“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Protest is important, just not against us.
“This is a business decision, not like all those other times people protested companies.”
/c/Leopardsatemyface ?
They have the right to do what they like.
Redditors should delete that label, and simply set up shop in their garden shed instead.
Someone may tell this guy that making (bad) business decisions is probably the #1 reason why businesses fail
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The fact that we’re communicating from so many different websites blows my mind! Just a little extra thing that makes this platform even more fun for me :)
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Yes. We could make our own little shitty website on a free server like angelfire, with a traffic ticker so we knew if anyone had been there. Mine was a stupid little parody website my friends and I set up for keeping track of acronyms and abbreviations we saw online. Didn’t realize we had something there, and could have been Urban Dictionary lol.
Yeah I gotta say, “Webrings are back!” was not on my 2023 bingo card. But I’m not hating it by a longshot! It feels like a nice hybrid of the lil Angelfire/Geocities sites and yahoogroups/onelist. Usually fandom communities were hand in hand with those two platform elements, and I’ve missed that tight-knit community feeling.
Echoing this, it’s a very similar feeling! We also had guestbooks for people to leave comments and these things called webrings that would let you explore more similar sites. I remember running a small fansite and forum. It was an interesting time.
Ah yes guestbooks. My first foray into actual programming (rather than just HTML) was when I wanted to add a guestbook to my silly little website, followed a tutorial, found out tutorial was borked and went looking for advice on what was going wrong (multiple things). By the time my guestbook worked properly I knew PHP(4 or 5) reasonably well.
Kid from 90s that grew up with the advent of the internet. It’s somewhat similar, but still very managed and controlled. Internet in the 90s was absolutely wild. Obscure corners, all sorts of content, free, open and you could spend days and days exploring it and still couldn’t enough of it. All of it was unique, driven by passions, curiosities, desires, people wanting to express themselves.
I sort of dislike what it has become and how everything is monetized. But I suppose, this is the cost of progress and innovation in the rest of the areas of our lives.
Late night internet chats, dropping the A/S/L and expecting the person to reply honestly. Those were the days.
pretty much yeah, but with IRC
I think I have felt that way for one thing or another since 98.
Internet itself blew my mind, playing age of empires with my buddy with just one phone call, then finding about mIRC, peer 2 peer, torrents, stuff i cant remember, and video games getting better graphics at ever increasing steps. I still get a little shocked when I see PS2 games listed as retro games.And now they are making advances way more often in quantum computing.
I just remembered the first time I heard about a terabyte and the story that “the only place that can hold that ammount of massive storage are the vatican servers” (whatever those may be) lol.Non-internet Bulletin Boards would each host message forums but would exchange packages of messages (such as QWK files) via modem so that you could communicate with others connecting to different BBSs around the world.
Such a magical experience back then.
Then usenet newsgroup servers did much the same, (but probably updated more frequently). The peer-to-peer aspect was transparent to the users, so it was good to have just one “place”, a newsgroup, where everyone could discuss a subject. But numbers were low enough that it wasn’t flooded with messages.
I completely forgot how cool the internet was outside of corporate silos. And yes, the '90s internet was slow as hell, but there were so much of it to explore.
This project has legs. I’ve been on Lemmy this past week but now I’m commenting from kbin. Once you start to figure everything out you really see the potential.
I started out on lemmy.world but I tried kbin and I like it’s UI way more. When I realized I could just follow all of those communities on kbin I was sold!
I created this account earlier today a first step to move away from reddit. I’ve heard kbin mentioned and will; have to check that out too.
Indeed.
I’m trying to help the Lemmy.world chat community take off. Come introduce yourself!
Honestly, it might not be a great thing just yet. I feel like Lemmy is struggling under the influx, it’s just not ready usability wise. When I tapped on the link to this comment section, I got a weird Latter Day Saints post until I reloaded. There’s so, so many things like that and I’m deeply worried it’s going to give people a bad impression.
Then again…it’s not like they have anywhere else to go…
This was always going to be a mess at first, no question, but I’m worried it will get messy to the point Lemmy starts cracking.
It just further drives home the point that people got way to comfortable using one or two sites. We need to get into the habit of having multiple sites and alternatives again, or this is going to happen every time the “new big thing” goes to shit.
The missionaries were trying to get ya!
Kbin works like a dream except for the occasional server error.
I love kbin’s UI. It’s awesome that we can be on lemmy, but on a site we prefer
Yep the UI is excellent for my needs. It looks great and is easy to interact with. There are a few nooks and crannies for settings which I imagine will throw a few new users off but it appeals to my ‘learn by clicking random buttons’ nature.
I’ve actually been really enjoying the mobile site. I hope we’ll get an Apollo-style app one day, but the mobile site is pretty damn good for how new kbin is
Funny you should say that I actually literally just started a magazine which I’m beginning to fill with basic mobile UI tips for those who just want to get going: m/quickstart
When I first started using reddit over a decade ago it was pretty great. I didn’t really stop to think what would happen if reddit started to act more like a corporation because I was having too much fun.
Now that time has come, and it’s time to move on to a more free (as in freedom) and open system. It’s immoral that all those years worth of human interaction (the howto’s, cat videos, porn, niche topics etc) is “owned” by a corporation.
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Oh well, here I am, glad to join this ship. I just want a reliable place I can further geek out on mechanical keyboards, memes and news. I hope we migrate somewhere cause reddit does not look like it has a bright future.
Welcome! I’m super stoked to be here, too. And each day this community seems to grow stronger.
I agree that reddit’s future looks weak. The API change was horrible. Spez’s approach to the whole thing was even worse: condescending, disingenuous, and hostile.
And the more I think about it, the less I see any hope for reddit as a place I want to spend time. This isn’t just one bad episode. Once the company goes public, there’s going to be more shit like this. The site will slowly gut itself for perceived short-term gains, over and over again.
No thanks.
the problem with shareholders is that they always and forever need to see a chart that’s in a growing trend. That line is getting kind of stagnant there mate how you gonna please us? What makes this problematic is that there will be a finite number of users for this infinitely growing service, sooner or later growth will have to slow and this does NOT please the shareholder. Where are the gains bro? I was promised gains.
Not always, but it is when you go public. I work a lot at small businesses, lots of them have shareholders who are mostly hands-off, or would prefer a more conservative approach to protect their investment.
People who invest in non-public businesses are usually in for the long haul, and come with much greater risk.
But when you go public, your business just comes a commodity, nothing but a vehicle for a fund manager to use to try and get a higher return for their clients so they get more business and commission.
In theory, it’s a really democratic system, but the reality is that we’ve lost track of what an investment is meant to be, and the number of private individuals actually holding shares in a company directly is very low, it’s mostly fund managers who literally just want to pump their numbers for a few years, because long term, they never really beat the market.
Agreed. I have seen time and time again companies going public and turning I to a steaming pile of crap. I have no doubt the ads are going to get worse and they are going to continue to make bad decisions. It’s all about exponential profit now.
One good thing about the blackout is it brought this place to my attention. Made quitting reddit so much easier.
Do you know if old.reddit is going to be vanquished as well?
When I talked to my Discord group, they asked for a source. Ironically, I can’t access the threads with all the logistical explanations of why old.reddit would be eliminated (because… they’ve gone private), and while yes, an official source/confirmation would actually give them cause to be angry (I totally get it - no one wants to think they can’t use old.reddit any longer), it’s frustrating to see they’re not accepting it.
I can imagine one reason being no support for in-line video ads, when scrolling down a subreddit or the homepage
Right now the ads are limited to a tiny image and a title on old.reddit. There was also a traditional squarish ad space on the right hand side IIRC but I’ve never seen an ad in there…
I really don’t know. I definitely recall Spez saying it’s safe. But it seems like we’d be wise to not trust a word he says.
Ooh is there a mechanical keyboards lemmy yet??
Ooh is there a mechanical keyboards lemmy yet??
Just fyi, when posting links to communities, you should just use the “/c/” without the link to the instance. Like this: /c/mechanicalkeyboards@lemmy.ml
This is similar to how those links were done on reddit (/r/). The problem with your link is that it is instance specific, which is really helpful for anyone in your instance, but anyone in a different instance will be thrown out of their instance if they click it (they’ll be unable to subscribe).
When I click your link, I’m getting kicked out of Jerboa…
me too, but still helpful advice for web users
just remember that jerboa is very much in alpha and needs more developers to implement the finer stuff like this. the guy currently working on it is also a developer of lemmy itself, so he doesnt have much time for the app. if you happen to have some android dev knowledge, please see if you could contribute!
I wanted to get into android dev space but I don’t have a computer powerful enough.
oh shoot, I’m not familiar with it at all myself and didn’t know it needed you to have decent specs.
out of curiosity, what sort of specs are required at bare minimum and why? I’m guessing maybe for the android emulator to work properly, though in this age of insane, bloated electron software, anything could be the culprit, even the IDE :')
Thank you, I will use this in the future!
One on lemmy.ml and one on kbin.social. But Lemmy’s moderator labeled as “deleted by user” even though community is more active compared to one over kbin
Fellow mk enjoyer
click clack gang
But Huffman says the “pure infrastructure costs” of supporting these apps costs Reddit about $10 million each year.
Eh, so although, according to him, the third party apps cost Reddit 10 million per year, he still decided that 20 million a year from a single third party app developer is reasonable? I think he needs to learn some basic math…
I don’t think they seriously expected any third party apps to agree to the costs. They just wanted a plausible excuse to funnel everyone into their own app for data collection and advertising revenue. That’s my best guess anyway, another business decision for the IPO.
Well there is also human cost for development, PR etc, which also probably costs a lot
That would be where that 10 mil figure would have come from.
No. $10mm/year for cloud spend is totally reasonable for a website the size of reddit. Honestly it’s lower then I would expect.
I’ll admit I’m not entirely well versed in this, but what development? Is the API being continually worked on? I’d imagined it was relatively stable, especially given how awful Reddit has traditionally been with any kind of feature development.
Hell, they couldn’t even make their own app, they had to buy Alien Blue and then drive it into the ground for $$$
Yeah, is not the cost he’s charging 3rd party, it’s the expected lost ad revenue.
So bad the article did not put that number into context.
They’re just presenting one-dimensional claims by the CEO. The overall infrastructure cost tells you nothing about gains or cost or losses due to API users.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the early beginnings of the Internet in the 90s - and what’s happening now with the fediverse feels like coming back to its roots.
We may well find that the implosion of Twitter and Reddit - within 6 months of each other - is the beginning of the end for “big tech”. It’s unlikely that it will go away entirely but I do feel a seismic shift happening. I seriously hope that it’s not a false dawn.
Can I just say thank you to all of the journalists protesting against reddit with the tools they have available? Most articles I’ve seen are pro reddit community or barely neutral. Dozens of news sites are involved, from left and right news sites, to finance magazines, to explainers like Reuters and NPR. Multiple articles a day are keeping this at the forefront of everyone’s mind - especially spez and potential investors - as well as ensuring the whole thing stays transparent. I’ve seen a few articles that link directly to lemmy and kbin signups too 😊
I agree. Honestly, I think these types of (front page!) articles are the only thing that CEOs pay attention to these days. I have no skin in the game anymore, since I deleted my (long-standing) account on Reddit and completely switched to Lemmy. However, it’s nice to see people take a stand against greed and, from what I’m seeing in the last day or so, hypocrisy…
to me lemmy has taken a big dip in activity the last couple days, particularly in the more niche communities. hopefully it grows back over time, but I’m not that optimistic.
I would expect the big jump to come when people who are barely engaged with this whole thing try to open Apollo or Sync or whatever in a few weeks, seeing it doesn’t work, then spending 5 minutes trying to use the official app before getting frustrated and googling “reddit alternative”
then they’ll come to Lemmy and be just as frustrated with a confusing new architecture, buggy website, and apps in their infancy.
Maybe, but I think people overstate this. Reddit’s desktop UI and official app still confuse and upset me. Frankly the on-boarding to Lemmy is easier if anything
I found it as an alternative and haven’t had any issues on a mobile chromium browser. Sign up was fairly easy too. Maybe that’s because I was directed to a federated offshoot with less logins.
To me both lemmy and kbin got a very important push, it showed the potential of the fediverse to sustain communities.
The dip in activity is something expected, the platform is still in its infancy and will get more refined with time, eventually being able to retain non tech-savvy users.I’m literally not tech savvy at all, and I’m here. Lol.
Yeah I don’t understand why people are complaining so much. I really wouldn’t describe myself as tech savvy at all, I can only Google my way out of tech issues sometimes. But I went here, picked an instance I liked, signed up, downloaded Jerboa and I’m here and done.
I honestly couldn’t even tell you how I made my account, which tells me it was super easy, because if it frustrated me I would remember it, lol. I needed my husband’s help with a printer issue, and literally all I needed to do was open the settings and select “fit to paper” 😂 and I couldn’t figure out how to change the paper thickness on the printer at work to use cardstock. But I’ve been on Jerboa for a few days now, and while I’m still discovering some features, it’s not hard or frustrating, and most everyone in the community is friendly and helpful.
It boils down to the fact people generally don’t want change, but they don’t want Reddit.
Some people complaining about Lemmy want it to be “Reddit 2.0” where Reddit 2.0 is the same and better than Reddit without realising that work has to be put in to make it better, and that better inherently means it cannot be the same. They want their cake and to eat too.
As for me, I’d prefer to think of Lemmy/kbin/fediverse as the next step, not the same as Reddit, but serving a similar purpose. And because we’re just getting started, as a developer I know there’s going to be more kinks that need to be worked out, so I stick with them.
I’m not expecting Reddit to fully disappear either - many people just won’t care, they want to be where the people are, and currently Reddit is where the people are. They won’t move untill there’s enough people, and by then the platform should have already stabilised. You’ll know when Lemmy hits the mainstream when it’s mentioned regularly in passing in news articles as a source, not like this “what is Lemmy or what is the fediverse” article barrage were getting currently.
Get on squabble as well.
Everyone knows, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, is that spez is a moron, and is doomed as CEO.
I might be a little bit cynical but I suspect at least some of them are only writing about it because Reddit was the source of all of their stories and they don’t want to have to do actual journalism again…
Where will the gaming sites get their Skyrim article material now lmao
I really appreciate The Verge’s coverage on this. I guess someone there really have an axe to grind on Spez or Reddit lol.
Traditional media outlets are not exactly in the friendliest of terms with social media platforms in the realm of disputing ad revenue.
That’s an institutional attack from content producers against a platform. In the limit publishers could host their own lemmy instances.
Interesting and rare thing to see…
Traditional media outlets are not exactly in the friendliest of terms with social media platforms in the realm of disputing ad revenue.
Ehh. I don’t think that this is some elaborate strategic move coordinated from on-high at media companies in the space of a day or two. It’s just a big, high-profile event to write a story about.
I agree it’s a big high profile event to write a story about.
But it wouldn’t be put upfront covers with that level of screen real estate if each of the individual publications didn’t have vested interests on it. Maybe with a few exceptions.
Not necessarily coordinated, but like a discoordinated lynch mob, just… Not holding back?
What good will outrage/protest do? It’s time to migrate. Reddit was built by volunteers who can build it again. Lemmy seems like a good choice, but time will tell if it can be the next front page of the internet.
Yes. We need to somehow convince reddit mods to create their community here and redirect the users here.
I don’t agree that communities need to migrate entirely. New platforms need time to naturally grow. If the user experience isn’t good, then moving too many people too early will be bad in the long run.
Regardless, Reddit will continue to exist in some form for the forseeable future. It’s not going to collapse in a matter of days. It might not ever collapse.
If places like Newgrounds, 4chan, 9gag, funnyjunk, etc. are still going then Reddit will keep chugging along for now. People will find there way here eventually.
I think they should migrate and that it should have happened a long time ago. We have been depending on corporations and their proprietary platforms for way too long. We also need to leave YouTube and other centralized platforms.
Unfortunately you are right that Reddit will continue to exist. Its users have the power to change that though if they only wanted to.
But I don’t want it to be the front-page of the internet. That turned out horrible.
Because a company has control behind it, not the people
“…we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Great, then I’m not negotiating when I say you’re a shite CEO and I’m done with your crappy website.
Now Spez is sucking off Musk in the media talking about how Twitter’s “cost cutting measures” were genius, firing most of your staff is never a genius move.
Makes me wonder what morale is like for the employees at Reddit. Working for a CEO that admires Musk’s takeover of Twitter would have me running for the door.
Lol. Isn’t that moron getting evicted? Yeah, “genius” my ass
Landlords HATE this one weird trick!
Twitter is still thriving? O_o
Back channel asking Musk to buy Reddit for $40B
Should be edited to say Diggs in Heels
Congratulations, you win the fediverse 🏆 🤣
This whole debacle will end up being a MBA case study in a few years on how not to work with your user community.
But i have a feeling it will probably show that it doesn’t matter.
Exactly. The effects are not going to be instant though. I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks. Hopefully Lemmy ends up being the answer. If it does, then my use of Reddit will drop sharply in the next month or two. Who knows, maybe then reddits board of directors will realize that Spez just killed their golden goose.
I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks.
Same here. My reddit account is now only for a select few communities that haven’t made much of a foothold in federated space yet here on Lemmy. But my reddit interaction is down, and I’m honestly considering deleting my account there given the total shitshow going on.
I don’t think it’s a place I want to go back to, especially given how hostile the place can be overall. Arguing is engagement. Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air in terms of civil and engaging discussion. It’s actually like what reddit used to be over a decade ago.
I still make about one post a day on reddit in communities I like, in a reply that says “there’s nowhere else to turn to” and make sure to mention the fediverse every time. Which is far less than I post on here, where it’s about 50/50 circlejerk about reddit, and the other half is actually engaging with (or even creating) content.
This is my new home. It’s small, but I like it that way. I mean, you can actually find out all communities on an instance, so I actually find a lot more relevant communities here than on reddit. They still gotta grow though.
Yeah. Shit is really going down on reddit right now. Spez is trying to paint this as “power hungry mods are closing down your favourite subs. Let admins control reddit more and we’ll stop the power mods”. Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people. Classic tactic of the ruling class turning people against one another to distract while they fuck people over. Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
Its like the iq of the average redditor dropped over night.
That’ll happen when the oldest part of the userbase emigrates.
Tons of shills and astroturfers too in every community, basically repeating the same talking points over and over. And then they’ve got doomgloomers who are trying to convince people that it’s pointless. And now lately you have the most insidious assholes, the ones that tell moderators to “protest” by not moderating. That last one is hilarious because if you stop moderating a community, Reddit WILL give it to someone else or ban it.
Either way, this place is nice a cozy compared to Reddit, it’s like in the old days. I’m loving it.
Sadly, it really seems to be working for a lot of people.
Most of those people will realize in a few months… the people posting content of value left, and came here.
And, reddit will become a cesspool like never seen before.
“Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”
Honestly, my reply to this particular statement is that maybe Reddit should die!
I’m not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don’t have control over them, friendo.
You can’t just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there’s no overcoming business decisions.
Bro has the personality of a turd and the charisma to match.
A good play might have been to buy it off Selig for a few million. But he’s so fucking unlikable and put his foot in his mouth dozens of times at this point that the power users are unlikely to back down. Reddit will limp along and lose another 40%+ valuation over the next few months as spez plows through his community to try and squeeze as much money as he can from the corpse not realizing he’s doing the opposite of what he needs to do.
Gotta drive down the price to buy it and musk it
“Alright boys, you heard him. He said the magic word. Let’s pack our things and get out of here.”
That’s really the only thing left at this point.
If there’s no negotiating, fuck it, burn it down. We built it, we can unmake it, and that bastard can build it back up himself if he’s so damn set on making a profit of it.
He seems to think that the people want the shit that he and his dev team created. They don’t. People want the content of the site. And all he is succeeding in doing here is showing away a good deal of it
Well put…
That quote is fucking wild. spez, a man of the people, all for protesting except for this time because he’s nOt NeGoTiAtInG. Lol k, same bud.
“Your business decision is making people HATE you”
At this point, it needs to.
He’s counter-protesting
I’m definitely not going to download the official reddit app, I’m done with it for good. Lemmy’s mobile website is good enough for now, hoping that the Apollo developer decides to make a Lemmy client eventually
I also will never install the official reddit app. I’m trying to move away from reddit altogether for various reasons.
I created this account this morning and am writing this message on Jerboa (got it off fdroid). So far so good!
Fellow Jerboa user here - it’s basic but it has everything needed. Currently I’m in a remote French Polynesian island and it’s perfectly responsive.
Bonjour from Canada!
Bonjour! En tant qu’Américain non francophone, être ici me donne envie de ne pas avoir appris le latin au lycée.
J’ai appris le français au lycée. Je ne me souviens pas de grand-chose par contre. Google a traduit cela pour moi, mais ça a l’air correct.
Oui, il semble que je me sois fait un ami qui utilise également Google Traduction pour communiquer en français. C’est l’essence de ce qu’on appelle la lingua Franka. Quelle chance j’ai rencontré celui qui est connu sous le nom de SkullRot. Bonne journée à vous et bonne chance dans vos efforts.
Yeah I’m on jerboah from the Google app store. Seems to work fine
jerboa exists and works very well
Isn’t that only on android? I’m on iPhone
Mlem on iOS
It’s in beta. And Testflight is full. Should be out on July first tho. The Homescreen solution is fine for now.
Yeah Mlem is very buggy and missing a lot of big stuff right now. That being said, folks should use it to at minimum provide feedback so it can improve.
So is Jerboa on Android. These apps are quite new and need some time to evolve.
You can also put Lemmy on your homescreen as a PWA.
It’s in beta. And Testflight is full. Should be out on July first tho. The Homescreen solution is fine for now.
In case you missed it: if you have Lemmy open in the browser, use the share button and Add to Home Screen. Feels and looks like an app that way.
Haha yeah it’s supposed to but in my experience it feels and looks like a buggy webpage without a refresh button. I still have the shortcut on my home screen, I figure once server issues have been worked out then I won’t need the refresh button as often.
Shit, let’s go back to digg, why not? Is it still there?
checks digg.com
Oh shit, nevermind, here is good!
Why not jerboa? Works decently well… EDIT: nevermind, forgot it’s not on iOS and mlem isn’t great yet
“… not going to change anything”
Yet look what happened to the fediverse. I wouldn’t be here without his boneheaded move. So it already changed things for me and thousands more like me. I don’t plan on going back.
