This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
Hear me out.
Elon destroys twitter and eventually makes it a joke and no one can be trusted cause the process of verification for that is a joke now.
Spez destroys reddit. Shuts down 3rd party apps. The majority of people have to decided whether to stay or leave.
The SAG and WGA go on strike because of wage issues, now shows like Last Week Tonight and other shows that take deep dives into the problems of government can’t make shows that inform people.
All of this is, in my opinion, to shut down public conversations about many issues and the timing is also coincidental since the 2024 election is coming up and in a time everyone is divided, there is no comfortable place to communicate. The curiosity is if trumps social media and other right leaning communities are facing the same disruptions. Not saying reddit and twitter are bastions of the “left” but twitter and in particular reddit have been a place for public good. Now twitter is a hallway that is almost completely covered in fecal matter and reddit is a poorly designed website that blinds you with advertisements and OF spam bots.
Elon I can see doing it maliciously, because he benefits from a Republican government. Edge Lord Jr has probably doing it because Senior told him it was a good idea. The survivability of these companies are not in their interest because why care if you can just close it down claim the sale and go make more money somewhere else.
But the biggest one is the “Late Night” shows. Most of them are the way some Americans get informed about some of the more deeply rooted problems in America. You can look at shows like John Olivers, Last Week Tonight and maybe Late Night with Seth Meyers. Shows very critical of Republicans and trump in particular, completely crippled by the SAG and WGA strikes.
In total the information delivery systems we are all used too, have been dirupted and I’m seriously questioned its timing.
I think the reason is something much bigger than the American election. Just not sure what yet.
The election is rigged anyway. Choose between turd and asshole, both of which are selected by the establishment.
Until people can vote with cryptographically safe identity control, there is no reason to trust manual vote counting in my opinion.
No, it’s a choice between an orange fascist traitor, and freedom, democracy and decency.
And nice job spreading twitlers “big lie” about the election. People like you are the enemies of democracy.
Twitter was ruined for the reasons you state, but thinking it was for the west is untrue. One of the biggest investors was the Saudi king, a ruler in an area where Twitter was used to organize actual revolts and revolutions. The destruction of social media is definitely being done in prep for elections. The strikes seem like coincidences as far as the election goes.
Buy it, kill it. 44 bill is chump change to the
Many people benefit from its downfall, its not exclusively to the election i just used it because I live in the “west” and I can see it disrupting a very critical election because 4 more years has of trump is gonna be bad for everyone…
Glad I’m not the only one considering this. Been in conversation with another long-time user of Reddit (>15 years) and let’s just say that if the goal was to suppress grassroots mobilization of progressive coalition, this is what you would do. We already know how compromised the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg are… And we saw just how much we had to pull the teeth of Reddit to do something about The_Donald…
I often wonder if Trump would have been elected in 2016 if Jon Stewart was still on the air. Now imagine if right-wing groups controlled Reddit, Twitter, and clamped down on all late-night talk shows that help pierce right-wing ignorance chambers of this country.
I’m glad I’m not alone either. I’m thinking he could of swayed the independent voters who were confused but, to be honest things have changed in such a crazy weird way, I don’t think it would of mattred. His faithful friend John Oliver was doing his absolute best but the message fell between the mass noise brought on by the maga crowd.
Some people suffer from reddit nostalgia and forget some of the most disgusting subs and activity during the early days was common place but as time went on it rooted them out and forged a better sense of community. Then trump emboldened idiots to be idiots and cultists obey their leader. Questionable people bought up share and spez suffered a stroke after Elon gave him the boner after telling him how much power he has.
From my readings in the last few weeks, there does seem to be some sort of coordinated effort to control public messaging. There was/is a discussion about how the right wing is suing and chilling any and all efforts to expose and educate about disinformation. The lawsuits were so menacing that they even wanted to go after the students of the classes run by professors they were suing for teaching about present day disinformation in our society. It isn’t just professors, it includes writers and journalists and groups that targeted disinformation. This is being done under the banner of ‘bias’. Opposing, criticizing, or pushing back against far right wing messaging is attacked and sued as intolerable bias.
It’s believed that this is to clear the way for a massive onslaught of disinformation and conspiracy theories entering into the 2024 election cycle. As far as what’s happening to some social media sites, the timing is suspect. Reddit and Twitter were among the most effective at getting out the blue vote. Now they are in shambles.
Seems more simple and likely to me that the “normal” corrupt and crony capitalism we’ve allowed to take over our government and big businesses is just reaching even more for the next dollar, like they always do. Although the leadership at Twitter and Reddit seems particularly bad, maybe because their product would appear even more unsustainable with proper transparency.
It’s true that capitalism and public interest are generally incompatible. Though this seems a bit more nefarious, considering that actions at both Twitter and Reddit have only continued to devalue these institutions, no?
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it, though. America will escape this rut when people realize it’s Big Cor’prit that we should be afraid of and not so much Big Guv’mint; the former is a virus that corrupts the body. And the immune system (checks-and-balances, separation of powers, etc.) have largely failed.
You think the writer’s strike is part of a conspiracy to prop up Republicans for an election in a year and a half?
It’s always been like this for potentially nsfw subreddits
How so? It says the subreddit is unreviewed and could potentially contain inappropriate content… Same thing as nsfw
There is a huge difference between “unreviewed” and NSFW. Unreviewed is very nebulous and inexact, and let’s reddit effectively censor huge swathes of the website…unless you use their shitty app, ofc! NSFW is a very specific designation that can easily be backed up with evidence
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don’t bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie’s stream…
This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.
What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.
But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
Ehhhh. This could just be their current stopgap because of all of the NSFW swaps happening. I think you are extrapolating too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I could totally see Reddit enacting this policy in their “infinite wisdom” and quietly rolling it out. But you are drawing too much from this screenshot. We need more context.
And I didn’t say it was specific to NSFW subs. It’s been like this for most subs since like a year. They restricted nsfw subs years ago.
Edit: It might not be exactly a year, but the point is I faced this restriction on sfw subs many times in recent memory and it’s not remotely new.
How exactly does it help if I install the app and go to that subreddit? NSFW is still NSFW.
This might just be morning brain, but I honestly don’t understand the question I’m sorry
Nope. It’s because it’s easier to harvest data through the app, so they funnel people towards it.
Oh there’s no doubt they’ve slowly made it more of a pain in the ass to not use the app (while also making the app worse) but this specific screenshot is too much missing context for OP’s claim to be assumed. It could be true but we don’t know enough.
I do remember seeing this popup way before the whole API & protests debacle. The warning doesn’t even make sense, how will switching to the app to see the same content be safer?
I figured you needed to login (to apply your block list, filters, NSFW prefs, etc), but merely seeing the desktop mode of the website lets you through (not even using old.reddit). So this is another cheap way of forcing you to their cancer app.
Now you can’t even SORT comments without using the app. They are really taking all pqges off Elon’s book on ruining a website.
they made this change months ago, nothing new
