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Yes, it’ll take time but this was a good kick in the pants.
Given that reddit is making it difficult for users to delete posts and comments [1]. I wonder if it will make it more difficult for them if instead of deleting the comments and posts, but we flood the posts and comments with garbage edits.
Something like this could be easily scripted out. Could use browser automation if you don’t want to use the reddit api.
If they truly have the ability to roll back deleted AND edits on a post and comment level, then flooding the change history log with garbage edits will cause them to hemorrhage money in terms of cold storage (ie, Amazon S3) and database size.
They can’t be infinitely storing all of the edit history. So at some point they have to purge the oldest commits at which point makes it equivalent to deletion of original post, except now they are keeping garbage and paying to keep that garbage stored. Have fun running your LLM on that junk.
Something like this:
- original comment: “Some thoughtful comment here”
- 1st edit: <edited to hit max comment length with garbage content, maybe “lorem ipsom” placeholder stuff>
- 2nd edit: <edit one character in string>
- 3rd edit: <edit another character in string>
- nth edit: …
Again, this assumes they are even keeping the edit history. Would be nice if we can get insider information from a reddit backend engineer to confirm.
It took many years for reddit to take off to become a huge player on the internet. Digg, Twitter, and myspace where the big players in 2005 to 2010. Then people started to move to Facebook, Snapchat, and Reddit as they became more popular. It only a matter of time until Mastodon, Lemmy and other federated platforms take over. Especially if the community keeps growing and spreading the word.
Yeah does it seems like decentralized (federated or otherwise) systems will be the future of social media. There’s lemmy (only four years old, the most popular I’d say), bluesky (another federated system), and plebbit (peer to peer, uses ipfs) to highlight a few. So there seemsto be a lot of exploration in this space.
I think reddit will be around for quite some time, but it’ll never be the same, and die a slow death.
Bluesky has a great write up about federation/decentralization in case anyone is interested:
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/6-23-2023-moderation-proposals
Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences.
Reddit is a full trashcan nobody bothered to empty for 10 years. Lemmy it up!
This 🔥
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are continuing to stick with it + be supportive. I didn’t expect anything beyond the planned end of the blackout, although I didn’t expect thousands of subreddits to participate in that either. Either way I’ve basically cut Reddit out entirely. I used to scroll 2-3hrs a day and I’m down to maybe 10 minutes once or twice a week when I’m trying to find an answer to something. Attempting to fill my newfound free time has been… fun
Even if reddit changes course at this point… I’ve found Lemmy. And it’s just… better. And beyond that, it would take reddit years to recoup the goodwill they’ve lost with this.
It is sad that we are going to loose a bunch of community knowledge that is on reddit if they go under but fuck spez and reddit
Though I wish there was a backup of reddit so we can keep the community knowledge gathered throughout the years
Edit: typo
It’ll technically all still be there on reddit, right? We can treat it as an archive without actually being active users. Heck, you could even form a volunteer group to collate all the most important threads and key points into some posts here, or some google docs, etc.
There are some people, who in the light of the protest and moving to Lemmy, have deleted their accounts. Of these people there are also those who have purged their data, as in removed all their comments/posts.
If the purgers were content creators or support geeks, then the communities they interacted with might become a little “moth eaten”.
Luckily, r/datahoarder has been looking into archiving reddit before the chaos.
There’s a couple of scripts out there not just to delete previous posts, but to edit them all into gibberish. Even random gibberish for each post/comment. That’s much more destructive to reddit’s value and hard for datahoarders to detect, unless they started before the uprising and track changes.
Pushshift data might be a very good candidate for a reddit archive of data before may 1st but I’m not sure on the specifics of Pushshift access to the data
before may 1st
Not sure if time traveler, or…?
Meaning Reddit data up to that point in time
Weirdly enough it got me more engaged with social media. In the sense that now I’m posting and talking with people on lemmy and mastodon more than I ever did on reddit. Weird how a place can get so popular it stops being a real community after a while
I don’t know that it has me engaging more but it feels more fun and meaningful now. Reddit had turned into man yells into the void for me. Now I feel like I’m talking to real people again on Lemmy. It’s such a relief honestly.
I think the strange part is feeling obligated to interact more. I’ll upvote more than I did on Reddit. I post more than I did on Reddit. The goal seems clear, to make this place feel inhabited. The more bustling it feels, the bustling it will become.
The other aspect is moderating communities. I’m not a mod, or at least I wasn’t. But Lemmy lacks the breadth of oddly specific comms, and if I intend to eventually doom scroll again, modding a niche comm is a good start.
True, same experience here. It’s nice to not see 1k+ comment threads filled with karmahoarders voted to the top.
I’m going to predict that at the 11th hour they walk back the pricing to a reasonable number, as it attempt to 1) save face and 2) to be able to point to their investors and the media that they tried negotiating.
It’s too late.
Yeah, I think that’s a possible way that this goes down. I also think that if they did that it’d be a mistake. I think Apollo, RIF, and the other 3rd party apps are gone. Even if reddit announced yesterday that they were going to keep the API free, let alone negotiate a middle ground, I think 3rd party apps are gone and not coming back. On the 3rd party level I don’t even really think it’s the cash grab that’s the problem, it’s the lack of communication and trust. Even if reddit were to bend over backwards to try to keep them, I don’t think there’s anything they can do to make up for the lack of trust this has created in reddit’s leadership. Same thing goes for the mods. The mods are arguably reddits most important users. They make the site usable for everyone else and if reddit was ever to become profitable I think the people spez would have to thank for that would be the mods who made the spaces that people wanted to come be a part of. They can’t trust reddits leadership either. It doesn’t matter what shiny new toys reddit may try to roll out to make their job easier, it doesn’t matter what exceptions they try to carve into their new API policy. Common thread here is noone wants to sink their time into something that might change as fast as reddit has shown it can. Being a 3rd party dev or a mod takes a lot of time out of your day. Faced with the choice of leaving or laboring for a company that clearly doesn’t respect the value you add to their service I think that most would choose to flee the sinking ship.
I think there are other motivations which will bring devs and mods back to reddit. Devs like the large user base and frankly I have no idea what motivates the volunteer mods other than a misguided sense of purpose.
I don’t really get what protesters wants to achieve now but only a moron would go back even if they announced that there won’t be any API changes, knowing what shit CEO of that shit company thinks about them. Stockholm syndrome is strong in these people.
This won’t go anywhere as long as users aren’t willing to leave reddit. Mods can be replaced, users can’t.
I left…reddit honestly seems clunky now…I go back to watch it burn but it’s not burning enough :( maybe instead of John Oliver they should be posting dragons or something jeez
People should just start posting really unflattering images of spez or photoshopping spez
That would really piss him off
I don’t see why anyone would be still trying, other than perhaps mods of major communities who want to hold on to their power or prominence. For typical users, who cares. It’s like knocking and knocking on the door of an ex-friend who kicked you out of their house. Just go somewhere else.
A lot of mods are community founders. They care about their community, not reddit. Reddits just a middleman getting in the way.
Imagine a group of friends. Reddit is the friend with the best house for parties, but is kinda a dick. The mods are the social ones that brought this friend group together in the first place. Reddit is being stupid and making dumb rules that mostly hurt the mod. The mod is trying to either get reddit to relax the rules OR convince the rest of the friends to leave. Truthfully the friends should leave, but reddits house is so nice and they’re comfortable. The mod could leave, but they’re afraid all that will result in is losing their entire friend group. The whole situation sucks all around.
Thanks, that’s a more precise analogy. Definitely we were never metaphorically 'friends’with reddit - the best times on the site have been when I didn’t really know who was running it or care and they just stayed out of everyone’s way.
I can see why mods of any size would want to preserve their existing community, because it’s true that most people won’t migrate together. With reddit’s attitude it seems hopeless at this point to me, though. Perhaps if they had a change of leadership, but it seems likely to only get worse if they IPO and are further corporatized.Nosleep for instance…I can see them being in a tight spot…it’s such a niche community and honestly a fairly important one…I at least have 4 physical books I’ve purchased from authors. It’s such a great launch pad. I feel bad that I’ll really not be spending hours there at all anymore
There is a Lemmy equivalent. Sorry not sure of the name. It was there when I was scanning through subscriptions.
Shameless self-promotion: It’s https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyscareyou or !lemmyscareyou@lemmy.world, would love if more people can contribute over there.
