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‘Front page of the internet’: how social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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Eh it failed in the most reddit way imaginable: Most of the users are too addicted to astroturf accounts posting heckin puppers and epic memes to organise a boycott beyond a few days. Reddit ownership knew how pathetic the "protest" was going to be from the outset and didn't even bother trying to disrupt it beyond nudging out a few of the remaining holdouts on subs too small to matter in the grand scheme.
All the mods who thought they were irreplaceable just discovered their users are all the more happy to digest low quality slop moderated by amateurs who are more interested in the title than doing anything to protect the quality of said content.
People are even relenting and PAYING for access to the API to use previously-free apps.
...and yet, here we are. I left Reddit recently because of the drop in quality, and a lot of folks I know agree that it sucks even if they aren't yet tapped into the fediverse. The internet still has a lot of friction and inertia. These things take time. But the momentum has shifted. These social media cesspools can't last, even the most idiotic knuckledraggers will eventually smell the stink.
The downside is that they will find their way here. Lemmy will be bigger and less cool. Eternal September, am I right?
I found in recent years the quality was hit by spammers who were basically regurgitating content from other social media sites and spamming it to whatever subs would allow. Even though they'd get banned they'd have like a dozen alts, all co-mods on the same subreddits, and just make new accounts to get around it. You'd report them for ban evasion and nothing would happen. It would be political spam too, like you'd have accounts posting to "antifascist" subs and red pill subs just so they could cover all the bases.
Speaking of quality, it basically became the things your parents like on Facebook or Google Image results for "epic internet meme." Political humor was reduced to AI images of angry Trump looking damp with captions like "oh no I'm going to jail." For niche-interest subs it basically becomes people posting pictures of boxes of products they bought or asking which products to buy, people getting angry and debating about products and people who sell products.
Case in point that Oliver guy who would sell his books and shit on his subreddits and respond to every comment with links to his own blog posts, sold anti-Trump merch that hilariously looked like it was pro-Trump, posted ACAB stuff but also made racist copaganda comics, pretended to be an enlightened leftist but also wrote a red pill book about how rape is natural. Guy got banned for harassing mods of other subs and got his network of 20+ spam subreddits and dozens of alts banned, but the admins don't do anything when they try and rebuild their spam network.
Gangrene is natural, etc., etc.
The pathetic-ness of the system stems within the fact that Moderators and Subreddit Creators cannot delete the Subreddits they created. I don't know how we didn't see this as a red flag.
/HFY did. A ton of authors including Hambone stopped posting there at all around 2018 or 2019 because we found out that Reddit was claiming that they owned our work, since we had posted it to Reddit, or something like that
What is /HFY and who is Hambone? Sorry for my ignorance.
Humanity, Fuck Yeah! It was a subreddit that focused on a subsection of Science Fiction, where humanity is frequently not the underdog at all.
Hambone is the author of The Deathworlders series, also referred to as The Jenkinsverse.
https://deathworlders.com/books/deathworlders/chapter-00-kevin-jenkins-experience/
That "chapter" got posted and Hambone forgot about it for five years, then came back and posted a chapter a month for seven(?) years to turn it into a book. It's a long book.
He did this because at least three other authors wrote their own stories in the universe he created.
Salvage (this one is only canon until Adrian attempts to "blow up" a black hole. Something like chapter 73 or so. Jennifer Delaney, the main female protagonist, makes an appearance in The Deathworlders)
Humans Don't make good pets ( Canon, but we never meet the unnamed main protagonist in The Deathworlders)
The Xiu Chang Saga (Totally canon, and Xiu becomes one of the main characters in The Deathworlders)
All of these can also be found as audiobooks, in varying degrees of completion, on YouTube. There's also a guide somewhere as to when all this stuff takes place. A large amount of it takes place between chapters 0 and 1 of The Deathworlders.
Your passion for these stories is endearing. I'm going to check them out.
HFY = Humanity Fuck Yeah! A place for writers to post their stories about humans being awesome. Many of them were sci-fi space operas which is what I loved.
I used to read there a lot on my phone. My main activity on reddit at the time.
Then Bacon reader died, and I just stopped reading there