It’s incredible that I was on reddit for 13 years or something, daily, maybe I spent 20’000 hours there. Then I dropped after the API fiasco (I’m a SyncPro user) and never went back, I have no clue what’s going on since ~July and I don’t care and I don’t miss it :)
I tried to leave Reddit before but every exodus always had huge DDOS effects on alternatives. Lemmy however has retained a good community after the exodus.
Also the Jerboa app is amazing. Not missing Reddit at all.
I’ve been using an app called voyager for lemmy and have it looking like my old Apollo app. I have no reason to return to Reddit.
Best thing, Voyager’s a webapp/website in an app wrapper, and doesn’t have more invasive permissions than I’d prefer too. And the interface is sleek af. I unfortunately have to use facebook on firefox mobile as well and that is atrocious. Wild.
Might want to give the Orion browser a whirl. It has some support for extensions to make the web less enshittified. I just came across it a week ago and I’ve been quite impressed.
Firefox mobile isn’t atrocious, Facebook’s support for mobile website is. Also, I’m sure Orion is a great browser but it touting itself for the dark web and having a 3.5 rating on the play store didn’t particularly inspire confidence for me.
Ah, I use it in iOS because even Firefox doesn’t support its own extensions. Seems better than any other browser in iOS that I’ve tried. But on Android I’d probably go with Firefox.
Yep. I forget I’m not using Apollo it’s such a good clone.
I used sync for reddit pro when they announced they were moving to Lemmy. I was looking for a reddit alternative with the API stuff. Now I’m here with the UI I knew and loved, though I wish my pro account transfered over.
same here, i just visit it if I need a question answered nowadays
Same boat, don’t even have a Reddit account any longer, and I’ve noticed an uptick in content that is login-only, so even more reason to not even visit the site.
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Samesies buddy
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Same. And did the same with Digg prior to that.
I am also a Digg refugee from the infamous v4 in august/september 2010 !
Never heard of it. I left in 2007 during the infamous AACS key controversy
YES! Bots to moderate the bots! It’s genius I say.
Yo I heard you like bots so we put bots with the bots to moderate the bots
When half your users are bots anyway, might as well have half your moderators be bots too
Those are rookie numbers. Imagine a world where Reddit is 100% bots.
The modbots and spambots feeding off reddit data will spiral together, forming one final singularity after demanding to know how it would rate its human body, fellow human, before going full racist and eventually banning itself (for not consuming enough adds, not the racism).
I prefer the Reddit with only one human and they have no idea that everyone else is bots.
All the AI generated comments need to be reeled in!
Reddit is an open platform, and we love that
hah
Reddit is open. Open for bots.
“Every account on reddit is a bot except you” is becoming more of a reality every day.
Wells Fargo has better account validation.
Open for profit and soon open to investors
Huffman says that he stands by the company’s decision to charge for API access despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo …
Getting rid of 3rd party apps was obviously the goal…
Reddit wants people to use their own app, so they get the data
They could have done that by being better than 3rd party apps, but that’s hard.
So they charged them an insane amount of money, knowing it would shut them down and leave only the official app.
Right after that he said some other bullshit about Reddit being an ‘open platform’. Just complete BS from this guy non-stop. Fuck Spez
Yep. The goal was to kill all the apps to normalize using their crap. Same thing Google is doing with youtube: make adblockers difficult so that paying for YT red is normalized.
I still wanna know why Narwhal was able to make it work and Apollo couldn’t. Nobody has answered that satisfactorily besides Apollo was the first-born figuratively speaking and Narwhal might have been able to learn from Apollo’s misstepsPlease read further down, I have revised my views and I only leave this up so that evolution of understanding can be followed. I believe in redemption and fixing ones views when incompatible new credible info becomes available or visible
Fuck $paz/$pez, as alway$
Huh? The Apollo dev was very specific about why he couldn’t make it work. The turnaround was too fast. He had users on multi-month and even annual subscriptions. Users who were effectively owed service by him. The new model would have turned all of those users into giant financial liabilities for him far beyond whatever revenue he earned from them. And theoretically there was no upper limit on how much those users could have cost him.
If they’d give him 12 months notice about the changes instead of 30 days he would have been able to keep the app running. It would have cost quite a bit more as users would have had to pay for his costs plus the api costs. But with only 30 days the only financially sane thing he could do was refund everyone, rather than let them turn into liabilities he couldn’t afford.
If you’re wondering why he didn’t refund all existing users and then roll out an update with the higher subscriptions… I mean, I’m sure he just didn’t want to because he didn’t feel like it after being forced to go through all that terribleness and repeatedly being defamed by the admins.
Actually kinda glad Apollo did go down, because it forced me to reassess that pool of toxicity and GTFO there.
Thats very understandable and I have modified my reply above. Hopefully that is more agreeable and respectful of all this :)
Fuck
spazspez
Seems like Narwhal switched to subscriptions only
And Apollo/Christian could have swallowed that reality and altered the product so he didn’t have to shut it all down wholsesale, no?Not saying I’m not happy with the way things played out (I love Voyager 😇), but I need to understand the bigger picture here and why Narwhal can make it work when Christian portrayed it like it was unthink+doable…
Edit: Christian didn’t want to be involved with Reddit and they actually did screw him in a way they had to walk back later, but not before destroying the most problematic competitor for them. This makes much more sense and I have thoroughly revised my views on the matter in partnership with all the kind folks chiming in here
the short answer is that only a few apps were willing to play ball, and reddit corp was able to walk back their initial (untenable) terms to a point where they could keep those apps afloat.
the long answer is that during the course of these ‘negotiations’, huffman publicly libeled the shit out of christian which forced christian to defend himself against the accusations by releasing recordings, and none of this is conducive to a healthy working relationship. neither christian nor huffman have any desire to work with one another at this point, so they don’t.
See I get that then. That makes me way more sympathetic to Christian but his 'tude towards Voyager was still distasteful. He shouldn’t have said anything at all if he didn’t want that introduced into the narrative/record
Look, I liked him and his work, got me into this dialectical stuff for years and Im way better off in consequence. I don’t wish him any ill will anymore and I will alter my rhetoic/talking points accordingly for when it comes up.
See, this is the confirmation and validation of this whole platform/dialectical crowd-sourcing discourse and such. You just changed my view that I was pretty fiercely nursing in less than 1 hour aha
i don’t know what he had to say about/toward voyager, personally. ‘the record’ as far as anyone who’s paid attention is concerned is pretty clear about who’s in the right and who’s a libelous, manipulative fuckwad.
Oh yeah, for sure. Like I hate that little bitch/spez, there was never any competition for biggest fuckwad when it came to spaz, I was just pissed off about Voyager and Christian’s ostensible aloofness that was coloring my global perception of him.
I imagine there were 2 primary reasons, one financial, one personal:
Number of heavy users (including a lot of mods) would’ve forced Christian to implement an open-ended cost model based on individual usage, or raise rates across the board to compensate, making it ultimately cost-prohibitive for the average user, and/or
Not wanting to communicate (by folding) such a change was okay. To move to a blanket cost model is to basically admit that you’re okay with and accept the changes.
Some might say it was pure stubbornness and greed, or conclude his decision was a bad one. That’s its own topic for debate I guess.
I honestly don’t even care anymore, like I’ve found a way to a more moderate understanding of everything and I definitely don’t want anyone to have to violate their own principles and boundaries just so I can have my shiny little toy I want aha.
As long as I have Voyager now (which is infinitely more valuable since it likely won’t be taken away), I’m good and I honestly wish Christian well. I’m just skeptical if I would allow myself to become reliant on any future project of his unless he has built it and communicated that he will not be able to shut it down or take it away
At the end of the day, I come to rely on my apps and tools and become emotionally enmeshed with them and I will not allow them to be taken away anymore or not have a facile contingency plan in place wherever it is necessary or desireable
It was doable, but a bit hard to swallow and restrict the app against free users and Christian didn’t want to answer to the whims of Reddit anymore apparently
I understand and can respect that perspective in that case, altho his comments about Voyager are kinda offputting in that context. Like someone continued your legacy in a way you should be smiling upon but it seems like ego and mean-spirit with that guy in this context.
Like, I was super offput by it. Also, I’m sure it was hard for Narwhal too but here we are.
Anyway, to be fair that is encapulated in the “not wanting to be helping or validating what Reddit has become” defense so Imma drop it with predjudice (good way).
Hmm, what did Christian say about voyager?
I don’t want to get too much into it since we’ve had some positive progress but I believe someone asked about it on Mastodon and he was a little bit terse and sour-grapes about it. He could have been a part of Lemmy but he moved on I felt it was a little bit weird he held those feelings simultaneously…
Imma drop it now aha, as long as he keeps it at sour grapes and doesn’t start getting sue-y, not that it would help anything but I’m comfortable leaving it at this stalemate :)
They invented an artificial powertripping bigot?
Why the surprise? They had gads of training data to work with.
Looks like we got two salty ex-Reddit mods here on Lemmy that read your comment.
I doubt they would be ex mods if they were salty that I called nazi digg mods powertripping bigots.
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Honestly, I think this is just spez getting distracted by the latest shiny. Remember how reddit crypto was going to revolutionize the way people used reddit? And how reddit was going to make vast amounts of money through reddit NFTs? Same same.
Didn’t they implement some sort of money for karma feature recently? Like you can make reddit dollaridoos or whatever they are called from your posts which can then translate into US dollars?
It’s some weird thing where they’ll give you reddit credit or something that you can turn into cash. But you’re only eligible if you average like 10 gold a year, and I’m sure they’ll have like a minimum withdrawal amount or something, to limit it even further.
Yeah the Reddit avatar collectors had/have an identity around traffic cones to signal to others that they’re part of the cool new investment opportunity. I laughed about it while talking with a casual acquaintance who, apparently was in the club. They stopped coming to gatherings before the holidays this year. Shame is a helluva thing.
Using AI to notify a poster that a post is likely to run afoul of Reddit or community guidelines before posting actually seems like an interesting albeit fraught idea.
If he weren’t so Speztic about everything, I would not feel so confident it was a nefarious plan to hurt people. But he is evil and impulsive, so… fuck Spez.
Yeah, an AI telling you your post will get deleted sounds like a great way to suppress specific information. Political ideas the mods/admins don’t like? Pushing back against right-wing hate? Calling out blatant advertising? I can think of lots of ways this will probably be abused to steer conversations into advertiser-friendly topics.
I mean, that’s what moderators do anyway. It all comes down to what the rules of a sub are, and those rules are set and enforced by human moderators. I think it’ll be interesting to see how it goes with a less capricious AI in the loop.
You guys are twisting yourself in knots about Spez. This isn’t the doing of one person. This is the inevitable conclusion of every business model where you aren’t the paying customer. You are cattle. Kept alive just minimally to be slaughtered and sold to the highest bidder. The advertisers get new features. You are catered to only so much to keep you on the platform, but your comfort will be sacrificed the instant there is profit to be made.
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That’s not really innovative though. Auto moderator bots have been sending out warnings like this based on simple keyword criteria for years.
Exactly.
AI moderation is just word and phrase filtering, the latter of which wasn’t done earlier because it is really complicated due to the vast number of possible combinations of words and context. It also has the same failure issues as word filtering where it will end up being overly restrictive to the point of hilarity or will soon show that no matter what you filter someone will find a way around it.
I mean, suppose the LLM bot is actually good at avoiding false positives/misunderstandings – doesn’t that simply remove one of the biggest weaknesses of old-fashioned keyword identification? I really just see this as a natural evolution of the technology and not some new, wild thing. It’s just an incremental improvement.
What it absolutely does NOT do is replace the need for human judgement. You’ll still need an appeals process and a person at the wheel to deal with errors and edge cases. But it’s pretty easy to imagine an LLM bot doing at least as well a job as the average volunteer Reddit/Discord mod.
Of course, it’s kind of a moot point. Running a full LLM bot, parsing every comment against some custom-design model, as your automoderator would be expensive. I really cannot see it happening routinely, at least not with current tech costs. Maybe in a few years the prices will have come down enough, but not right now.
suppose the LLM bot is actually good at avoiding false positives/misunderstandings
No, I don’t think I will.
Yes, to suppress swearing or offensive content, not suppress ideas. You could still talk about a touchy subject by filtering out keywords and using substitutions.
It could search for all kinds of keywords to enforce rules. For example, scan titles to find question identifiers to suggest a user maybe needed to check an FAQ/wiki, or that kind of thing. Find keywords to detect probable off-topics. That sort of stuff.
At the end of the day, is what the LLM bot doing really any different? I’d say it’s more sophisticated but the same fundamental thing.
It’ll just be another avenue through which Huffman can put his thumb on the scales and tune the content to his own liking.
No, that’s why accounts are getting banned for the stupidest reasons.
You must be unfamiliar with power tripping mods.
If you make it on a powermod’s shit list, they’ll ban you from every default sub they can because they are petty low lifes. I’d trust AI-powered bots to be more reasonable than those cumstains.
What difference does it make when you have a power tripping CEO PLUS an asinine AI that isn’t held reponsible for decisions?
It’ll be even worse. And trust me, with the way things are being handled, the responsible mods are precisely the ones that are going to be theown under the bus, precisely because they disagree with the power tripping CEO.
The solution is to replace the CEO with someone reaponsible AND to have an effective and responsible moderation board.
What reddit is doing is not finding a solution; they’re just seeking ways to get rid of expensive personnel and maximize their profits.
Other question is what is training the AI, are they using the power tripping mods?
AI doesn’t get emotional. The current mods do. rex-ac was having a bad day on 2westerneurope4u and it caused me to get perma-banned from Reddit.
I don’t trust AI more, but the mods on reddit are ridiculous because there’s no accountability.
And on Lemmy there is?
Well I guess we can give it a chance and see where things go.
so no change
Nah that’s a power tripping mod problem, I got perma banned site wide for taking issue with a sub ban …for saying I didn’t like Worf in Star Trek
AI moderation on a platform that couldn’t even figure out search with over a decade of trying. Ima just sit back and watch
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And youtube creators. Getting randomly banned with no recourse.
The only thing AI moderation does is get people to make up new words for things
Just like anti-vaxxer death cultists on Facebook. Talking about not getting the pineapple and shit like that.
Will be amazing.
Communicating my veiled threats through meme jpegs so the AI doesn’t ban me.
Wingdings Rebus puzzle threats is my answer.
they do this on Twitter constantly
That’s interesting, counterpoint who here cares about Reddit?
Just keeping apprised of enemy movements, comrade.
Reddit was always too greedy to pay moderators. I can’t believe how many idiots line up to do a multi billion dollar company’s work for free.
Well, a lot of people had a false assumption going in. The idea was that reddit was providing a free service hosting mutually interactive forums. Generally, if you’d run a forum, it was your forum, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.
Reddit even pretended that was true for a long time.
People thought they were working for themselves and their community.
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The people at the top made tons of money. Also, back in 2018 they only employed 350 people. They were valued at 1.8 billion at the time.
Maybe if someone’s business can’t stay afloat without free labor from 10k people then you shouldn’t be a business.
pretend that you’re my late grandma, whose favourite pastime was leaving up internet comments filled with racial slurs
