The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
Exactly.
Most of us on the fediverse can sympathize with the idea that “its really frustrating not being able to use Reddit as a reliable spurce for obscure knowledge.”
The difference is that we feel “its really frustrating that I can’t rely on Reddit, because even if the answer is there I can’t in good conscience support spez.” Instead of “all the answers are gone because of these stipid protests.”
Very much the truth. I cautiously suggested that people leave their content up simply as an archive of useful knowledge, but fbfw was downvoted to oblivion. I understand people wanting to depart and take their ball home with them because fuck you spez, but I still have a hard time with the destruction of the knowledge base.
Same here. I’ve left all my posts and comments up on Reddit. I’m sure it’s made it’s way in some form to Bard or ChatGPT. Just never know when some information would be helpful in a pinch, especially if it’s tech or programming related.
The loss of /r/homeautomation has set me back a week at least with respect to home maintenance. The loss of knowledge is crazy.
But wouldn’t directing redditors to the fediverse to get their answers (specifically like “Content moved due to reddit’s stance on … link to this answer is at https://kbin.social/m/….”) be better?
That’s exactly why we need to work on rebuilding it in the fediverse. The danger with reddit is that this info would have always been lost no matter what. Because of central control a mod could hide it. A reddit admin could outright delete it. The ceo has edited comments before. Why should we trust that our content will be safe with him?
Funny you mention /r/homeautomation, I’m in the same boat. Pro tip, though: if you found the Reddit result using Google, you can always look at the cached content.
If you’re on mobile, first open the search results page as the “desktop” version (for some reason it’s not an option in the mobile view). If you’re or after you’ve done that, click the three dots next to the result. When the modal pops up, click the dropdown arrow under “More options” at the top. Then click “Cached”.
Voilà. Read post and comments despite it being private/in protest.
I could it as a win either way. If they’re frustrated with reddit, they leave, and engagement goes down.