Reddit and Weep

[JD]

This is a huge deal, considering how common it is to add "site:reddit.com" to searches to get good results instead of junk. I got hit with this as reecntly as today. There was an independent forum for the topic I was researching, but it's been shut down and turned into a Discord.

My guess is they'll either try to wait this out, or replace the moderators with more amenable members. Failing that, the standard policy is to shut down any subreddit that is unmoderated, because until recently they understood that the site is built on a foundation of volunteer moderators, moderation bots, and user goodwill.

[Mongrel]

A list of dark subreddits by community size can be found on reddark. (mirror?)

# Combined Subscriber Count: 2,793,415,311

*long low whistle*

I can see this pushing more people to Discord, which isn't indexed by search. Also, the dev experience there (including massive turnaround times during bot verification + severe undercommunication) frankly did not inspire me with confidence either.

Also Discord is shit; everything on it is vanishingly ephemeral and impossible to find.

And I say this as someone using it all day daily anyway, as one of the least-awful broadly-common platforms remaining (a VERY low bar).

[Mongrel]

Saw a sliver of a window into an argument somewhere as I watched "r/cuphead has gone dark" and "r/cuphead has gone public" notifications trade places several times while browsing that list of dark sites.

[Grath]

Worth noting: That's 7857/8190 subreddits that pledged to join the blackout, there's millions of subreddits in total.

Also so many of my subreddits have gone dark that my front page on old.reddit.com doesn't have a full page worth of posts, and so it can't paginate.

(Looks like /r/cuphead settled on 'restrict posting' rather than 'go private'.)

[Mongrel]

<Brock_toon> Discord falling apart, Reddit blacked out, Blue Sky looming, Facebook moribund, Twitter a disaster.
<Brock_toon> It feels we're on the cusp of a web3.0 but not necessarily the one the tech lords imagined.
<grylxndr> Straightforward from here: Biden nationalizes all the social media networks after they crater in value, then repackages them into one unifying software suite called America Online.

[Thad]

CEO of Reddit rants at length about how the thousands of volunteers who run his website for him are freeloaders who just don't want to pay for things

[Mongrel]

There's two quite small Reddits I post on which haven't gone dark. I mention this not because I want to shame them into going private (though if they chose to do just that, I would approve), but to explain why I'm still visiting Reddit.

Apropos of nothing, I'm getting several new pornbot pollowers every time I go to Reddit, when before the Great Darkening I'd had that happen maybe... three times ever?

[JD]

Before copying Twitter, Reddit should have first checked how that was going for Twitter.

[Mongrel]

It's funny to realize that I'm now seeing FEWER random pornbot followers on Twitter than I am on Reddit.

[Mazian]

Before copying Twitter, Reddit should have first checked how that was going for Twitter.

Their CEO did... and decided that's what he wanted.

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

Never trust anyone that refers to Musk by first name only.

[Mongrel]

And this is AFTER Twitter's lost 2/3rds of it's valuation in less than a year.

Techbros really are a special breed.

[sei]

Worth noting: That's 7857/8190 subreddits that pledged to join the blackout, there's millions of subreddits in total.

Thank you for the catch!

Someone one reddit mentioned that RedReader got an API pricing exception due to accessibility. It's frankly uglier/less usable than rif is fun, and I don't know how long I trust reddit to not fuck them over too.

[Mongrel]

It’s become a meme that the Reddit CEO was a mod of r/jailbait, and people have pointed out you used to be able to just add people as mods as a joke, but that really overlooks being the CEO of a company that hosts r/jailbait for a really long time, is arguably a lot worse.

[Thad]

And this is AFTER Twitter's lost 2/3rds of it's valuation in less than a year.

Weeeeell it's worth 2/3 less than what Musk paid for it. Which isn't the same thing as 2/3 less than what it was worth when he bought it.