • Neotecha (She/her)@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).

        I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.

        I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation

      • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way

        but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…

    • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.

      The fail whale was iconic back in the day.

  • Hot Dog Water@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • GhostMagician@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • jakroois@beehaw.org
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      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.

        • jakroois@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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!

          • Silviecat44@vlemmy.net
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            1 year ago

            Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there

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    1 year ago

    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”

    • Boe6@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Faendol@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I wonder how long that’s going to hold. If they’re blocking google api to read for their AI, they also have to block google search (or else google not being stupid will just feed the seach readout into their AI).

    • danc4498@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Ask chatgpt what Reddit things about something something. It has probably scraped everything on Reddit anyway.

    • TechyDad@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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.)

      • blindsight@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Enfield [he/him]@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      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 like site:!social.lemmy.

    • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • Fox@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • Suppoze@beehaw.org
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    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 @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] 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.

    • Ryumast3r@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Going to download my data tomorrow and delete my own 11 years worth.

      Sad day, but also very cathartic.

        • bruzie@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          If you use Power Delete Suite there is the option to download your comments before editing (or just download). However it’s not great if you’ve got years of comments. If you click the download button it caps out at about 65k. But if you inspect the button the full export is available in the href so you can copy that into notepad. However the formatting is not great (CSV unfriendly characters are escaped), so it’s a bit of a clean up.

          There is the alternative of requesting all your data from Reddit itself. A preview I saw from someone else shows a more extensive dataset than you get from PDS. I’m still waiting on my data request (it’s only been a day and it can take up 30 days).

          • Deestan@beehaw.org
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            Thanks, Power Delete Suite was exactly the type of thing I’ve been trying to find for the past few days.

            I want my contributions out of Reddit’s hands, but still leave a protest up. PDS allows me to edit all comments and self posts to “[this user data has been purged]”.

          • Squirrel@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Is there a difference between the various types of data requests? There are 3 options based on different laws, but do they give different information?

      • dollop_of_cream@beehaw.org
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        The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          that right there is the biggest reason I never swapped to the new reddit redesign. Looks and aesthetics are one thing, but constantly having fake notifications about “you may like this post” or “you may like this community” shoved into my feed with the same notification icon as an actual reply to a post kept getting on my nerves.