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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      One of them… who was a mod on r/jailbait.

      This is something that really needs to be brought up regularly.

      • simplify@lemm.ee
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        There are plenty of valid criticisms beyond character assassination. It is my understanding that any mod could add any user as a mod of their subreddit.

    • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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      It’s easy to get corrupted by money and success. Has been shown a myriad of times in any stage of human history.

      In the beginning, spez might have been “one of us”, but he gradually shifted away from that while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.

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        while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.

        He probably really was one of us. To be honest, most of Reddit had no idea who tf spez was before this. Anytime he did something terrible, it would be big then disappear in a week.

        Then, since he was so removed from a redditor’s in the day to day, all would be well and he’d be forgotten. The local mods and reddit admins were who everyone would direct their hate to.

    • Dexx1s@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      Well, they don’t always start out as “corporations”. He may have been one of them, till the glamour of profits came into the picture.

      • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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        he never was. It was always a business. Do you remember they started the site with faking users? They were always a for-profit company. It’s kinda cringe to think he ever was one.

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    He’s just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it’s paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.

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      That may be intentional. I know they want ai companies to have to pay to train on all that human written conversation. Right now it can be searched and accessed on google cache.

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        Reddit and AI companies are all financially backed by the same people. Anything they lose on Reddit (which they aren’t) they gain on the other side. Plus, bots make this unlikely. Who wants an AI trained on spam bots and automods?

        Don’t let Spez make it sound like everyone working at Reddit is broke and needs pitying. He wouldn’t be CEO if he wasn’t on CEO pay.

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    Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.

    What’s next in the Reddit bingo?

    The removal of old reddit?

    Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?

    Buy upvotes?

    The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn’t count when there is actual factual evidence.

    • XYZinferno@lemmy.world
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      Buy upvotes?

      The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright “gib money get updoot” but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.

      “Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!”

      To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn’t be surprised at this point.

      • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
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        A new tier: reddit ultimate

        With reddit ultimate you get all the benefits of reddit premium plus you get the ability to link your online and offline personas as well as a weekly free loot box.

        Loot boxes (8USD each or 10 for 50USD) may contain one of the following perks:

        • a week of free Reddit ultimate.
        • “3 nuclear downvotes”, like a normal downvote but counts as 50.
        • “karma MSG”, for 12 hours all karma you get or lose is counted twice.
        • “look into the shadows”, get a complete list of all your shadow bans.
        • “STFU”, mute all chats for a week.
        • “sacrificial lamb”, remove any or all non-ultimate users from your followers.
        • “heeeere’s Johnny!”, banned from a sub? Guess again, and this time you can’t get banned by non-ultimate mods for a week.
        • 5 gold awards, appears in 17 out of 24 loot boxes

        A as a new democracy oriented initiative, for 50USD you get to dethrone one mod for a month.

        The loot boxes would actually be able to get me back, not to buy them of course, but to see the havoc it would bring to r/Conservative.

      • popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org
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        It’s sort of what World of Warcraft did with gold.

        The gold farms were making TONS of money selling illegal gold in much the same way upvote farms are making a killing.

        Upvotes are free for them to give, and they would have a money printer on their hands.

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      Honestly, I’m surprised Old Reddit has lasted this long at all, even before all this.

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        I’m 100% out once that happens. Well technically I pretty much am currently. I may look at r/all for a couple minutes then head over here for a good portion of time.

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      What’s next in the Reddit bingo?

      See what stupid shit Musk pulled with Twitter a month ago, and that’ll be what Reddit does in a few days.

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      The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you’re making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn’t make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.

      • legion@lemmy.world
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        People get “slippery slope” wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.

        The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn’t just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn’t intend to, and B happening can’t be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don’t want B but can’t stop it, because we’ve slipped and we’re sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That’s the whole concept, that we’re stuck sliding.

        Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn’t apply. There’s seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.

        • fische_stix@reddthat.com
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          When the slope is engineered and intentionally constructed per design it likely isn’t slippery. This Reddit slide is decline, which is a type of slope in some context, but it isn’t slippery.

    • LUHG@lemmy.world
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      Everything you listed is on the table for them. I hope they do it so it dies quickly.

      • gridleaf@lemmy.ml
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        What’s the difference between new.reddit and sh.reddit? They look nearly identical, but with different margins and padding.

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          I don’t really know because I haven’t spent much time with it. I do remember either in one of the mod summits or somewhere that Spez admitted that new reddit was bad and that they were already working on the next version of reddit, which is what sh.reddit is supposed to be. New reddit is an abomination and I’ve only ever used it for settings old reddit does not have.

          But to be honest with you, I haven’t really spent any time on sh.reddit because you used to not be able to log in to it.

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    My operating assumption here is that Reddit can collect more data to sell if people are logged in and use their app.

    Does not matter if you destroy 75% of the usefulness of the system if the remaining 25% can be more effectively monetized.

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      exactly. People keep saying Spez is an idiot. Him and the board ran the numbers, knew there’d be attrition and still think they’ll come out ahead so they went with it. They expected people to get pissed off but for enough suckers to stick around to make things profitable under the new paradigm

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      There’s a reason so many sites force users to sign in if they reject cookies. It’s all about tracking data.

    • PlantbasedChe@lemmy.world
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      Does reddit have an ideology ? Without one, I think it is very difficult surviving on long run even if founders were on good will

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    Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.

    The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣

    But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.

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      I can’t even imagine it being about the IPO anymore.

      There might have been some concerns about profitability numbers for an IPO, but I don’t think that’s something you can right in a hurry. If the investors didn’t like “N quarters of losing money”, will they be that much more impressed by “we slashed and burnt big chunks of the platform, but we don’t really have any clue if this will stick?”

      More importantly, they had a strong narrative they could sell investors: They were the “anti-social media social media”. Users remained largely in control of their curation, the content was less ephemeral and more indexable. They were perfectly positioned to differentiate themselves as other big players went whole hog on the “the algorithm is mostly standing between you and what you want to see” models.

      Does that narrative hold up when their user base is either fleeing or feels held hostage?

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        It’s 100% about the IPO. Other large websites have gotten into trouble with the credit card companies by offering porn. It’s why Pornhub removed unverified amateur content, OnlyFans considered not allowing porn, and probably others. Your platform absolutely plummets in value if people have a hard time spending money there. Hiding unverified subs sounds exactly like this kind of move.

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    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.

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      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

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        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…”

        • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world
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          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.

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            Future incidents probably will still happen

            It’s not a question of if, but when. The only secure computer is one that’s a mile underground, encased in concrete, and with no network connection.

            And even then, it’s still not a 100% safe bet.

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            I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao

            I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.

    • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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          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.

      • lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee
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        It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.

      • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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          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.

          • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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            History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.

            But we’ll see I suppose.

            • rwhitisissle@lemmy.world
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              It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.

              • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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                New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.

  • grape54321@lemmy.world
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    reddit and twitter are literally competing to see who can destroy their platform first and unfortunately they’re both winning

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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      I can’t believe neither has lost it yet. I keep seeing public entities talk about their Twitter page, and I keep seeing subreddits active.

  • qwed113@lemmy.world
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    I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.

    Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.

    • XIIIesq@lemmy.world
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      It’s probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It’s already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user’s etc.

      Be patient.

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      I find the size quite pleasing. Sure there are more posts and stuff to see, but here it’s possible to actually have a conversation with someone and not have your comment buried in 3k other comments.

      But that being said, I would like to see Reddit crash and burn, so business practices like that doesn’t become more common.

      And you are right - decentralisation is the future.

  • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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    They’re doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it’s been shocking decision after terrible change

    • DaedalistKraken@ttrpg.network
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      Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it compares to Twitter’s attempt, Elon Musk seems to have a lot of natural talent at bad decisions.

      • Brudder Aaron@lemmy.world
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        A techbro saw Elon’s dumpster-fire handling of twitter and went “Yes, this makes sense!” Oh Spez, this is why we don’t idolize idiots.

    • negativeyoda@lemmy.world
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      install Reddit enhancement suite and run this script in the developer tools console:

      var $domNodeToIterateOver = $('.del-button .option .yes'), currentTime = 0, timeInterval = 1500; $domNodeToIterateOver.each(function() { var _this = $(this); currentTime = currentTime + timeInterval; setTimeout(function() { _this.click(); }, currentTime);});

      You even keep your karma that way

      • GreenM@lemmy.world
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        I have already batch rewritten everything.

        Just few thing for the script you posted.

        • At the time I edited my posts reddit was sneakily undoing deletions but not edits. So editing was safer option.
        • I think time interval between posts was longer than 1,5 secs, otherwise reddit would have blocked next edit/deletion.