Decoupling from Reddit has been easier than I thought.
Am actually rotating between Lemmy instances and Kbin to read the articles and thoughts in between my workday and it works like a charm.
It also really helps that I pavlovd myself to associate Reddit with garbage and instantly make the connection to how they see and treat their userbase.
It made me open reddit only once during the last days.
Was going to send someone at work an interesting article which was linked from Reddit but the subreddit was shutdown. I hate that reddit is doing this, and I hope more subs shut down permanently for protest so that reddit can’t just “wait it out”, but man is it inconvenient as hell.
I went back into Reddit a couple times during the blackout as it’s so easy to click the Infinity icon on my homescreen. And I’ve got to say, the quality of posts on my feed were so much worse. Zero text posts, only images. I started unsubscribing from a bunch of those subreddits. Starting to realize how little value most of Reddit gives me. The only things of actual value are behind subreddits that have gone dark. I’ve been enjoying Lemmy so much more and having more meaningful conversation. It’s so much better
For the semi-lurker like me there’s nothing holding me back to Reddit. Some current news, sprinkle of meme, some draft comments that I will never submit and some meaningful discussion from community, fediverse has all those.
I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.
The suits are all about their metrics and engagement and clicks and they don’t care about the user. They don’t even care about the peeps they hire to talk to the user.
I’m told sometimes admin employees find out they’re fired because they can’t log in to workspaces anymore.
*I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.*
Agreed, but I don’t think they’re going to be moving in a positive direction. I believe we have seen the best Reddit will ever be. When a company becomes profit driven in the way Reddit has, it forces the company to make decisions that aren’t beneficial to it’s users. I understand the decisions they’re making, but their “rip the band-aid” method at least lets us see that they’re unwilling to compromise on their position. It makes switching to a different platform much easier for me. It just sucks because there are small communities that I thoroughly enjoyed and I don’t know if they’ll ever recoup.
I don’t know how to make this not about me. So, I’m just going to say it.
Friday I closed a 13 year old Reddit account. Saturday and Sunday I brought up multiple Fediverse servers. I now have Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, Owncast, and NextCloud working. I have yet to get Element Chat and PeerTube running. They will happen by Friday.
When I opened my Owncast I killed my Twitch account. When PeerTube is up and running I drop YouTube.
My point is, I want to thank Reddit for providing me the motivation to leave corporate social media and switch to my own platform. I’m not going back… I’m going forward.
Thanks for this, I hadn’t heard of half of these projects and now I’m also looking into them! Pixelfed in particular look amazing. I have a few friends that have been wanting to rid Instagram so will definitely be sending this their way.
I was wondering, how the temperature was in the Germany subs.
Well, /r/de, /r/Gernany, /r/fragreddit and /r/ich_iel which are the largest by a huge margin are all still closed until at least the 18th.
/r/de, the German language main sub, also links to https://spezistdoof.de/ (spez is dumb)
This makes me pretty happy as Reddit has repeatedly been trying to get bigger in Germany :D
It wasn’t poorly translated, and I’m not sure how many of them actually knew about it (I’m not very active in the German part). But yeah, that was their latest attempt to expand, last year they tried some kind of weird payment scheme, no idea what happened there.
The thing with this is that it will take a HUGE amount of money to do this, unless you’re suggesting they’ll replace them with new unpaid moderators that are pro-being abused for free labor.
If that’s the case, the quality of those subreddits will tank fast because there’s no way they’ll replace the existing mods with ones as motivated or as experienced as the ones already there.
As much as people love to mock Subreddit Moderators, there’s a definite learned skill to doing it well and keeping a community thriving. That’s not going to be something easily replaced.
personally it’s a little hard for me to believe that reddit admins are hellbent on making sure things are quality seeing how they’re acting right now. :p
But that’s the problem. It’s easy to find people who will abuse their mod position. It’s harder to find people who will use their mod powers fairly. If the mods in a subreddit - who use their powers fairly to help foster the community - are replaced by power seeking mods who just want to force their views on everyone, then the community will suffer. People will leave and the subreddit will slowly degrade.
So Reddit could definitely replace all the protesting mods with power seeking folks. Reddit will even see a short term gain with the subreddits opened again. However, it will just reinforce people’s negative views of mods and will hasten Reddit’s decline.
If they replace protesting mods then the communities can just overload the new mods until they restrict the sub (again). The real problem is people giving up (which just so aligns with what reddit wants). Personally, that’s the reason why I’m leaving because apparently a lot of people genuinely thought that a 2-day blackout would cut it. Yeah, right.
Especially because that’s basically a lie. The free tier right now is 60 requests per minute, per client, per user. The new free tier is 100 requests per minute per client. If for example you develop a bot or tool and you’d like to give others access to use for their own purposes you’re now sharing those 100 requests per minute with everyone else using it.
Just follow the install instructions on the page and let it rip. You can act on or exempt specific subs, act on age, exempt by status, etc. It will also export deleted and modified comments to a CSV for your own use.
I nuked my accounts, editing all comments to “This comment has been deleted in protest of the Reddit API changes of June 2023. Consider visiting Lemmy.world or Kbin.social for an alternative news source.”
I’ll probably go back in on the 29th or 30th and delete everything before closing the accounts.
worked on Chromium for me. Never had success with Firefox, and I don’t touch Edge.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this project)
Discussion:
I arrived at posting this after some soul-searching about destroying inforamtion. In the end, my contributions were derivative from still-extant and viable sources, while I consider Reddit to be a lost cause. I decided it was more abhorrent to me that they continue to profit off the back of my freely-contributed content than to reclaim my contributions, and rehost those contributions at a later date under a more friendly banner.
That was my calculus. You, reader, are welcome respectfully to disagree.
I for one, will most definitely not be doing this. Reddit was such a vital part of the internet during the mid-2010’s to early 2020’s… it would be a shame it all that history was permanently lost.
I will, however, likely not be going back. I’ve actually really wanted to take part in a decentralized social community like this for a long time, and I am very excited about what the federation brings to the table, and about the role that Lemmy fills in that network. In a world where the internet seems so much to focus on what is currently going on now, I reckon not contributing to Reddit anymore will have a much greater long-term impact than nuking my previous content, and will allow me to leave my piece of internet history intact on their archive.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s all been captured in the internet archive, but I still think that reddit gets most of its value from active users, not drivebys looking at posts from a decade ago. I’d rather those vital parts of internet history be findable in their original, SEO captured location, but I also understand the reasoning behind getting rid of all that and moving it strictly into internet archives. The thing is, the 2010s have taught us that the addage “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is patently false. The internet has turned out to be incredibly fragile with big chunks of history that wasn’t archived going away forever. Our collective memories have been edited by companies going out of business and deleting all their cloud storage to avoid incurring further cost.
From the perspective of preserving useful knowledge, I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a horrible thing to do. Especially when your comments relate important niche information rather than just being the millionth meme on the same template.
That said, I still edited everything (weren’t too many niche info things on my account anyway), because I read a couple times that Reddit’s big goal here would be to sell the immense amount of “real people conversations” to AI language model companies, thus possibly still making more money off what’s already there even if no new content would be posted again.
PS: I have no idea how or why my phone did this but while typing, a popup suddenly came “Report Created!”. If I somehow reported your (or any other) message here, please ignore this, whoever gets the report!
I had the same though. But then I started scrolling through my post and comment history and decided I’d rather do something else with my time than consider whether or not a comment I made will be exactly what someone searches for years from now.
But, I should add, that my valuable contributions on reddit are pretty few. I can see how that would be entirely different for someone who is/was incredibly active in answering r/AskHistorians posts.
Lol I’m posting on both here and Reddit. I’m kind of enjoying the drama even though I don’t have a strong opinion about the API controversy personally.
r/dankmemes commentators are all whining about the mods powertripping and how the protest is only hurting users and what right they have to destroy the experience for everyone 😂
It was business as usual on some of the subreddits I post on a lot (e.g., /r/credibledefense, /r/historywhatif). Those never shut down. But other ones where they re-opened, there’s a bit of debate going on about whether or not to stay shut down or not. At least on the subs I visit and post on, most people are in favor of keeping the subs open.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
new megathread is here
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dN5sn37vNGs Doing my part.
LMAO
Decoupling from Reddit has been easier than I thought.
Am actually rotating between Lemmy instances and Kbin to read the articles and thoughts in between my workday and it works like a charm.
It also really helps that I pavlovd myself to associate Reddit with garbage and instantly make the connection to how they see and treat their userbase.
It made me open reddit only once during the last days.
Was going to send someone at work an interesting article which was linked from Reddit but the subreddit was shutdown. I hate that reddit is doing this, and I hope more subs shut down permanently for protest so that reddit can’t just “wait it out”, but man is it inconvenient as hell.
I went back into Reddit a couple times during the blackout as it’s so easy to click the Infinity icon on my homescreen. And I’ve got to say, the quality of posts on my feed were so much worse. Zero text posts, only images. I started unsubscribing from a bunch of those subreddits. Starting to realize how little value most of Reddit gives me. The only things of actual value are behind subreddits that have gone dark. I’ve been enjoying Lemmy so much more and having more meaningful conversation. It’s so much better
!remindme 10 years
For the semi-lurker like me there’s nothing holding me back to Reddit. Some current news, sprinkle of meme, some draft comments that I will never submit and some meaningful discussion from community, fediverse has all those.
I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.
The suits are all about their metrics and engagement and clicks and they don’t care about the user. They don’t even care about the peeps they hire to talk to the user.
I’m told sometimes admin employees find out they’re fired because they can’t log in to workspaces anymore.
I dunno.
Maybe this space is better. :)
*I like reddit. I want its fun little spaces to thrive.
Reddit is making this really difficult.*
Agreed, but I don’t think they’re going to be moving in a positive direction. I believe we have seen the best Reddit will ever be. When a company becomes profit driven in the way Reddit has, it forces the company to make decisions that aren’t beneficial to it’s users. I understand the decisions they’re making, but their “rip the band-aid” method at least lets us see that they’re unwilling to compromise on their position. It makes switching to a different platform much easier for me. It just sucks because there are small communities that I thoroughly enjoyed and I don’t know if they’ll ever recoup.
I don’t know how to make this not about me. So, I’m just going to say it. Friday I closed a 13 year old Reddit account. Saturday and Sunday I brought up multiple Fediverse servers. I now have Mastodon, Lemmy, PixelFed, Owncast, and NextCloud working. I have yet to get Element Chat and PeerTube running. They will happen by Friday. When I opened my Owncast I killed my Twitch account. When PeerTube is up and running I drop YouTube. My point is, I want to thank Reddit for providing me the motivation to leave corporate social media and switch to my own platform. I’m not going back… I’m going forward.
Yah, me too. Maybe not quite 13 y/o (that must have been painful!), but mine was still an active one.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
was a big help.
Thanks for this, I hadn’t heard of half of these projects and now I’m also looking into them! Pixelfed in particular look amazing. I have a few friends that have been wanting to rid Instagram so will definitely be sending this their way.
I was wondering, how the temperature was in the Germany subs. Well, /r/de, /r/Gernany, /r/fragreddit and /r/ich_iel which are the largest by a huge margin are all still closed until at least the 18th. /r/de, the German language main sub, also links to https://spezistdoof.de/ (spez is dumb)
This makes me pretty happy as Reddit has repeatedly been trying to get bigger in Germany :D
Do you have any insights as to why I have german posts appeared in my reddit front page when I have none of the german subreddits subscribed?
Nope
Didn’t reddit piss off a lot of the German users by making fake subs filled with poorly translated bots?
It wasn’t poorly translated, and I’m not sure how many of them actually knew about it (I’m not very active in the German part). But yeah, that was their latest attempt to expand, last year they tried some kind of weird payment scheme, no idea what happened there.
edit: made clear that the emphasis was on poor
Somehow I doubt anything is gonna come of the blackout.
If things get concerning the admins will step in and replace mods with plants. No real winning at all
The thing with this is that it will take a HUGE amount of money to do this, unless you’re suggesting they’ll replace them with new unpaid moderators that are pro-being abused for free labor.
If that’s the case, the quality of those subreddits will tank fast because there’s no way they’ll replace the existing mods with ones as motivated or as experienced as the ones already there.
As much as people love to mock Subreddit Moderators, there’s a definite learned skill to doing it well and keeping a community thriving. That’s not going to be something easily replaced.
No to mention subs like r/AskHistorians has mods that are actually historians. You can’t just replace them and have the sub maintain it’s quality.
personally it’s a little hard for me to believe that reddit admins are hellbent on making sure things are quality seeing how they’re acting right now. :p
I really don’t think it would be THAT hard to find unpaid scabs, people like power, no matter how small
But that’s the problem. It’s easy to find people who will abuse their mod position. It’s harder to find people who will use their mod powers fairly. If the mods in a subreddit - who use their powers fairly to help foster the community - are replaced by power seeking mods who just want to force their views on everyone, then the community will suffer. People will leave and the subreddit will slowly degrade.
So Reddit could definitely replace all the protesting mods with power seeking folks. Reddit will even see a short term gain with the subreddits opened again. However, it will just reinforce people’s negative views of mods and will hasten Reddit’s decline.
If they replace protesting mods then the communities can just overload the new mods until they restrict the sub (again). The real problem is people giving up (which just so aligns with what reddit wants). Personally, that’s the reason why I’m leaving because apparently a lot of people genuinely thought that a 2-day blackout would cut it. Yeah, right.
Just got a big blue headline on old.reddit.com, trying to negotiate their way out of the modtool API debacle
I also really hate this.
Literally freeloading of the work of developers for their mod tooling.
How incredibly tone deaf can one be.
Crying that 3rd party apps make money and the time of “freeloading” is over only to try to literally freeload on the applications of 3rd parties.
Reddit can still and again just fudge off.
Especially because that’s basically a lie. The free tier right now is 60 requests per minute, per client, per user. The new free tier is 100 requests per minute per client. If for example you develop a bot or tool and you’d like to give others access to use for their own purposes you’re now sharing those 100 requests per minute with everyone else using it.
I saw that, too, while I was there posting my final post explaining where to find me to any of my reddit friends who want to find me
useful link: wired - How to Download Your Reddit Data
Oh shit. I need that including saved posts. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s super useful
Does that include your saved posts? That’s what I’m worried about losing the most.
If you’re considering leaving Reddit, consider also salting the earth on your way out.
Check out PowerDeleteSuite, a Chrome* plugin that can edit/delete posts in a user’s history. https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Just follow the install instructions on the page and let it rip. You can act on or exempt specific subs, act on age, exempt by status, etc. It will also export deleted and modified comments to a CSV for your own use.
I nuked my accounts, editing all comments to “This comment has been deleted in protest of the Reddit API changes of June 2023. Consider visiting Lemmy.world or Kbin.social for an alternative news source.”
I’ll probably go back in on the 29th or 30th and delete everything before closing the accounts.
(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this project)
Discussion: I arrived at posting this after some soul-searching about destroying inforamtion. In the end, my contributions were derivative from still-extant and viable sources, while I consider Reddit to be a lost cause. I decided it was more abhorrent to me that they continue to profit off the back of my freely-contributed content than to reclaim my contributions, and rehost those contributions at a later date under a more friendly banner.
That was my calculus. You, reader, are welcome respectfully to disagree.
I for one, will most definitely not be doing this. Reddit was such a vital part of the internet during the mid-2010’s to early 2020’s… it would be a shame it all that history was permanently lost.
I will, however, likely not be going back. I’ve actually really wanted to take part in a decentralized social community like this for a long time, and I am very excited about what the federation brings to the table, and about the role that Lemmy fills in that network. In a world where the internet seems so much to focus on what is currently going on now, I reckon not contributing to Reddit anymore will have a much greater long-term impact than nuking my previous content, and will allow me to leave my piece of internet history intact on their archive.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s all been captured in the internet archive, but I still think that reddit gets most of its value from active users, not drivebys looking at posts from a decade ago. I’d rather those vital parts of internet history be findable in their original, SEO captured location, but I also understand the reasoning behind getting rid of all that and moving it strictly into internet archives. The thing is, the 2010s have taught us that the addage “once it’s on the internet it’s there forever” is patently false. The internet has turned out to be incredibly fragile with big chunks of history that wasn’t archived going away forever. Our collective memories have been edited by companies going out of business and deleting all their cloud storage to avoid incurring further cost.
From the perspective of preserving useful knowledge, I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a horrible thing to do. Especially when your comments relate important niche information rather than just being the millionth meme on the same template.
That said, I still edited everything (weren’t too many niche info things on my account anyway), because I read a couple times that Reddit’s big goal here would be to sell the immense amount of “real people conversations” to AI language model companies, thus possibly still making more money off what’s already there even if no new content would be posted again.
PS: I have no idea how or why my phone did this but while typing, a popup suddenly came “Report Created!”. If I somehow reported your (or any other) message here, please ignore this, whoever gets the report!
I’ve thought about deleting specifically noninformative posts
I had the same though. But then I started scrolling through my post and comment history and decided I’d rather do something else with my time than consider whether or not a comment I made will be exactly what someone searches for years from now.
But, I should add, that my valuable contributions on reddit are pretty few. I can see how that would be entirely different for someone who is/was incredibly active in answering r/AskHistorians posts.
Cool, I think I’ll do the same. I wasn’t popular or super active but hey, doin’ my part
Thank you, just ran this over my account. I didnt delete comments, just edited them to say I’ve moved to lemmy :)
Reddit refugee here, anime/manga nerd and mainly shitposting but I also like to engage in Machine Learning and C++/Python discussions.
programming.dev is a great instance for you then!
cool, just subbed to !programming@programming.dev
Lol I’m posting on both here and Reddit. I’m kind of enjoying the drama even though I don’t have a strong opinion about the API controversy personally.
That’s so funny. I deleted my app - what’s happening on the other side?
r/dankmemes commentators are all whining about the mods powertripping and how the protest is only hurting users and what right they have to destroy the experience for everyone 😂
It was business as usual on some of the subreddits I post on a lot (e.g., /r/credibledefense, /r/historywhatif). Those never shut down. But other ones where they re-opened, there’s a bit of debate going on about whether or not to stay shut down or not. At least on the subs I visit and post on, most people are in favor of keeping the subs open.