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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed... while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.
It's all about profits. You can't enforce any demand if you don't make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you're staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just "HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO".
The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn't matter if you're posting John Oliver as a protest, you're still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.
The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit's finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.
I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could've also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a "haha John Oliver" but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
Except a huge number of people only ever use reddit on mobile. There are no ad blockers that can target specific advertisements inside of an app itself. You can do network wide advertisement blocking with things like pihole, but the people using reddit on mobile aren't the people setting up a network wide domain filter. I only ever used reddit on the desktop through old.reddit.com, but I could see the writing on the wall that they're going to get rid of that sooner rather than later.
I only ever used Firefox with Reddit, and I had no advertising, no "recommended subs".
Why would anyone use an app?
Around 70% of the users are on mobile, more specifically. However my point still stands - even if only 10% of the desktop users pick an ad blocker, this means at least 3% less ad revenue for Reddit Inc., it's quite a bit.
Another thing that they could be doing is to create a bunch of rules that would displease mobile users the most, but that would not be detected as "targetting mobile users". Such as banning for emoji usage, or for writing "R/subreddit" instead of "r/subreddit", this sort of stuff. Aiming at actually destroying the subreddit, so people migrate elsewhere.
But for that they'd need to accept that their Reddit communities are lost, and yet most of them are still wallowing in that "no, we can recover Reddit!" wishful "thinking".
Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it's a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
The federation itself alleviates those problems.
In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don't want to lose the content.
Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won't lose access to their content, and they know it.
And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)
So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, "NOOOOO THEY'RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY". Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.
Additionally: it's hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.
Thank you very much! Very well explained.
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you'd only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don't worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren't an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
Yeah but we get some of those mods! Lol.