Ask Lemmy

lmao. Reddit had $456,000,000 in revenue in 2021. It would've been profitable long ago, except it's CEO spent millions and millions of dollars on buying and shittifying an app for it, chasing reddit NFTs and reddit crypto, creating a 'new' user interface that every user loathes, creating a streaming platform that died within a year, deciding to pay large infrastructure and bandwidth costs by changing to self-host videos and images after a couple decades of successfully out-sourcing that to other platforms, destroying AMAs, happily platforming and aggressively resisting de-platforming child porn, white nationalists, insurrectionists and other questionable groups, aggressively alienating the people who were happily creating and running the forums, creating new 'games' to be run for one single day, and a whole bunch of other stupid or questionable shit.

Huffman's been happily cruising away on infinite VC money for, what, eight years now? And he woke up one day six months ago to realize that he'd paid tens of millions of dollars for multiple incredibly rich companies to mass-harvest one of reddit's two prize assets, and he fucking panicked. Man has no vision beyond whatever shiny new techbro ponzi scheme is currently popular, except he gets on them too late and in ways that won't work, and he has absolutely no business trying to run a business - he just lucked into it and he knows that no one will ever hire him to run one again so now he's desperately trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear so that he can IPO and cash out before he gets (rightfully) fired.

Reddit was sustainable back before they started chasing profit and hiring absurd amounts of staff. They used to be able to cover their server costs with gold alone. It was only once they hired literal thousands of employees that they started needing to needle their users for money

Using reddit is using reddit, regardless of how you access it.

But you probably shouldn't worry too much - the fact remains that there's a ton of old, useful content that can be only found on reddit, so sometimes you don't really have a choice.

I disagree. I think that thinking and communicating that individual consumptive action is effective is harmful. I highlighted "consumptive" because it is a key term that you omitted.

The fossil fuel industry pioneered it as their "carbon footprint" propaganda in a deliberate attempt to distract our attention away from their responsibility and away from collective action against them. They want to individualise our efforts so we won't unite against them, and this idea was effective in achieving that.

The collective action alternative to an absolute boycot of reddit is... right here. It's lemmy. I'm not there on reddit making contributions and comments and voting, I'm here, and I'm also not making links to reddit. If I had to I'd either copy the relevant info or link to an archive. Together we are collectively building the alternative. It is not the same thing as setting a complete "don't visit reddit" embargo. Visiting reddit once or twice a week because it has answers to technical problems that I can't find elsewhere is my individual consumptive action, and it isn't a blip on that.

If you're on the deck of the Lusitania rearranging chairs, you're not spending the limited time you have in finding a way off the ship. Your actions didn't sink the ship and they won't save it. It's not almost nothing, it is less than nothing because energy spent on it is wasted energy.

Now I'm interested in why you think individualised action is so important - but remember I am highlighting the concept of individualised action to separate it from collective action. I just wrote a lot of words on what I think is the theoretical basis of this kind of thing but I decided to spare you from it unless you asked.

Even just being on the website boosts their monthly active users number which they can use to convince advertisers to buy ad space.

I understand that is upsetting but I look at it this way.

I never use the web without ff and ublock, both on pc and mobile (android + ff + ublock) I literally never see adds.

youtube is also via ff on both so no adds as well.

So the personalisation of ads means nothing to me as I never see them