Fiber arts. SoCal. Social justice. Snark.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s a 100% self-imposed moratorium just because I don’t want to appear to have a modding bias. There was a period where I was trying to enliven the community by posting a few articles each day, especially from sources not submitted to our mirror community on lemmyworld, but then my real life job was draining my soul for 3 straight months, so that endeavor fell by the wayside. Also, unless it’s an article dumping on one key player, our user base doesn’t tend to comment on news articles. It’s a weird phenomenon I’ve observed.

    I will add though that my hobby communities that I belong to never make it to my feed, which seems to imply that those communities are stagnant, too. I would probably comment more in those spaces, but it’s rare that new threads are created, I guess.


  • Ah - yikes. I was really not anticipating you seeing my mini pity party here, ernest. I know you and the team have been really working hard on kbin and I’ve seen massive changes with the modding panel and functions as a result of the latest instance update. I have a ton of respect for what you all are accomplishing on the fediverse and I was originally a very vocal early adopter after the first reddit migration in June. I trust that you all are shouldering a major responsibility with this instance, and I’m grateful for the fediverse at the very least. I hope when you read this you didn’t get the sense that I had any criticisms of kbin as the particular user interface I use for the fediverse - just that even across the federated instances (mostly lemmyworld), my ability to doom scroll for hours a day outpaces the userbase.

    I think I feel a personal sense of failure(?) or disappointment(?) that I wasn’t able to usher in a similar sense of community and activity to the sub I moderate compared to reddit. I think moving over here, it felt like my sub would be the natural beneficiary of inheriting the volume of users and content that existed on reddit, but our mirror community on lemmyworld got the lion’s share and it isn’t even scratching former reddit heyday numbers. Also, the people in their community are… suspect. I don’t care for the comments section.

    I hope you didn’t take umbrage to my comment. I’m eager to see what new features the kbin dev team will roll out.


  • Haven’t even directed my browser to reddit since migrating to kbin in June, but it’s never fulfilled the same dopamine hit for me. I’ve supplanted my online addiction with YouTube now, which because of what I flit past and what I actually pay attention to has been extremely educational because of the algorithm!

    Pretty early on, I ended up becoming the head moderator for a magazine on kbin, which then made me feel an ethical sort of guilt about commenting there anymore, so really the only place I wanted to be part of the dialogue is now gone for me here on kbin. Our magazine has a much larger mirror community on lemmyworld, so our magazine is barely holding on by a thread even after an initial burst of new subscribers. Discussion is almost non-existent in the magazine, and I’m not sure if it’s because we tried to instate common-sense community guidelines early, or if because we missed the momentum of growing userbase after the rexxit since most people migrated to lemmyworld instead of kbin.

    I’m not even sure why I keep my account. (I know I sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh in this post.)













  • Okay, this helps me a lot. In essence, as someone using a 3PA, I represent 1 API, so for wildly successful 3PAs like Apollo, we’re not talking 1000 API per minute, we’re talking like 500k API per minute.

    This is interesting also as it pertains to what you said about bots. When I used reddit for knitting and crochet, there was a bot that a community member had created that would reference a website that we all got patterns from, and then would generate a comment with a direct link to that pattern’s page. In the lead up to the blackout, the bot’s maintainer (not creator) was still in the dark about whether that bot would be shut down or not because reddit provided very little clarity when asked specifically about that bot. That bot was probably called up just a few dozen times per hour, so I imagine it would have been allowed to continue operating, whereas bots for AutoMods in subs with millions of subscribers were probably pulling huge numbers of API.

    Thanks for chipping in!





  • So, I was on reddit for over 11 years, but I didn’t arrive there from Digg. I remember a big kerfuffle surrounding Huffman and his willingness to change critical comments, but I was fairly oblivious to the ramifications of all that. I think I was just largely enjoying the halcyon days of Pao where you didn’t have to think about reddit’s corporate structure too far beyond how skivvy Conde Nast was.

    This current controversy I guess seemed more relevant to me because I exclusively used 3PA to access reddit. Back when I had iPhones, I was paying for one of the tiers of Apollo because I liked it so much. I am pretty sure I used to use alien blue way way back in the day. I used these mainly because reddit didn’t have an app on offer at all at these times and reddit for mobile was just inoperably clunky to use. As a share of the market, I was already brand loyal by the time reddit finally saw the writing on the wall that there was a need for an app. Now that I’m on Android, I was using Infinity (mixed feelings there about the fact that Infinity kept operating and I’ve since migrated and deleted my reddit accounts). I still feel resolved in my decision to leave reddit out of the principle of it all, and solidarity with Christian’s mistreatment even though my app of choice is apparently staying online.

    You refer to the Tencent movement as a notable moment that shifted the course of reddit. Any other pivotal moments that come to mind for you @arotrios ?


  • I also suspect that there were inconsistencies between pricing based on the 3rd party app in question. I don’t mean that Apollo was being charged more (in proportion) for having a larger userbase compared to apps like Relay or narwhal, but that Apollo was being charged almost double per unit to access API than Relay or narwhal. I am reading between the lines of articles published two *weeks ago about this because it didn’t make sense to me why these smaller apps would be able to afford the business model if Apollo had a $20M bill to pay in August.

    What gets my goat is why didn’t reddit ever just headhunt Christian or other 3PA developers and bring them into reddit corporate to build out their native app? That’s what Google or Microsoft would have done to quash competition. Or, to be truly evil, hired Christian and then never let him work on apps again with both an NDA and a non-compete in place.

    Huffman regularly calls reddit unprofitable with a heavy dose of ire, but I think there could have been a way to bring a reputable 3PA dev into the fold to keep the reddit native app at least comparable in UX.


  • Extremely well said, and I would repost you to the bestof magazine if I didn’t think bestof communities were lame.

    As I keep reading about all of this unfolding, a phrase that keeps rattling around in my brain: oppositional defiance disorder.

    I am not a doctor or psychiatrist so I am not being too serious by bringing it up, but I am facetiously curious about who has the worst ODD among all the players of this drama.

    Is it Steve Huffman and his refusal to back down? Is it the rexxitors who jumped ship on June 12? Is it the redditors who stayed to troll Huffman and his edicts? Or is it the redditors who stayed and are crafting a bespoke cesspool in snoo’s carapace?

    What are your thoughts, @arotrios ?