IninewCrow

What? … what’s that? … wait … let me buy the ‘listening app’ for $3.99 monthly subscription first … oh yeah, now I hear you … yeah, feels shitty being a product … oh wait … now I have to buy the $5.99 one time payment app ‘thoughts and feelings’ … there, now I feel I can feel it … yeah … feels shitty

Also … the most valuable content I find or want online for my own uses is all text based … reading blogs, forums, news sites, articles, creative writing, wikipedia

I really don’t care about design or flashy lights and pictures … I just want to read the news

I often just toggle the read only view as soon as I find something I want to read and seldom care about what a site looks like … on the other side of that … if the site is so messed up or controlling that it refuses reader view … I skip it and move on

I was a mod of a small niche reddit sub for about six years. When I started working on it, there were only about 200 subscribers and it was a pretty quiet place. Over the time I managed it, I had to work the group to get them interested. I’d regularly post, comment and like whatever was happening. But at the same time, I’d do searches throughout reddit to look for like minded people and just let them know my sub existed. No big marketing push but just a little reminder that my sub existed. I’d set out private messages to people and connect with them … about half wouldn’t respond … a quarter would say they weren’t interested but about a quarter would say thanks and that they weren’t aware of the sub and would have a look.

After doing that for four or five years, I grew the sub from 200 members to 2,000.

I also learned that on any social media about 90 percent of users are just lurkers who like reading stuff, liking stuff and maybe once in a while commenting. It’s only about ten percent of the group that are active, comment, post new content or even create new content. The larger your group, the larger that ten percent becomes and the more content your group generates and the more activity happens.

Keep working it … it’s all up to you in the early stages, you have to put in the work to contact people, encourage them to join and talk and chat with your base to keep them engaged. You create the content or highlight new stuff or keep posting content you find and share to your group … all your users are there … they are the 90 percent, you are the ten percent right now.

As your group grows, eventually there will be one or two people that will be enthusiastic and they will help with content … then as the activity grows, there will be a few more active users who will post and comment regularly.

Your group will never suddenly one day jump to 10,000 users and your community becomes a hive of activity … it grows organically like a plant in your garden. Right now it is small and fragile and anything can bring it down … you not tending to it will mean it dies. But if you water it, tend to it, look after it eventually it will grow into something big and there will be many people that will come around to help you with this enormous garden or field of crops that have sprouted from your activity.

Award a bunch of posts and memes making fun of r/spez

I think part of it is about retention … retaining all those users, especially those with high karma levels (or at least users who believe they have high karma) from abandoning the site and ending their accounts.

I’m currently in the process of ending my four accounts I have on reddit. Two of them are over 100,000 in karma and when I read this post, the very first thing that popped into my mind was … HOW MUCH WILL MY ACCOUNTS BE WORTH?

So it’s now making me think … if I can just keep up my account for another while, maybe I can cash in on all that karma I accumulated.

I am sure that many other redditors are thinking the same. The way this reddit admin posted the info is really weird too … it sounded like some salesman just enticing people into an idea but not fully being able to say much about it and instead making vague suggestions that something big is coming in the future.

I know a sales job when I see one … and this is a sales job. Many people will fall for it … if not just to hang on to see if they can at least cash in our something … anything when the announcement happens.

Say or think what you want about me … but I’m ending this relationship and deleting my accounts … I don’t trust big corporations to say or do anything that might give me a chance at anything. Any action they elicit from me or any user will be gamed to only benefit them. If not enough people figure that out … reddit will make bank in the short term and that is all they are counting on.

My guess is that most of them are probably preparing to cash out soon … because the whole thing is hanging on faith and promises that no one is sure will be kept … it’s like dating that hot girlfriend/boyfriend and hoping that some day soon, you’ll go to bed together and they just lead you on leaving you to wonder if anything will ever happen or not

It’s also a wake up call to those who created content and did tons of free moderating for no gain other than personal prestige … it is making us all realize that whenever we put in extra effort into a social media website that is privately owned - we create the content and reason for the sites existence but we don’t financially benefit from it, someone else does who did no work to create any of it other than to claim ownership over everything.

It’s the same old story from a thousand years ago or even the arguments of worker rights from the 1800s … we create the means of production but we receive no benefit from our work

Also … Reddit is a private business where people were allowed to come in to chat and talk … don’t act surprised when the owners and managers change their minds for whatever reason and decide to kick you out.

It’s the company’s space, like the lobby of a shopping mall … people are freely allowed to come in, sit down and chat … don’t be surprised if the owners of the mall decide one day that they no longer like you any more and bring security in to escort you out.

You have no rights or privileges on a private social media site … you have temporary permissions … and those can be changed, disregarded, forgotten or done away with at the discretion of the owners at any time for any reason.

LEAVE REDDIT … you’re on someone else’s lawn and they don’t like you any more.

One important key lesson that everyone misses is funding … we have to normalize paying a bit of money through donations or subscriptions to those people that maintain instances and those people who maintain, update and build the software … if we all just keep tell ourselves that we all just keep our heads down, lock the door and don’t bother to pay anyone to keep the door locked … the same problems of the past will always emerge … Owners, developers, programmers, instance maintainers just running out of money and enthusiasm because they have the shoulder the financial costs while everyone ignores them and takes everything for granted.

If we all just keep expecting volunteers to keep everything running for us for free … eventually we will run out of willing volunteers as the community grows and the costs add up over time as instances grow more popular

SUPPORT YOUR INSTANCE … whatever platform it is and whatever amount of money you can give … even if it means we just give a dollar a day, across hundreds or thousands of user, it will protect your instance owner, and ensure that the people running your instance never run into a situation where they have to decide on either ending their work … or selling everything they have to make a bit of money back.

100 years from now … Anime Titties is the defacto source for world news

Shells, Shills and Boughts

I got into reddit about ten years ago … I wasn’t part of the first wave but back then it felt like the site was new and things were happening. Then it just slowly devolved into what it is now

I really don’t mind the change as it just gives me a new perspective on things and people … change is good … any time we are caught standing still, we always seem to lose something, especially in the digital world.

That would be an amazing project a group could take part in … just have a whole host of users post irrelevant data that sort of sounds acceptable but is complete nonsense. Post usual stuff but with a twist in everything. Use bad grammar, misplaced words, unusual syntax, falsehoods, lies and just general nonsense … over and over again.

Jesus … lol … that’s hilirious … but also they said activity to make the site less attractive, not more attractive

Just stand up, flip the board over and walk away

Great perspective and a fanstastic way of seeing how we should view our participation in all this internet activity

Same here … but commenting, sharing and posting Lemmy for the past few days and I just got into kbin … I’m still learning and I find it is really engaging my brain to try to figure out what is happening … on reddit I was a mindless zombie just rehashing content I had shared a hundreds times before

The big thing that everyone should understand is that there seems to be no negotiation … no middle ground … either you stay on Reddit and you suck up all the advertising or you don’t

I wasn’t quite sure what to do and I drifted in and out of my account for a while and thought protesting, sharing memes or trying to circumvent rules or something … then I just realized … the worst thing anyone can do to a social media site is to simply just stop using it at all

Once you abandon Reddit, you’ve done the most damage you could possibly do

Social media is built on human participation … of all kinds, positive, negative, hateful, loving, inclusive, exclusive … it doesn’t matter what the participation is, as long as you participate

So once you leave … you’ve severed a section of the site to let it die … if enough people do the same, the rot of users abandoning reddit will turn the site into an empty billion dollar shell that will quickly become worthless

Best TL:DR I’ve read in a while … thanks

Come on muthafucka come on
Come on muthafucka come on
Come on muthafucka come on
Come on muthafucka come on
Come on muthafucka come on