this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!

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[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 55 points 1 year ago (41 children)

I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website's core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I'm aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.

At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they're going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.

Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg...

Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.

Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I've learned anything it's that Reddit's admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.

The only good that's come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)

I don't see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.

[–] msprout@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before...

[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It was getting really bad.

On my Reddit account I have about 80 followers. Nearly all of them are OnlyFans spam bots.

[–] PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit

[–] Clbull@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.

Why?

  1. It directly falls afoul of Reddit's rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.

  2. There's an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with the untrue notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.

  3. In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them...

  4. It's ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you'd otherwise have feel genuine, that's if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.

  5. More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn't agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so added an Automoderator filter so I'm effectively shadowbanned from using words like "OnlyFans" on a lot of subreddits. It's awful when you have to get creative with words to get past draconian censors.

  6. Rather than destroying the patriarchy, it reinforces the notion of gender roles.

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