hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.
The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.
No reason to go back and every reason not to. The Fediverse is my home now.
I don’t care about fixing reddit either, I don’t care if it lives or dies, not anymore, tho it wouldn’t be bad IMO teaching the CEO a lesson in humility.
Hard to teach humility to a dude who is surrounded by institutional investors funneling millions into his pockets.
But yeah I hope this is ruining his sleep
Right? This was always bound to happen. The only way it wouldn’t be innevitable would require Reddit be a non-profit or co-op or equivalent. Which it certainly isn’t.
I also agree, the sudden breath into the fediverse (I’ve been poking my head in since I ran a nextcloud instance and they had a plugin for the fediverse called nextcloud social.). This place isn’t just a handful of OSS developers and enthusiasts anymore, but something starting to resemble a community of all types.
It reminds me of when Reddit was good, way back in like 2010 (for me) - but it feels more consequential now!
no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king.
Every decision is made by one person or a party of people specifically saying “Yes” to it. Whether they are “idiot[s]” is up for debate, but every single event involving anything artificial is decided by a person/people, not merely a faceless system.
AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.
I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.
Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.
Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.
I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.
Oh, I hope so as well, that sub is absolutely precious. When people talked about nuking their account(which I get it) it was for post like those that I feared for.
Not to worry, every post and comment on reddit has been archived, and is freely available as a 2tb torrent on Academic Torrents.
Is there an easy way to access this? I wanted to point out to some older reddit posts.
The askhistorians subreddit and it’s mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I’ve seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.
But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.
This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.
However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.
To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.
Just my 1/2 cents.
r/piracy with a message to us lemmy:

Is the exclamation mark command meant to trigger a link? It doesn’t do anything for me. My “home” lemmy is lemm.ee if that makes a difference.
Lots of Fediverse stuff works like you might know email to work, i.e.
thing@place.com, no matter where your email is hosted, you can send and receive messages from other hosts.In this Case, the
piracycommunity, within thelemmy.dbzer0.comdomain, you should be able to copy-paste the !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, or any community like it, into the search bar of your home lemmy server and be able to subscribe.Unless it’s blocked…
I’m not sure how to make a link to communities so that it works for everyone sorry. But yeah the ! Does indicate a community usually
This is a sub that could really benefit from just leaving reddit entirely anyways. Potentially being able to have more open discussions centered around piracy would make the content of that sub so much better.
That. Being able to actually post links to websites.
Just have to say: Has anyone notice that Beehaw is just way faster then Reddit? Sorry new here, just my first impression. By the way. Thanks everyone for this site.
From join-lemmy.org:
Blazing Fast
Made using some of the fastest frameworks and tools, including Rust, Actix, Diesel, Inferno, and Typescript.
It really is faster, I noticed that too.
Yes, when I first got on mid-day it way crazy fast. It has slowed down a bit for me as the day has gone on but still faster then typical Reddit speeds. I wonder if beehaw load is more late afternoon and evening, or if it is just more people flocking in, or maybe both.
Probably has to do with time of day, but it’s more snappy anyway. Smaller platform I guess, but it’s pretty nice
Indeed! I guess it’s (at least partly) because there’s not as much stuff going on that the user can see (and sometimes can’t see).
Maybe because I’m using Jerboa, but it feels slower to me. Jerboa has many issues though
Yes, I am on the web UI… Have not tried the app yet.
Thinking about sticking to Lemmy for most things and using my Reddit alt account just as a porn aggregator. Who’s with me?!
This has been absolutely wild. Sadly, it’s not that surprising and the corporate speak is strong. While Reddit likely won’t change, the “type” of users that will leave over this is the kind of users that made Reddit the community it is today. These are all likely active members from Fark, Slashdot, Digg, and others.
Good news though, we’ve got a group of people that are experienced in making fantastic communities. I’ll bet we’ll do it again. We’ll see how this goes with the Fedditverse/Threadverse via Lemmy/kbin. I’m sure we’ll figure this community/magazine thing out soon enough.
Sometimes all we can control is how we react to the situation.
I find it a bit disheartening that a lot of comments on Reddit (I know I’m mostly staying away) are labeling us, the people who take issue with not only the API pricing but the entire direction the site is going, snowflakes and whiny babies.
A lot of “I don’t cares” and “I just want to use the site not see this useless protest” etc. I remember a time when reddit could come together and actually get results (for better and for worse).
Even the way people comment is different. Seems like a lot more low effort, mouth breather posts, or suspiciously bad faith arguments that I see in response to the increasingly rare thoughtful/informative dialogue in the form of posts or comments.
I’m not saying the site was ever an iconic standard to the peak intellectual, but there seemed to be more people hungry for that type of content.
Maybe I’m just looking back at everything through rose tinted glasses, but I miss the days of ending up going down a new rabbithole sparked by a random comment chain.
I wonder if it’s just me and I’m just turning into that old bitter dude longing for the “good ole days.”
That’s reddit from 8+ years ago you’re talking about, and small communities. Reddit has long been a mainstream community now, and we all know how the average person is.
Guess I am getting old. Hope Lemmy here can usher in a new wave of similar content. I’ll have to wait and see.
I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.
I’m not giving up. 11 year account deleted. I might read stuff on Reddit from time to time, but it will be without an account, in a private tab, through a vpn, with an ad blocker on.
there are also a lot of subreddits that went readonly. which doesn’t hurt much. when the first google result for something is a functional readonly reddit page, reddit has succeeded. When the first result I click is a message about the issue we’re facing that is much worse for reddit.
At the same time, the couple of subs posting the images and only the images are causing /r/all to have some anti-reddit commentary.
Either way, r/all doesnt look that different. Ok, normal-reddit-for-thing isnt on the front page, instead smaller-reddit-for-thing is there.
I’m sure moderators will plan more, but I think it’s going to be difficult to maintain coordination and whether I like it or not, I get reddits approach to just ignore this.
It’s functional for the users, but not for Reddit who wants more data/engagement.
But yeah, the smaller reddit thingy is true. r/thesims4 was open when r/sims4 was not.
hang on, what leaked internal email, do you know where I can find that?
i want to call complete BS on them making it out like the Redditors protesting would physically assault the staff. Guess that’s probably a reasonable thing now though. People are whacked in the head.
He wasn’t content on slandering the Apollo Dev, now he’s slandering all of us
Seems on brand after the CEO doubled down on falsely accusing the Apollo dev of blackmail, even though the Apollo dev posted the recordings proving otherwise.
I thought that was quite an escalation also. But maybe their health & safety committee reccomended it. Probably just trying to make the workers feel embattled and unsafe so they would avoid engaging with the issues and stay to reddits side. Its a PUA kind of doublespeak; spez is the one actually making the threat. But in a way it seems to come from us.
To be a fly on the wall at the water cooler. Please reddit workers, leak a zoom call.
Well in a world where people will attack a fast food worker for their order being wrong, it’s probably prudent to make sure the employees you are responsible for are protected.
I wonder if things are as tense as was shown in that video from reddit HQ.
was hovering over the link like “is this going to be a rick roll or something?”
so I click it and YES this is literally what I was imagining. not the rick roll, the previous comment. fucking brilliant. in the comments it says it is the last post to /r/videos
a lot of people mentioning ./ and digg here. on ./ there was this “first post” joke. it was very boring even at that time IMHO. but now is the moment to be thinking about “last post” if you are a person who has “last post” powers.
It at least seems like an attempt to push an “us” vs. “them” mentality.
i like the part where he implies that redditors are so deranged they will physically assault his employees.
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That’s my situation as well. Out of curiosity I went into reddit today to see how different it would look. It’s close to the same. A lot of the subs I go to are in the “Yeah it sucks but we’re small so we won’t make a dent so fuck it…” other subs like /r/games with their BS excuse of “we support it but don’t want to do anything about it”. Overall, kind of the same. Kind of makes me sad
There is only one sub I use that has not attempted to do anything about the API issue. They stickied a post forwarded to an explanation of what is happening in support of the blackout, but it is an important time period for us so no one was going to allow a full shut down. It’s one of the few non-toxic places to discuss our fandom. Beyond that sub, the others don’t matter much to me.
r/starfield?
Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:
The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
He should opensource it, then. Someone else will do it.
Great interview from Christian there, it really is so frustrating that Reddit is and has been so hostile towards him. :(
Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol
The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.
Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he’s doing his job perfectly. He’s looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He’s put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He’s a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.
I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.
It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.
Ah, the business world.
Fucks over Ellen Pao so that all hatred is directed at her, discovers a few years later that corporate can do the same to him.
surprisedpikachu
Although, I think he hasn’t actually learned this yet and still believes he’s doing a great job. His comments a few years ago about how he “sees [himself] as a leader, rather than a slave” speak to his arrogance (and also his weird philosophies; I’m pretty sure this is a dude who unironically considers himself a real life Hank Rearden… shiver).
It’ll actually be really funny if they just knock him out of the way just before the IPO. CEO makes bad decisions and proves to be a liability. IPO not looking as profitable. Get rid of CEO to gain trust from investors? Launch IPO. Take the money and run. Of course, the decisions were on them as well, but of course they’ll claim no credit for it.
I’m sure he has contingencies in place, but still. It would be a hilarious end to his tenure if something like that happened.
This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.
These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.
I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.
Has anyone considered creating a bridging API interface for lemmy? Something that can translate between the lemmy and reddit API to make this easier?
Still new, but this was gaining a bit of traction a few days ago:
Do you know if there’s a drop-in replacement for PRAW in the works? It would be nice to be able to port bots over easily for communities that relied on them.
I’m pretty he just wants to go take a week long nap before answering any more questions.
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hopefully we’ll be adding ‘lemmy’ to our web searches in a few years to get the best/most accurate information
hi, can someone read this?
Hey, I can see your comment.
sim! que susto rapaz!
POKWEAOKPAESKOPSAEOKPASEOKPSEAOKPESAOK
Eu tô tentando resolver algumas coisas aqui ainda então talvez eu volte pra conta antiga. Tipo, eu não consigo ver nenhum comentário da minha comunidade.

hahaha Não compensa manter as duas contas independentes?
Eu criei uma conta aqui pq ela bloqueia o lemmygrad.ml (eu tentei dar uma chance, mas toda thread que eu pisava dava uma discussão e eu quero ficar deboinha) e o exploding-heads.com, então minha intenção era substituir mesmo. Eu só não vou deletar totalmente a outra conta porque eu publiquei umas coisas úteis nela.
Ahh, saquei!
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You Can Export Your RiF History.

That is awesome.
First thing I do when the blackout is over is export my history, edit my comments, delete my acc and buh bye Reddit forever.
I just used Power Delete Suite to remove all my comments and submissions
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I am just a drop in the ocean, but I won’t be going back to reddit now that’s I’ve discovered the fediverse
this feels like the internet I fell in love with back in the mid 90s with smaller communities and no corporations trying to control what I interact with
oh man I’d love to run that but I feel it’d be wrong to purge all of the technical answers I’ve posted over the years. I think it’s better to pass on that one
You can filter by subreddit in Power Suite Delete, so if your tech answers are in specific subs, you can leave those alone and delete everything else
it had an option to export your comments into a .csv, so theoretically you could post them elsewhere if you want
but that could be a lot of work so I understand just leaving comments as they are
Archiving copies of my Reddit history would be nice, but here’s a somewhat idiotic question.
I use commas in copy a lot, so a CSV file sounds like a nightmare. How’s that handled?
so I just looked at the .csv it spat out, it encloses everything in quotes. here is what it looks like with the actual details changed:
“Title”,“Body”,“Permalink”,“Score”,“Timestamp UTC”,“Actions”,
“”,“example comment start, example comment middle, example comment end”,“https…/”,“2”,“1686084708”,"deleted ",
HOWEVER, looking at this .csv I don’t think it actually exported all of my comments. I don’t really care about saving my reddit comments but I’m 99% sure it is missing my oldest comments from this account so use at your own risk I suppose
it did a wonderful job of deleting everything though, my account looks totally empty from the profile page
Csv is not always comma delimited. It could also be delimited with a tab, semicolon, or pipe (|)
Isn’t a tab delimeted spreadsheet normally called a TSV, as in “Tab-Separated Values”?
Isn’t CSV literally Comma-Separated Values?
Sorry, pedantry doesn’t die.
A little bit yes, a little bit no
Tab delimited csv are sometimes called tsv, but just as often you’ll see csv (tab delimited) as a file type option
See the wiki section on standardization for details.
Csv currently includes the following delimiters:
Comma, space, tab, pipe, or semicolon
Now that you point it out, I remember being able to set delimiters on exports. It’s just been ages since I was generating them.
I believe CSV format has quoting rules. Hope the software understands them. :)
Considering doing what someone else suggested and editing all your comments to explain why you left, to mess with the data it has access to rather than outright removing it
Haha this sounds like such an amazing F you to reddit.
This is what I did, too. I even included a little blurb about Lemmy.
I suspect the account might just get banned and comments deleted, but nevertheless they were (or will be) there for at least a little while, and it removed my participation in reddit’s profit machine. It was oh so satisfying to do even if it only had a super small impact.
Just kicked it off on my account, it’s currently rewriting every Reddit comment I ever made. Feels good.





























