Because of reddits size
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
100 points (93.9% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35892 readers
1318 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I don't think a lot of people who are in the know have any expectation of this turning around and going well, but I don't blame anyone for hoping it will. The existing communities that are uprooted from all this, not to mention the headaches of signing up for new platforms and all that entails, aren't exactly ideal. Avoiding them from being necessary would be fantastic... alas, that hope is indeed slim.
Why? Because the whole reason reddit is even worth visiting is the posters.
Sure, the people in charge of the whole infrastructure that supports the act of posting and reading posts are making destructive "business decisions", but until now they've largely been basically a bunch of invisible, nameless, inconsequential people as long as the proverbial lights stayed on for my ten years on reddit. They were technically in charge of stuff, but any time there was drama around reddit employees themselves, I had to go to places like /r/outoftheloop or /r/ELI5 in order to figure out what in the actual heck the inexplicable hubub was all about.
To me, that means they're NOT what reddit is, they're just the people who make it possible.
The folks who do lights and sound at a stage play are necessary for the play to function at that particular theater, but if they were the only ones doing anything there, noone would show up and stick around.
Inertia is a horrible thing. It took a LONG time for most of the niche communities on reddit to get "established" enough to have semi-regular content. Inertia being what it is, it will likely take quite a while for the same to happen here and it won't be exactly the same thing. It may be better and worse in some ways, but it WILL be different and some of us were quite comfortable with what we had. So, yeah, hope, because losing something you like and care about, watching it get gutted, wrecked, hobbled, and ruined is not inspiring or fun.
That being said, I'm seeing very encouraging things happening here so far, so this might become my new home.
I think a lot of the general reddit user base is still out of the loop on it or just doesn't care about the drama enough to make any kind of change.
Many users don't log in every day, and might just sign in to look up answers to specific questions or to read individual subs. Those folks are a lot less likely to have been following all the updates through last month and before since so much was announced across a variety of subs.
There are about 5 years of my life on there, for some users 15+. Now, if you dropped your laptop with 15 years worth of memories on it, you damn sure would have hope you could still save the data, even if it's obviously done for.
Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
This is good to see, it seems a lot of the people that were for the blackout left, now there is so much vitriol against moderators on reddit, I'm so tired, I just don't want to anymore, deleted my 10+ year old account today after telling my mod team I can't anymore, so now at least the chances are smaller that I will go back.
Just know that I for one appreciate the hell out of you. I don't have the technical skills to do what you do, and to be perfectly honest, I don't have the patience either. It amazes me that people with the skills volunteer their time to do this mostly thankless work which makes communities more enjoyable. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
The thing is I really enjoyed the community that I modded, and still do, so I wanted to make it the best place it could be, I didn't have the skills either to do it in the beginning, started out just helping out the main moderator of our community, then after a couple of years they just disappeared, and I was driving myself rather insane for a year before I started fighting with the admins for 3-4 weeks to get the rights to get more moderators to join me, since I didn't have the right to before that, only the main mod had those rights.
I invited some people that I trusted from the community, and it at least made the work more tolerateable, having it spread out between 3 people in different timezones, and keep in mind we were a really small niche sub (~8k members) I don't even want to know how much worse it is for people moderating the gigantic ones, more people usually brings a lot more problems.
It became more or less a routine, just checking in, seeing if there was any spats to break up, people who were being dicks or spamming us with their books etc without interacting with the community, you get into this groove where you just get used to it. The most annoying thing was the few times where we gave people temporary bans and they started being aggressive about it in the mod chat, but since we were a really nice small community it was all worth it.
Come this whole thing, they take away the tools I used to deal with my routine, which would force me to be on the PC a lot more to deal with the community, then the blackout, we had a vote, and people were mostly for it, we did it, and people were decently for having done it, but nothing more when we were done. I don't know why mods have a bad rep, might be a bigger sub problem like so often, I don't know, we at least tried to do as much as possible just to keep our little community being friendly, accepting of beginners and not getting spammed with extremely repetetive content.
With this whole thing, I tried being a part after the blackout as well, but I keep seeing people just being really vitriolic, the place doesn't seem the same anymore, the whole keeping the community happy thing gets to tiring when you know the site does it's best to make it harder to deal with. I tried contacting admins again, but got some argueably toxic answers from the german admin, which is the only one I was getting a hold of. And I can't justify doing free work for a company that really doesn't appreciate it at all.
In the end I hope I at least left the community in a better shape that I entered it, I don't know if I did, but I hope so. At least this way I can stay true to myself and not being a spineless person not ready to give up on things, not because I think I would be the only one doing the work, but because I was already doing it and kind of knew what I was doing, and how our community ticked.
For people who were more than just the causal browser/lurker, Reddit was an amazing place to not only obtain information about very specific things, but also to connect with other people. I have type 1 diabetes and the ability to connect with other type 1 diabetics to commiserate, share information, and seek help on Reddit was like nothing else anywhere else on the internet. I have a few other niche interests that also only had communities on Reddit.
Years ago, these things (health conditions, niche interests, etc) all had their own separate forums scattered throughout the internet. One forum might have a few dozen people, one might have a hundred or so. But Reddit quickly became the central place where we could connect. Whereas forums could maybe attract a few hundred people, subreddits could connect with THOUSANDS. There’s not yet been anything else like it.
Unfortunately, we made the BIG mistake of relying on a for-profit, centrally owned company to function as a town square. Same with Twitter. We found value in sharing information and connecting through these platforms, only to get screwed over by billionaire CEOs.
Hopefully we have learned our lesson. Hopefully something comparable will take Reddit’s place. It’s not going to happen over time. I never expected Mastodon to replace Twitter overnight. But slowly, very slowly, at least some people are seeing the downfall of corporate social media and will hopefully slowly switch over to federated alternatives. I don’t think it will happen quickly, nor will it happen for everything. But I do think it’s already happening. And it will happen faster if we get some good mobile apps.
Could it be Lemmy?
I think it’s certainly possible.
I watched his recent interview (only for 10mins) but he described Reddit quite accurately. Namely, reddit(or platforms like ours) is a city, a city is living only if people are living. Also, he knew that very minimal and subtle moderation is the right way.
It sounds like a CEO who knows its stuff, but facts have been shown his actions and attitudes are outrageous. The moderation was good enough to reach success for 18 years, only bc people do it for Reddit for free. He only took the free ride on it.
The biggest problem I have with this guy is that the API charges is really selling people knowledges and memories as a product. It is supposed to be free and open. He is taking all the profits as business with no promises or giving back to the community. This model simply doesn't work well with us, I would rather stick to decentralised model as long as it is reasonably efficient.
There is nothing inherently problematic about charging for API access, it's the fact that the price they've set is ludicrous, something like 25 cents per thousand calls when you'd expect it to be more along the lines of 4-5 dollars per million calls.
It's like someone buying a free parking garage, letting mopeds park for free, and charging cars five hundred dollars a day for parking, and then, instead of just being honest and saying "Fuck people with cars no cars allowed," saying that the car drivers are at fault for wanting to use a more full-featured vehicle that takes more space
Indeed, if the prices were reasonable this would not be a problem. I believe that the Apollo developer even said as much (or maybe it was rif's developer - or neither and I'm just imagining it) - and I have no objection to it either, the servers aren't free to run after all. But the rate the used? It's just absolutely fucking incomprehensible.
The shitty treatment of third party developers is just the unmentionable icing on this already disgusting cake.