Technology

Victoria leaving was tragic but can we talk about Rampart?

Reddit created a way to drive more people to its native apps (where Reddit shows ads and generates revenue) as of July 1. But we can't overlook that Reddit was built on people's willingness to provide free content and labor, and the API battle has driven away some of the most popular content and veteran volunteer mods.

Reddit won the battle for API fees, but the war for desirable content—something no social media platform can ever be complacent about—is at risk. And that's not the type of problem that ousted mods and forcibly reopened subreddits can fix.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder in Reddit.

This is too good.

Tbf Ars is extremely editorially independent

Agreed, all it is now is a marketing stunt. Usually with responses built by some lawyer or publicist. But anyway, 1 horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?

Honestly, any user or mod that sticks around Reddit after this entire thing…I just don’t get. How can you be so disregarded, have your opinion so thoroughly dismissed, and then just keep creating content and driving traffic to the company? Fuck capitalism, but fuck reddit in this particular instance.

"Ask Me Anything About Rampart"

Not if it's my latest project, "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.

That was the event that changed me from "sure, I'll wait out a two day protest" to "wow, I should stop using this website."

That era ended when they fired Victoria.

It was a flawed system, but it really benefited Reddit. Volunteer mods did it because they were supposed to be the leaders of their communities and reddit was supposed to just be a platform for hosting them. By attacking that system they removed the main incentive for volunteer mods to exist.

I wonder if he thinks about it at all or if he's got a gang of yes men telling him it's all good.

I doubt we will see any big dent in numbers so soon, if at all. The brutal honest truth is that most users of Reddit are casual lurkers who just want a content feed and do not care about anything else. This is why subreddits protested as they did, interrupting the content feed with blackouts and extremely niche rules.

What may actually happen is that a lot of the content creators leave, which will decrease the quality of the site in the long term and maybe push out the casual user when the content gets bad enough. This is not something easily quantifiable, so we'll just have to wait and see.

But personally, I'm ok even if reddit isn't toppled. Now that I've stopped using it, I have no stake in the matter anymore.

For me, it wasn't so much the loss of third party apps as it was the way the admins handled it. I had never realized how little they actually valued their community. Instead, everything was about the money. Too bad they failed to see that users and the content they created was the reason Reddit was worth anything in the first place.

Lemmy Ask You

Ask someone something.

Eh Reddit doesn’t own that term, let’s just take it

I'm surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I've curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.

I suspect they've fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.