Reddit Migration

Every other day there is a "Who is this person?" post here which clearly seems to be blogspam. I am reporting and removing them from my instance, but it seems that nothing is being done about it.

If needed, you can add me as a mod.

The company said it’s golden upvote system “missed the mark.” (Bwaahahahaha)

Recent NPR article on Reddit's IPO -- I strongly suggest you give it a listen. I won't say anything other than I found myself angry enough to provide a bit of feedback and links to evidence refuting some of the worst misrepresentations.

#RedditMigration

Sure, spez, tell us again how reddit's just never managed to make a profit ...

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/17/24075670/reddit-ai-training-license-deal-user-content

[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.

REDDIT posted a more than 20 per cent rise in revenue in 2023 versus the year before, sources familiar with the situation said, as it prepares for one of the United States’ most anticipated potential initial public offerings (IPOs).

A mass user protest six months ago over technical tweaks had big downstream effects, and now the ‘front page of the internet’ is changed for ever

The moderator rebellion is crushed, there are no longer any third party apps competing with the official Reddit app and Reddit seems to be as popular as ever.“It’s a nice time right now,” he says. “I think we’re executing really well.” In 2024, the company plans to focus on three pillars. 1. Maximizing ad revenue 2. Charging AI companies for training on its data3 . Enabling users to make money from Reddit

OK so #Reddit search has always sucked.
It has sucked especially in the New Reddit era.
Now, they have deployed the Even Newer Reddit user interface.

One of my biggest use cases of Reddit was "what are people in various communities talking about this particular video"?

In Old.Reddit, you could at least see crossposts in the unlikely case that the YouTube URL was somehow equivalent to the actual URL posted to Reddit. You know, because YouTube videos could be called upon by many requests, and Reddit fucking gave no shit about any URL normalisation.

But they at least let you see if anyone had crossposted shit.

Apparently, the New New User Interface fucking doesn't even let you do that. I tried searching for a particular video that was already posted in particular communities. Nothing.
Tried Google Search to find this particular thing. OK, found it.
Slapped "old." to it. "6 discussions."
That's it. Reddit was already shit at finding discussions about particular YouTube videos if you didn't use old.reddit. The new Reddit interface at least pretended the crossposts were there. Crossposts no longer are there. Why the fuck do people even follow the site any more.

#RedditMigration

Wiki

New Kbinners

Welcome to Kbin! For starters, please refer to the unofficial community-made guide to Kbin or another guide we attempted on our own (Both are useful resources!) to learn more about Kbin and the Fediverse. You can also visit m/KbinMeta if further support or help is ever needed. We also ask our community rules mentioned here in the sidebar to be followed.

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I made my home here permanently now. It seems like such a friendlier place but how are you all doing?

This could affect a lot of peoples searches. I don't know about you, but when my laptop stopped working correctly last month, the best solutions were still ones that google linked me to reddit to read.... That said, don't believe every news article on the internet and all that...

This time on Reasons Why Crypto Based on Reddit Karma Blockchain Points Is Dumb: potential fraud!

I just suddenly found my user over there banned. Not for getting in a fight or breaking any rules, but just for criticizing and asking questions regarding its recent vague Terms of Service. In fact, no reason, warning, or reply was given beforehand, and the admin who did it suddenly scaled to banned, with no reply or anything sent to email.

It seems to be because of some criticism I made regarding https://legal.lemmy.world/, where rather than answer it they deleted my entire user history and implied that the criticism was:

reason: disagreeing with the Terms of Service - don't worry your content is gone

Note that I never explicitly disagreed with the Terms of Service, but I guess they must consider any criticism of it disagreement.

It hardly matters when they've made sure to make it my word versus theirs by eliminating my entire user history. This should be a big hint about how they will treat you, your comment history, and your ongoing discussions, even those unrelated to the ban, and it shows just how shit they will be at transparency when it happens (be sure to use the Internet Wayback Machine on them).

A lot of my criticisms had to do with permabans and how they would carry them out, so I guess I have my answer - in the worst way imaginable it without recourse, control, or even the possibility of getting it lifted.

What they say under 6.2, it's all deception, "what may happen" when the reality is they won't mind completely banning you on the spot. They won't give you a warning and tell you not to repeat it. There won't be any sort process. They will just ban you and remove your comment history on the spot. They will throw your entire history of content down the drain, and laugh while making a snarky comment. It's even worse than reddit, then, but that was always a risk, specially given who's heading Lemmy's development and given the apparent lack of concrete details regarding its leadership.

I suppose I'll try kbin.social now. ~~On the off-chance that somebody has of knows of where there could be a cache of the comment I made where they claim I was "disagreeing with the Terms of Service", I would appreciate it.~~ Oh, never mind, found it - that was easy: https://web.archive.org/web/20231020022523/https://kbin.social/u/@InternetTubes@lemmy.world

Here's the link to the modlog removal, because there seem to be a lot of connection problems now and the latest one is missing a lot of admin actions, including those that purged and banned my account:

Then: https://web.archive.org/web/20231019235547/https://lemmy.world/modlog

Now: https://web.archive.org/web/20231021224842/https://lemmy.world/modlog

NOTE: Apparently it is still there, it just has to be searched for through a more precise filter. It isn't clear how or why it gets removed. However, it is now clear who performed the ban, and it is the person I suspected: https://web.archive.org/web/20231104183117/https://sh.itjust.works/comment/5112860 Plus it seems the two most active admins are very close: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105083850/https://kbin.social/m/trees@lemmy.world/t/567901/Sipping-mist-from-a-bag-to-get-high-feels-so#entry-comment-3163448

I've submitted a ticket, whose link leads to a service hosted on mastodon.world: https://imgur.com/a/aisRzL9

The result? Closed without a reply: https://imgur.com/a/6PK1elq

NOTE: I was finally able to contact Ruud, contact as in get him to join the same Matrix PM chat as me and direct him to this post, but that was basically it. Complete silence and not even a courtesy "I will look into it", so within their bubble of narcissism. I'm going to guess he's already quite aware and ok with the "sweep under the rug" approach. In contrast, they were quite quick to ban me from the Matrix chat after joining and waving hello, yet not so quick to provide a reason except that of a circlejerked "yeah just ignore, because look at all the other dirt on the carpet".

Lemmy.world seems to be corrupt at the core, at it will likely continue to fool a lot of people for years to come.

As of today, two months later, no apology from lemmy.world, my kbin.social account still remains banned. Even though they've removed the admin responsible there's no apology and you wouldn't know about it or even begin to guess why if you didn't look under the covers ( https://i.imgur.com/En7roiG.png ), because the other admins are complicit in sweeping it under for the appearance of acting legitimately that they wouldn't ever dare an apology from the hole they've dug themselves into.

Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that victory was forcibly removing moderators for dozens of communities. In fact, according to Reddit users, the protests have caused a major brain drain on the site. The question is: can you prove it? And the answer is: well, sort of, yes.

For the last six months, we've been tracking the top Reddit posts every month. When we first started, the subreddit with the most posts in the top 20 was r/OddlySatisfying, with three posts. As of last month, however, 10 of the top 20 posts all came from r/MadeMeSmile.

The fact that all of the top posts on Reddit are coming from the same subreddit, as far as we're concerned, means either people aren’t browsing as much or there just aren’t as many people on Reddit. But it was hard to tell which was which, since the actual number of upvotes on the most popular posts are pretty identical to where they were six months ago. But investigating that, I found that Reddit has always had certain caps on how many upvotes a post can get, which suggests that isn’t a good way to measure. Over on Subreddit Stats, however, we found a much better way of working this out.

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

This chart from SubredditStats show the daily comments and posts for 5 major subreddits: r/news, r/facepalm, r/mademesmile, r/oddlysatisfying, r/mildlyinfuriating.

And that’s how we've now ended up with a Reddit full of r/MadeMeSmile. And, just in case you're curious about what that looks like — four of the top five Reddit posts were reposted TikToks.

Reddit was one of the last major spots online where you could expect to interact with people who aren’t making money off you. Which also why Reddit was able to completely replace its existing moderators since they were virtually all unpaid.

We’ve talked a lot about Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification”, but he was only talking about individual platforms. Larger trends like AI and crypto (or even pivoting to video) have a cascading effect on the process. One big platform trying something is enough to legitimize it, and soon everywhere you can go has a noticeably worse user experience. If people stay off Reddit, then the site definitely didn’t “win” the protests, but neither did anyone else.

When Reddit announced the API pricing that kicked all this off, they justified it by talking about lucrative AI tools trained on Reddit data, saying, “we don’t need to give all that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free”. Ironically, that’s exactly what you do every time you go online, and it looks like a lot of people have decided to choose the same thing for themselves by staying off Reddit.

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce one more release before I take a short break. I have some other stuff starting up, so I won't be pushing out new features as fast, but I'll still be around to manage the project. (more at the end)

Links:

• Firefox Add-on
• Chrome Extension
• Edge Add-on
• GitHub

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❓ What is Instance Assistant?

If you're new to Instance Assistant, it is a browser extension with a collection of tools and features to simplify your browsing experience on Lemmy and Kbin. It is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; you can also install it from the releases page on GitHub.

For a full list of features, please see the GitHub homepage: https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant

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⭐ What's new in v1.2.5?

• Redirect posts to your home instance!: Post pages now have a redirect button that will find the same post on your home instance(1). You don't have to hunt it down yourself anymore.
• Posts related to this webpage buttons in popup & sidebar
  • Make a post: You can now create a post from any webpage! Click the 'Make a Post' button in the extension popup or sidebar to generate a draft post with autofilled title, URL, and body contents. Afterwards, just select a community and hit post. (This currently works for both Lemmy & Kbin, but custom frontends are untested while they develop). Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/4478560
  • Open Posts: This will find any posts about the webpage/article/video that you are looking at. Use it to see if something has already been posted, or to find related discussions about it. When there are multiple posts, it will ask before opening them all. (see note on risks and why it doesn't count automatically)
• Post an image: You can now right-click on an image, anywhere on the web, and hit "Post this image". It will open a new tab and autofill the title, image link, and add the page URL to the body as "Source: URL". Try it here: https://lemmy.ca/post/1282303
• Reorganizing popup:
  • I fixed the issue where the popup would still display a button after removing all instances from the list.
  • The number of default instances in the popup was reduced to 4
• Added settings:
  • You can now hide onboardining guides to make the interfaces less wordy
• General styling changes, wording improvements, and bugfixes

(1) This is an important feature to me because this little annoyance was part of why I set out to create the extension in the first place. Thanks to some help from @zero_gravitas, I was able to use the Lemmy API to grab the post details, and then run a search for it on your home instance. While most posts should only bring one result, there is a chance that there are multiple posts by the same user, in the same community, with the same title. If this is an issue, I'll make this search more specific.

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🗣️ My questions for you:

Improving 'post to Lemmy'

• Right now the 'Post to Lemmy' button does a very basic search in the page meta tags for information. This works for most websites, but it is not perfect. What websites do you usually post from, and is the extension doing a good job of replicating how you format the post? Please share both good and bad examples, so we can fix what isn't working and keep what is.

Improving Post search

• Having the extension automatically count the number of posts and display it in the icon would be pretty nice, since then you would know about any posts for the news article / blog / video that you are looking at. However, there are privacy implications with this since it needs to send the URL to your home instance to do the search.
• I would like to add the option to whitelist specific websites, so the user can choose what browsing data they want to find posts for. Is this something you would list to use? What websites would you whitelist?

Anything else?

Please share any issues that you find. Lemmy and Kbin instances have a lot of variation in how things are structured, so there are bound to be some bugs that I haven't found yet. If you have any ideas for new features, please share them too! I'm always looking for new ideas to add to the project.

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🔮 Cool ideas being discussed for the future

• Account switcher & ability to save login info to extension
• Reddit migrator tools
  • multireddit input should convert subscriptions to official Threadiverse replacements, or large related communities
  • embeds on Subreddit sidebars to search for similar community
  • button on post pages to cross-post to home instance
• Prepping for Firefox Mobile app, now that they are opening mobile up to all extensions!
• Keyboard hotkeys, possibly collaborating with someone that already implemented something similar

For the most up to date information, see the issues or the project road map

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💛 Finally

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback so far! I'm really happy to see that people are using the extension and finding it useful. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with it in the future.

Like I said above, I won't be as active over the next few months in terms of getting new features out. The extension is now in good shape, and it covers most of the important use cases. There's still lots of cool stuff we can do with it, so please contribute ideas and expertise! When I get a chance, I'll pop in and grab a few more issues.

Cheers :)

FAQs and info included on the linked post

i have been working through the stages of grief over my dear, departed friend reddit. many years we spent together. it has been clear though, that the reddit governance committees that now exist in the corporate ether have different priorities than those priorities that governed its creation.

to that, i have watched for several years the decline of reddit as compared to its initial goals. it has stopped me from logging in. it forced me to use redirectors to prevent me seeing nonsense that is the new main page. so many terrible decisions.

so, i have come to acceptance. thank you, Spez for killing reddit, for me. It may exist is some form or another, but ya know, so does AOL. have fun with that.

thanks to you, Steve Huffman, i found Kbin. i found a renewed interest in community and participating in it. i have a renewed interest in the complex software stack required for reddit replacement systems. reddits ashes will be fun to build on.

i feel we are restoring reddits original purpose through the fediverse.

I'm in the post-ban blackpilled mode right no so please forgive me. I know reddit is falling apart but it isn't happening fast enough. Is there any hope that the whole site will be destroyed? I really just want the whole site / app completely destroyed and thew Vichyite mods unable to have their power trips anymore.