Having 0 or negative karma is a barrier to posting. Some subs completely disallow posting if you don’t meet a threshold, but even outside of those subs you still run into things like having your comments held up in the spam queue until they are manually reviewed.

So having a bit of karma allows them to post their scam and/or spam links and have a chance of being visible.

rif’s UI was near perfect for me. I called it an app version of old.reddit, which was exactly what I wanted.

(Before old.reddit I just considered it a perfect app version of Reddit.)

Off topic, sorry, but I’m curious: Did a bоt copy your comment? Or is this some sort of Federation-related-weirdness?

https://i.imgur.com/1mmxOE7.png

I assumed OP would be willing to say it it was “just” that. This being the Internet and all, people admit to way weirder stuff all the time.

When I was a Boy Scout, we often had kids who would refuse to go. It was a whole thing that we had to check on. (Along with asking everyone how yellow their pee was.)

I remember one guy was in tears on the hike out, and it turned out that he had faked out the scoutmaster by taking a walk with the TP and shovel, but not actually gone. Poor kid was barely able to walk, but kept insisting he couldn’t void either.

I only learned later how serious it can get if prolonged.

My best Reddit experiences were where Reddit facilitated meeting people “IRL”. I found my first D&D group on Reddit, made 3 great penpal friends, scored a couple dates, …, and one romantic relationship.

I really don’t know my worst… A couple times I let people get under my skin, but I eventually got good at blocking people.

FWIW, Reddit had a revenue sharing deal with rif, at the very least. Apparently when spez returned as CEO he shut it down.

NSFW subreddits don’t appear on r/All or r/Popular. (NSFW posts can appear, but only from subs that aren’t flagged as NSFW themselves).

So the current protest method is somewhat counterproductive. People who never took the step of subscribing to these subs likely won’t see them at all.

Plus, people are still over estimating how much impact has been made. If everyone participating in the ‘protests’ instead deleted their accounts and moved on, Reddit would not be hurt all that much.

You know how there are posts all over Reddit (and even all over here) saying “what’s with the porn on r/interestingasfuck?” or “I don’t know what’s going on with John Oliver”?

It’s because of them that the “protests” must continue. Raising awareness is the point. Only a small percentage even know what’s going on.

Reddit would love for everyone to quietly go away, they’ll pretend nothing happened and move on with a small chunk of users missing but still growing.

From my understanding, they already aren’t using the API.

If the spam bots were using the API, then Reddit would have been able to shut them down trivially. Part of logging in via API requires a “client ID” that uniquely identifies the creator of the app/bot being used.

They could theoretically have each bot account create its own client ID, but even that would be a pretty obvious thing to look for.

Yes when all the apps had to change their names (January 2020), it came out that they had previously been working under a Trademark licensing arrangement.

(When “reddit is fun” became “rif” and then “rif is fun for Reddit”.)

A lot of people thought it was Reddit suddenly cracking down to protect their trademark, but in reality it was something more petty.

https://old.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/el8ri3/reddit_is_fun_is_being_renamed_to_rif_is_fun_for/

I should mention I’m grateful to the “old” Reddit Inc. and its former employees for being willing to let me use the “reddit is fun” name for the past decade, working with me on mutually beneficial agreements like revenue share, in exchange for licensing the Reddit trademark. Not sure if you would be reading this, but thank you.

Here’s a contemporaneous article with a good amount of info on Digg’s decline.

Know Your Meme has a surprisingly good write-up after the fact.

IMO one of the main factors that even allowed Digg to die as fast as it did was the fact that Reddit was already on the way up.

At the time I was primarily on Slashdot over either, but there were frequently articles about how Reddit was growing, and how people didn’t like Digg. Then v4 launched and Digg’s traffic dropped 25% in a month.

Unfortunately I don’t think Reddit can or will lose that much, that fast. And one of the reasons is that there isn’t already a “drop-in replacement”. Reddit could do everything Digg could do, and more. But crucially it was also mature enough that there was a community and very low barrier to entry.

Here’s another contemporaneous article with a good amount of info: https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450

Personally I like this summary from a Harvard student assignment:

In August 2010, Digg attempted to wrest control back from its power users by migrating to a new system (Digg v4) that deemphasized user-contributed content in favor of publisher-contributed content. The change incited an uproar among power users and regular visitors alike, who felt the company was selling out to the mainstream media it had originally sought to replace. Digg experienced a mass exodus of users, many of whom turned to rival site Reddit. While Digg’s traffic fell by a quarter in the following month, Reddit’s traffic grew by 230% in 2010. Digg never recovered from its transition to Digg v4, and the site continued to bleed users and traffic over the next two years. By July 2012, the time of its sale to Betaworks, Digg’s monthly unique visitor count had fallen 90% from its peak.

Know Your Meme also has a surprisingly good write-up.

I typed a long response but it seems to have disappeared.

It wouldn’t be hard for Reddit to find sympathetic mods to jump in. Any mods of big subs that didn’t participate in the blackout would likely be thrilled to grow their empires.

If necessary, Reddit could throw some interns or some contract employees at the problem. A huge part of the job moderating the giant subs is removing spam and other obvious rule violations. It doesn’t take specialized training to check a report to see if it is accurate and click ban/remove/approve.

The parts of moderating a sub that do take special skill – the parts related to growing and tending a community through thoughtful application of subreddit specific rules and norms – will not be missed in the million+ subscriber subreddits in the short-to-mid term. r/funny and r/TikTokCringe and whatever other giant subs don’t really have any quality standards to speak of anyway.

No. I mentioned that:

Forbes did mention it in their most recent article, but the majority of the drop in valuation was last year.

The “new” valuation, 41% lower than their investment, was announced in April 2023.

Note that this cut in valuation has nothing to do with the blackout. It’s actually old news. Forbes did mention it in their most recent article, but the majority of the drop in valuation was last year.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/

Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit’s most recent funding round in 2021, has slashed the estimated worth of its equity stake in the popular social media platform by 41% since the investment.

Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund’s stake in Reddit was valued at $16.6 million as of April 28, according to the fund’s monthly disclosure released over the weekend. That’s down 41.1% cumulatively since August 2021 when the asset manager spent $28.2 million to acquire the Reddit shares, according to disclosures the firm has made in its annual and semi-annual reports. […]

The substantial markdown of Reddit’s value by Fidelity predominantly occurred by the previous year. Nevertheless, it merits pointing out that Fidelity has persistently implemented minor reductions in the worth of Reddit’s shares in the ensuing months.

My initial response was “probably everywhere, duh”. But then I remembered that Reddit tried to throw Apollo under the bus, claiming that their API usage was only high because of inefficient code.

As I recall, Apollo (Christian S.) responded by open-sourcing their backend. Maybe Reddit should do the same?

Christian has been the public face of this and therefore has borne the brunt of it. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it would be in his shoes.

I do also wish the best for the Android app devs.

I’m a “rif” user for over a decade, so a special shout-out for talklittle. (I hear he’s developing an app for Tildes, a link aggregator.)