hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

  • Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:

    The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.

        • Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he’s doing his job perfectly. He’s looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He’s put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He’s a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.

          • I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.

            It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.

  • AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.

    I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.

    Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.

    Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.

  •  Briongloid   ( @briongloid@aussie.zone ) 
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    1 year ago

    I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted to fediverse, Mastodon just didn’t fill-in for twitter in the way that the lemmy instances have, once I learned how they work together.

    Now that I have gotten over the first hump, it feels new and exciting enough to make up for the lack of diverse content. I really think lemmy/kbin can be the ones that push forward an interoperable internet.

  • The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

    There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

    That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.

    If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

    • Is he wrong though?

      We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don’t really care about third party apps, a lot didn’t even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.

      For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.

      • so - as one of those people who really didn’t know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you’re downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the “dissenting” opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don’t think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I’m not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind… for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it’s not happening.

        • Yes… I feel the same way. We will see. The last big blowup there was not a place to go (I went to voat for awhile, but it was just another walled garden filled with a certain type of vibe I did not really like that much). Lemmy seems pretty good now. We all know that moderation and a heavy “Do not feed the trolls” has always been the rule all the way back to Usenet and the early internet. One reason I choose Behaw is they seem to believe in that basic philosophy. Plus federation, people that do not like that, they can go to instances where they are happy too. Seems win win.

          The big counter issue is scale. There are some areas where Lemmy does not cover well. These tend to be technical areas like Law.

          • I wish Lemmy had a really easy way for people to self host their own instances without having to know really much of anything at all about how it works (or at least an easy and comprehensive Guide to Self-hosting for Dummies!), so that we were less likely to end up with too many people on too few instances.

            I’ve never self-hosted anything, and I know I could learn it, but it’s still a project.

            •  crank   ( @crank@beehaw.org ) 
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              21 year ago

              I do some self hosting for my own projects… if you want to and have the time an resources it is fun in a way. It is trivial to start with 1 thing so try it out. Probably your OS already has servers installed.

              However it is my opinion that it is better, for the most part, for most people to use tools hosted externally. There are economies of scale. It would really be truely stupid for masses of people to all have their own little homelabs. And being an admin is a serious trade with a lot of skills and it is a time sink. And it is risky. If we are doing stuff online that we want to last, that is important, there are reasons to leave it to smarty pants nerds. Just like home maintenece or health care or hair cuts… there is a role for hobby DIY and a role for getting a pro.

              If you cant parse the documentation to figure out how to set it up, you are not competant to do it. The software is not ready to be run by a person of your skill level. And im not saying that to be shitty to you; i looked at the requirements and i think it would be more than i have the time/knowledge to do. I have tried and failed for this reason at lots of things.

              This is really complex project. Try something simpler Here is a list (simple to ultra complicated): https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

              There are a couple of selfhost(ed) communities on lemmy too

            • I think any self-hosting is technical. Especially technical is the security aspect, and especially time consuming is all of the updates over time. I actually have a VPS at linode. Lot of stuff to set that up and keep up to date. Not talking Lemmy. Way more efficient for me just to pay $7 x 12 to these guys to take care of all of that. Just say $7 because that is the monthly cost to run my VPS. Well that plus my domain which is not free either.

              Anyway, just some thoughts based on my non-Lemmy experience.

      •  Pooh Bear   ( @poohbear@toons.zone ) 
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        1 year ago

        Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn’t take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn’t cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can’t say the same with this one.

        In any case, whilst you won’t get the r/funny’s of Reddit going private forever, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they’re blacking out indefinitely.

        It’s pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn’t at least attempt to make an user relations play here.

        • The fact all those private and shuttered subreddits and deleted comments/posts already break a lot of “site:reddit.com” searches is a big deal for their traffic, too.

    • it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

      Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we’ll profit from it in new users. Spez’s problem isn’t that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.

      • I’m pretty sure his dream is just to make increasingly absurd amounts of money, every year more than the last: Line Go Up, forever. That dream is attainable in the short term, but utterly unattainable in the long term on a planet with finite resources.

        He’s just in it for the $$$, regardless of how, not for any of the things that’re good about reddit. Someone who cared about reddit for any other reason wouldn’t do this to it.

    • It’s definitely a weird response, since it’s directed at employees I would have expected him to try to be reassuring without downplaying or even really mentioning the blackout.

      Should have been easy to just say something bland like “we believe in the changes we are making and how they will make our company better. “

    •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemmy.click ) 
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      11 year ago

      Everything passes. Including reddit. waves hands this is all just temporary.

      Type O Negative - Everything Dies has surprisingly fitting lyrics for the search of people for a place to stay.

      •  Evkob   ( @Evkob@lemmy.ca ) 
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        21 year ago

        I wasn’t familiar with the band and for whatever reason based on the names I had thought it was going to be either an indie pop or a folk punk song.

        I was not expecting I LIKE VITAMIIIIIIIIIINS to be growled at me like that, I had a good laugh.

  • I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.

    •  Sens   ( @Senseibu@feddit.uk ) 
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      People say Lemmy is too complicated for most people, well that’s probably a good thing as it naturally filters out the people who only want to incite anger for upvotes. There’s no love on Reddits main subreddits anymore

      Also it’s not that hard to understand anyway.

      • In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.

        •  Kushan   ( @Kushan@beehaw.org ) 
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          441 year ago

          I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.

          The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.

            •  Pigeon   ( @Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
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              131 year ago

              I think it’s not necessarily just dumber or more impatient people who can be soft-locked out by this, though. People who are too short on time to put a lot into hobbies (e.g. single mom working two jobs, and others with very busy irl lives) or learning a new unfamiliar system may also be left out, or older people with a anxieties or self-defeating beliefs about their ability to learn. And remembering here also that we are used to learning new internet systems, but that’s a skill in itself even though it feels easy to us.

              Leaving people on platforms that have ad-drive, hate-elevating algorithms also has consequences for all of us when it comes to politics and conspiracy spread.

              Technology is a tool, and the tool should be as intuitive to a human newly encountering it as possivle, imo. If people make the same mistakes or have the same confusion with something again and again, it means the system is badly designed for humans, not that the humans are dumb.

              • I don’t get where all this talk of the Fediverse being daunting to learn comes from. I thought it would be like setting DIP switches on a dot matrix printer…but I selected my usual username, provided email for backup, short summary of why I’m here - bam! Connecting to the rest of the Verse, how it’s all interconnected, well, that’s a titch more involved - but to me it’s just registering again at lemmy or kbin, and I can link things up when I have the time.

                The analogy of continents/states/counties/towns sums it up well. There was a really good post at reddit summarizing things.

      •  StingJay   ( @StingJay@lemmy.ml ) 
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        361 year ago

        You’re right Lemmy is going to take a bit to get used to, but the kicker for me (and maybe a lot of people) is going to be at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down. I’m either going to have to get used to something new either way, whether it be Lemmy or the official Reddit app and my understanding is that the official app is littered with ads and promotions that no one cares about so I probably won’t even bother.

        • Yeah. I’m not willing to use the official Reddit app. I tried for a day, and it was terrible. Using Lemmy with Jerboa feels natural, because the interface is very similar to the app I used for Reddit - Boost. There are communities I will miss, but it’s nice to actually see the fediverse start to grow, and participate in it. It’s hard to change from being a lurker to actually commenting, but the community feels more tight-knit.

      •  araquen   ( @araquen@beehaw.org ) 
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        261 year ago

        I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.

        It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.

        The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.

    •  Woofcat   ( @Woofcat@lemmy.ca ) 
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      341 year ago

      I’m really hoping that lemmy can see a larger uptick in engagement. I know I should be the change I want to see in the world. However the thing I miss the most is pointless arguments in the comments section. :D

  • I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.

  • I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.

    The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.

    •  Hyperz   ( @Hyperz@beehaw.org ) 
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      351 year ago

      That’s great news 👏. I really hope most of the subs currently participating end up going indefinite. Especially with Spez shrugging off the whole thing in the media.

  • Sadly, most of my subs don’t really care about the Reddit drama, and I can’t find anything replacing them here. But at the same time… I kinda realized I don’t really miss them, and overall getting away from Reddit feels like a good thing for my mental health. For now, I think my lights stay out at Reddit, and it will be replaced by a mix and match of lemmy stuff and old school forums. And maybe discord for some special live events.

    So while the blackout and all that happened leading up to it didn’t really change my Reddit experience, it changed my overall feeling about Reddit as a platform. Let’s see how this will hold up.

    • That’s my situation as well. Out of curiosity I went into reddit today to see how different it would look. It’s close to the same. A lot of the subs I go to are in the “Yeah it sucks but we’re small so we won’t make a dent so fuck it…” other subs like /r/games with their BS excuse of “we support it but don’t want to do anything about it”. Overall, kind of the same. Kind of makes me sad

    • There is only one sub I use that has not attempted to do anything about the API issue. They stickied a post forwarded to an explanation of what is happening in support of the blackout, but it is an important time period for us so no one was going to allow a full shut down. It’s one of the few non-toxic places to discuss our fandom. Beyond that sub, the others don’t matter much to me.

        • No, it’s actually for BTS, the kpop group. It’s their 10 year anniversary today so celebrations have been going on for the past week or so. Unfortunately, a lot of kpop-based subs are toxic due to fan wars, antis, and the parasocial (also, music subs in general snub their nose at the group because they don’t realize the lyrics are all about mental health, societal commentary, etc. and that most of the fandom are adults). All that to say, the sub I am a part of is great at moderating the negativity out and keeping it a positive, chill place of discussion.

          Man, sorry, I guess I wrote a lot there instead of just saying no lol.

  • Spez has told Reddit staff that the blackout “will pass”.

    He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.

    A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.

    The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.

    • Not to mention, it doesn’t feel like the blackout did anything either. I opened up r/all on Sync just now and it didn’t feel any different than it did a week ago besides a bunch of posts that say that Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps.

    • Blacking out indefinitely won’t change a thing. Reddit has before and will again, if threatened this way, re-open shuttered subs if they believe it is valuable for their bottom line.

    • Being out for a few days or a week could be enough for a disapera to form and go elsewhere. For me, I am finding Lemmy and Mastodon are more usable. If even 1% go to Lemmy or Masatadon, a critical mass might be established and people will stay.

    • Agreed, but I don’t think negotiating is going to do anything. If they were to negotiate, it would likely only work temporarily. They would likely just changes the terms of the deal when it suits them.

      I really feel like Reddit is in “pumping money out of the users” mode at their own expense.

      Sadly the only solution feels like parting ways with them.

      • Maybe so. It wouldn’t be the first time - I’ve left platforms that have gone downhill before and I’ll do it again. But it is psychologically difficult to let go of a site that I’ve used for over a decade and made so many connections through. That’s how they get you I suppose, the sunk cost fallacy.

        • For sure. I feel the same way. I feel like I’ve developed hobbies from niche subreddits I’ve discovered over the years. Makes me wonder what other interests I could get into if I stuck it out. But I won’t be doing that with their horrible mobile app, or to be spammed to use the mobile app every time I access the site from a mobile browser.

          I’ve made my peace with it and I’m going to move on.

        • Yup, I left facebook a couple of years ago and it was hard at the time. Now I’m reminding myself that I don’t miss facebook now that time has passed, so I probably won’t miss reddit either.

  • This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.

    However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.

    To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and ~~older demographics ~~ low-literacy to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.

    Just my 1/2 cents.

    Edit: changed some inacurrate words

  •  LemmyAtem   ( @LemmyAtem@beehaw.org ) 
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    I posted this on Kbin too, but I thought people might find it interesting here as well. I feel like maybe younger/shorter term users, and other people really don’t fully understand what’s going on with Reddit, and how it’s been building to a crescendo for a while.

    tl;dr: This shift in Reddit has been coming for awhile, and was heralded years ago by fundamental changes they made to how users engage with their platform, most specifically by turning “/r/all” into “/r/onlywhatwewantyoutosee”.

    I was a Reddit user for 12 years and change. I pre-date the Digg migration, and honestly I thought the years after that were its peak. There were warning signs that it was going downhill at many points in time, but I think the moment that really signaled Reddit was never going to return to what made it popular and successful is when they removed NSFW subs from /r/all…even though they’d rolled out /r/popular a year or two prior, supposedly for that purpose.

    It’s not because of the restriction of NSFW subs in and of itself, it’s the implications/precedents that were set for the service as a whole. At that point, it became crystal clear that Reddit wanted to make sure the vast majority of users would be stuck with reddit recommended content only, and from there out it’s felt more like user manipulation for maximum advertising. Think about it - probably 50% of the most popular posts are either thinly veiled ads, or posts LOADED with ads that Reddit is surely getting clickshare revenue for linking to. Then there’s the sponsored posts hidden in with the normal posts, and the banner ads inserted between those.

    The point of /r/all was to show everything, in real time, as it was growing in popularity. That’s how people discover things they like that they didn’t know existed - but finding those things, means spending less time in the controlled environment engaging with the content they most want you to engage with, and making them less revenue as a result. When /r/all turns into “/r/onlywhatcorporatewantsyoutosee”, there’s really no going back or improving. This API bullshit is just the next iteration of that same long term strategy - control what users see and interact with by forcing them to stay in their tightly controlled environment

    • NSFW posts weren’t the primary reason why /r/all got limits. /r/all was littered with hate and bigotry and general garbage. If /r/all had been left alone, Reddit would have continued on the path to becoming Voat.

      Not modifying, to some degree, what subreddits appear on /r/all would have made trying to remove the bigotry off the site that much harder. (It will never completely go away; the site is too huge at this point.) While they should have used the idea of quarantines long before they started out with flat-out removal of these subs, these weren’t just “[racist slur] are dumb” type of stuff. These were subs that outright called for the violence and death of people who weren’t them. These were places for racists and bigots who had no qualm about doxxing people with hopes that bad things would happen to them.

      You can argue “Well, then, ban the people who do that kind of thing!” Sometimes when the pool gets full of scum, you have to recognize the point where spot cleaning isn’t the cure and you have to drain the pool to stop the scum from gathering.

      • You’re not wrong at all on that, however, the quarantining and banning of hate communities happened before the removal of any and all NSFW subs from /r/all. The hate groups were largely getting restricted well before that. I realize they’re two sides of a similar coin - but there were different motives behind the shifts. Recall also, that most of those groups getting quarantined and banned were not NSFW communities.

        Nobody was using boobs or twerk videos for hate speech. A 4K/60FPS version of that gif of Alexandra Daddario wasn’t being used to advocate violence against political figures. That later shift was done purely for user control of content. Reddit (probably) isn’t getting click shares off of imgur reposts of daddarios boobs. If they’re not standing to gain, they lose every time someone leaves the front page and goes to a sub page to explore more. They also get fewer eyes on their paid content if people are turned off from using /r/all because they don’t want to see said boobs. That particular move was a dollars and cents content control move only.

    • The other side to all commercial social apps is driving engagement, and as you said driving ads and cash generation. These both are harmful to users. Driving engagement seems to be a more subtle thing, but more harmful of the two as it is kind of corrosive. So commercial social apps are just bad.