I just saw this post over on r/modcoord which is basically a massive list of subreddits participating in the blackout protest. If I’m being honest I haven’t seen this much anger and coordinated frustration since the era right before the digg exodus.
Assuming more and more subreddits join in, it’s going to send a pretty massive message to the users who interact with a blacked out subreddit. Then I’m trying to imagine what happens if after a massive coordinated blackout, Reddit continue on the current trajectory. Is Lemmy even prepared to handle the amount of potential incoming traffic that API closure could lead to? It’s absolutely bonkers to me that the Reddit team might just stay the course…
Honestly, I want Reddit to fail altogether and have people flood into Lemmy by hosting their own instances. It’s like ripping off the band-aid, it’s just better to get on with it.
My account is 17 years old and predates the first digg migration (before the giant digg v4). It’s been a downhill run for a while but sometime after the Boston bombing debacle it’s seemed much more aggressively moderated and curated, much less “free” and less tolerant of opinions or thoughts that fall outside of the “hive mind”.
I use it less and less anyway. I get that the API was abused to violate folks privacy wishes(ie:pushshift ) and feed larger corps coffers with ad data. And I get that a response is to ad some charge. But their general direction has seemed to be circling a toilet so to speak
It always felt to me like there was just a huge shift in the entire reddit culture. At some point, everything changed and it was no longer the same. The users all got worse, the moderation got worse, reddits decision making got worse. The site is nothing like it was when I joined in 2013.
Agree. But I can’t find a specific inflection point. I still recall one of my first comments was some low effort smarmy joke that would engender upvotes on digg, and thus must have been good for Reddit. And the only response was something like “we don’t really do that here bud”
And they were right. The culture was much closer to say news.ycombinatir.com now, but with much more open subject matter.
I do know they changed how quickly things can be put on the front page after Boston. And then clearly there were things that were selectively placed there and suddenly certain, if not most subreddits couldn’t be on the front page. So that’s the main place I can point to that changed the type of content and culture from one of a popular vote to a more delayed and curated narrative.
I’m okay with it dying at this point.
To my knowledge they (reddit) are working on getting pushshift back to work and large companies mining data do so by scraping the website, not through api
They axed Pushshifts API access because the dude was unresponsive. Which is par for the course. It was down for days at a time often. At one point he mentioned you could opt out of pushift crawls, but signing up for a google survey with your username. But then never opted anyone out, so everyone got crawled.
Guy is a bit of a scumbag. Im glad his access was cut.