Reddit has decided to run another edition of r/place in mid July for some unimaginable reason.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/1387534
It seems to me that it would be stupid to not at least attempt to advertise for Lemmy given the perfect opportunity. Many have expressed concerns about giving reddit more traffic, but a few thousand users is less than a rounding error to reddit. However, getting a few thousand more redditors to move to Lemmy would be great for us.
Hopefully I can get a few sh.itheads to help in this noble endeavor. If not, at least I tried.
I’d be hugely surprised if this isn’t full of ‘this sub is restricted’ ‘this sub is NSFW’ ‘fuck u/spez’, John Oliver pics, Lemmy, Kbin, Apollo and all the other 3rd party app logos…
So much iconography to choose from. The admins will be all over it trying to censor it
Why on Earth would they run r/place not only in the middle of July but right in the middle of a massive fight with their user base?
To boost the active users numbers
And based on everyone’s excitement to participate seems like their plan is working.
Agreed… Feels like everyone is falling for this hook, line, and sinker.
The goal is to get people back on Reddit, doesn’t matter what you’re doing. For how many people are still on Reddit complaining, it clearly doesn’t matter that much to people.
99.999% of people never left reddit in the first place… this is our chance to get some of those people that either never heard about Lemmy or were discouraged by the complexity of the whole thing the first time around, but might be primed to make the leap now
Yeah, Nah. Fuck the joint. Haven’t logged in since the purge.
Are we sure about that? Many people exclusively used third party apps and wouldn’t use it otherwise
It’s too early know right now. We do know that a very small percentage actually came to Lemmy. My assumption is that most of the people who cared enough to stop using reddit would have looked for an alternative, and other alternatives like Tildes and Squabbles are much smaller than even Lemmy.
But I suppose its possible that a significant portion of users simply stopped using reddit without a replacement. I doubt it, but we don’t know for sure.
I know a lot of people just use TikTok and Instagram and don’t care to find an alternative, but I don’t know what that number scales to outside of my personal circles
I evaluated both and decided pretty quickly that lemmy was the way to go.
I bounced off of the sign-up and initial subscription setup a few times, unfortunately it was during that business with beehaw and I still have ‘pending’ subscriptions that will never be allowed or recieved :P
All in all, the things that made me pick lemmy were:
- The atmosphere in discussions (the agora on sh.itjust.works was having excellent back and forth)
- Documentation for self-hosting and openness of the code
- Selfawareness of problems the platform faced
- The boom in 3rd party apps
Even I have to admit, most of my reasons were lucky, timely and niche.
No they didn’t.
i’m sure at least one person did
I think they made the bet that they will earn more from boosting the monthly active user numbers than they would lose from the bad image drawn by Lemmy trolls, and I’m not sure the outcome is obvious.
The outcome is obvious. Admins will remove anything they don’t want people to see and they’ll have accomplished their goal of pumping their engagement numbers.
Bread and circuses 🎪
Which raises the question: if the point is to raise the number of active users for July, what do they plan on doing for August? Like, a slow descent from June to July to August wouldn’t look great to a potential investor, but surely a steady increase to July followed by a sheer cliffface down to August would look even worse right??
Shhh. Neoliberism doesn’t worry about the future, neoliberism is only interest in the profits that can be had today. Questions like “what will we do next month?” or “what if our greed makes the earth inhospitable to life?” are not welcome.
Which is why their valuation had already halved. Do you guys consider your arguments even beyond the surface level? A company doing dumb things and then tanking because of it is not an argument against capitalism. If it were the only local option run by the community (as would be in the most unrealistic and ideal anarchist worldview), you’d be here same as it is currently but your local community production would still be supporting that option. Bad leadership and dumb incentives are not the sole domain of corporate structures.
Their valuation halved back at the start of June. Since then, they’ve tried every sleazy trick they can think of to claw it back before their IPO. All of those changes will have negative long term impacts but the staff don’t care since they’ll bail the moment they have their cash.
The rest of your comment is just you taking a wild guess at my political opinions and getting them wrong.
I’m not so sure that it will have negative long term impacts. The damage has been done. They don’t see reversing it as improving their chances to turn things around. In terms of investors, if they are willing to shell out cash for Reddit right now, maybe they deserve their fate.
I’m terms of your political opinion, the only thing I know is you don’t like capitalism. You either don’t understand the definition of it, subscribe to what I addressed broadly, or believe in a former dead form of economic system. Really, it’s on you to be specific.
So “the damage has been done” but also, “it won’t have negative long term impacts”, even as people leave the site and are openly hostile towards it’s staff?
It sounds like you’re awkwardly trying to reconcile “using predatory API pricing to increase ad impressions is bad, but corporations milking customers for everything they can is good and resisting that is pointless”.
Also, I never mentioned capitalism at all, I mentioned neoliberalism. My bet is that you thought I was a tankie and this was your chance to show everybody just how clever and rational and realist you were.
Bettee luck next time I guess.
Launch their IPO? Get the capital while the numbers are hot?
I’d imagine there are a few reasons, but the TL;DR is… money.
- This year’s April Fools event was terrible. Most people were unable to participate as they didn’t understand it and those that did participate worked on the event in a couple of different Discord servers, not on Reddit itself (because Reddit is terrible for real-time communication). It was also largely unannounced so it was pretty challenging to find and that couldn’t have been good for the site’s revenue - as controversial as r/place is going to be this year, it’s going to bring in a lot of money for the site (and increase the number of active users) because even people that have left Reddit will probably return to put “FUCK SPEZ” on the canvas.
- The API controversy is ongoing and shows no signs of ending currently. I think they’re trying to distract people from the API changes and hope that people think “wow, Reddit is fun, I’ll stick around” after r/place ends instead of becoming less active or leaving the site entirely. r/place will also probably be discussed quite widely for the next few weeks and Reddit probably hopes that this will lead to the API changes being forgotten about (like plenty of other controversies in the site’s history - newer Redditors have no idea about the r/jailbait controversy or u/spez editing comments, for example).
Ultimately, Reddit are going to be collecting data from r/place and using it to encourage investors to invest in Reddit.
I don’t even remember this year’s April thing?
The reason they are bringing back r/place right now is obvious. They are luring people like OP back in so they can say, “Look at how high our engagement is even after the API changes” then push forward their IPO. This post is exactly what Spez wants.
Spez likely doesn’t want an alternative that is doing well being advertised on r/place, I wouldn’t be surprised if admins didn’t do some sussy deleting like they have before.
It likely also won’t look good that the picture is covered in “FUCK SPEZ” everywhere.
Unfortunately the admins will be able to replace any pixels they don’t like.
They don’t give a shit if they’re getting ad money and gaining more users than they lose.
They already have tools to censor these things in a variety of ways to make it not look totally off, absolute scumbags.
Reddit has over 500 million monthly users. If we got 100,000 Lemmings to go over there, that would give them 0.02% more traffic. For one week.
Also I hate to say this but you’ve got like 25 comments and I’ve got nearly 900. And I’m being lured back in to reddit? I never left, I’ve been shilling Lemmy this whole time.
And because Lemmy is so much better, that’s genuinely all I want to do when I’m on reddit.
I find that figure extremely hard to believe. Maaaaybe with bots.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324258/reddit-monthly-active-users/
430 million MAUs as of January 2020. They’re probably closer to 600M now. That does include bots but still
I admit to having a very US-centric POV when it comes to this, so I guess I can see it. I was never an /all browser, so my exposure was limited to my subs. Even so, there’s no way that many users actually contribute anything of merit.
Yeah most of those users are either 0 value or negative value. But there’s still millions of positive contributors that we could siphon to Lemmy
Reddit isn’t going to die because a few thousand users decide to stop using it. It will die if we build a quality alternative and bring users over while reddit’s quality goes to shit.
You son of a bitch, I’m in.
👉😏👉
I won’t be participating, I vowed to never Grace Reddit when Apollo shut down, but I support the cause.
Exactly. There are redditors planning on protesting on r/place. There are discords dedicated to it. Fediverse users should not participate. Especially those who left because of the recent changes. All we’ll do is boost Reddits numbers.
On the other hand we could get a few more borderline leaving reddit users here… IDK, IMO it’s worth a shot.
Like I said, there are discords and redditors already doing this. One discord is doing 3PA icons, another was discussing between a QR code that links to Lemmy, or just the url. There are going to be tons of small “API” everywhere like the among us in the 2017 place, we’ll probably see large ones as well. Sending Lemmy users to reddit will do more harm than good.
Reddit has over 500 million monthly users. If we got 100,000 Lemmings to go over there, that would give them 0.02% more traffic. And realistically, it would be a miracle if even 10,000 of you fine folk participated in this plan.
Redditors protesting is fine, but ultimately means nothing, as we have seen time and time again. In order for the protest to mean something, people need to actually stop using reddit. Posting a million APIs and fuck spez is great and all, but next week everyone posting those will be back scrolling reddit.
Unless, they happen to encounter some Lemmy artwork and look into it. If we can save even one redditor from that hellscape and bring them to the green fields of Lemmy, it will be worth the miniscule difference in traffic.
I pointed out other things that people are doing, things that involve lemmy. At the end of the day, everyone who is tired of Reddits bullshit has already left. No one is going to leave Reddit just because we put the url to lemmy on the canvas. I just honestly don’t see the point of encouraging people away from Reddit by telling them to get on Reddit, even if it’s just a couple days.
At the end of the day, everyone who is tired of Reddits bullshit has already left. No one is going to leave Reddit just because we put the url to lemmy on the canvas.
I could not disagree more. Human beings are much less rational than you seem to believe.
I’m just trying to do my part to keep growing this platform. You don’t have to participate and it may not work. But to say you don’t see the point of trying to recruit redditors to Lemmy when we have fewer than 100,000 active users? Really? The point is we need more users!
Stop twisting my words. I didn’t say I don’t see the point of recruiting. The word “recruiting” is not seen in any of my comments. I said very specifically, that I don’t see the point of encouraging people away from Reddit by encouraging people to use Reddit. That is wholly different from “I just don’t see the point in recruiting.” I understand the need to recruit, I just find it completely illogical that you’re encouraging people to use Reddit. Even if it’s for a couple of days, and “for a good cause”.
You have people who were seriously addicted to Reddit, but left anyways. Now you’re encouraging them to go back.
Hey, I scroll reddit for the NSFW content every day, so… it wouldn’t make much difference to me anyway 🤷.
No it’s not. Everybody worth keeping has already moved to lemmy by now. The stragglers are the ones who cannot see the big picture and the anti blackout protests.
Most people haven’t even heard of Lemmy, even if they want something to replace Reddit. You’re only here because you had the good fortune to learn about Lemmy already. Let’s give others that fortune as well.
Agree with this. Like me, I wasn’t active on Reddit for about a year, it was pure luck that I started being active again right before the protests.
Exactly!
I mean the numbers are probably insignificant, but I want to stand my ground.
Let’s change a few “r/…”s to “c/…”s for existing Lemmy communities.
I post with c/ even on reddit, lol 😂.
Love this idea
I don’t think the average Joe understands the words “decentralized content aggregator.” It would scare them away. How about replacing it with layman’s terms, like “the better reddit”?
“it’s like reddit but there’s no Spez”
We changed the name to “The No Spezes Club”
I agree, but this is not the design we are using. In fact, we currently have no design. We will likely need to leverage alliances to get anything done, because we don’t have enough people here to secure our own space.
Maybe the Netherlands or Germany places would lend us some space to create something. This one was nice to see
I see. wait r/place has already started? time to spam lemmies.
I found voyager (previously wefwef) pretty easily and quickly adopted that while I wait for sync to be released
Here’s a fun post asking lemmy users about their technical background. It’s quite a varied mix but it seems to trend on the pretty layman end of the spectrum https://lemmy.world/post/1868094
Lemmy gave me my reddit fix when I left when the first blackouts started, using my 3rd party app only every couple days to check protest subs until the app died
I think with development of lemmy apps, and the fact kbin is officially working on an API (https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/903221) it will only become more accessible. When I first heard of lemmy, of course I search the play store and there was hardly anything. I’ve been using voyager for 10 versions and it’s improving leaps and bounds. A lot of seasoned reddit devs are working on a lemmy app now and that’s nothing but fantastic news. Some even stated future kbin support
To be fair, that post specifically asks people who don’t have a technical background. It can be used to show that laymen have the capacity to use a federated platform like lemmy, but not that they are a significant portion of the userbase (albeit that post does have a lot of replies).
My input for anyone on board for this is to start with the Lemmy logo. Put it everywhere, subtle and varied like the among us characters had been done before. Then, quickly, put one bold one and focus on getting the word Lemmy next to it. If the moderators don’t immediately squash that, go on to the other words you have laid out here.
Alternatively, put the smallest readable size of the word Lemmy.com all over Place.
https://join-lemmy.org would probably be better
Whether it’s the link spelled out or a qr code for it, that would be good
I mean admins will just delete it like every other time someone they don’t like attempts to participate in r/place
Then they’ll point out how many people returned to participate. It won’t just be a wasted effort, it will actively help them.
This. They’ll permaban you for nothing, overwrite everything that doesn’t look good to advertisers, and report you as a new user on the platform.
I’ve seen these happen every year but have never actually participated. But this feels like a worthy cause.
I participated a little bit, these felt like they were the best of these sort of “events”. If we do this I’ll definitely come click a few times to help the lemmy banner.
Then you missed out on the controversy of the admins changing stuff they didn’t like in the past then!
This will be no different.
But at least it was controversial. Maybe they’ll streisand effect us more into public consciousness
Good point. It certainly had the Streisand effect last time.
If you are thinking of doing this, I am begging you to stop and spend that time contributing to lemmy instead. 10,000 users will be a drop in the bucket for r/place, but 10,000 extra comments or posts could be the difference between the whole site surviving or not.
Post in c/place > get redditors to make an account > gain users > eventually gain 10,000 extra comments and posts after a bit of time.
The site won’t survive if it doesn’t grow. In order to make it grow, sometimes we have to leave the site and tell other people that it exists.
Just write a bot to click a certain area and certain colors. That’s what a lot of people did last time.
Unfortunately I don’t know how to make a bot. Was hoping someone else here would pop up with that kind of skills
First thing to pop up while searching Reddit place bot
I am not skilled enough to use this but if seomeone wants to use my account for this lemme know
You mean lemmy know?
Set up a macro to pixel paint/place to the Lemmy url, or fuck reddit or whatever, put it on repeat… While that’s running browse and use lemmy.
I created a template! https://lemmy.ml/post/2288443
That would have been great. I’m away from the computer, but I kept looking for anything Kbin or Lemmy in the mix.
This is how we fared with the central banner: Timelapse
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=dfiDzdQ392s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Removed by mod
probably will just be streamers owning the whole thing again
It’s gonna people shilling for a used game store.
Even worse: Shilling for the NFTs of a used game store.
B- but- stonks to the mooon🚀🚀🚀?
This seems like a bad idea…
Aside from giving them traffic, which i’m pretty sure is one of the major goals of r/place…
how much are you banking on people actually seeing it, let alone caring about it?
I mean they could even just mod-erase the spot couldn’t they?
I’m just saying it’s a lot of traffic for them that doesn’t seem like it’d actually be of any benefit to anyone but Reddit.
Reddit has over 500 million monthly users. If we got 100,000 Lemmings to go over there, that would give them 0.02% more traffic. For one week. And realistically, it would be a miracle if even 10,000 of you fine folk participated in this plan.
I don’t know how many people will see it, I don’t know if they will eventually erase it, but either way, it’s better than doing nothing.
Again, there’s a very good chance the mods will delete it, and part of the whole point is to not bring them back traffic. Because that’s the point of the r/places event.
So I really don’t think it’s actually better than doing nothing.
Let’s put it this way, the realistic number goes both ways, the people who would be working on the spot, and the people who might check it.
The mods just flat out removing it is an additional factor against the project.
How does a 0.02% increase in traffic for one week benefit reddit? Are you familiar with their metrics and how investors judge their performance? Until you can support your baseless assertion that Lemmings using reddit will notably alter their overall activity, your argument is DOA.
btw I have to select English to respond to your comments
btw I have to select English to respond to your comments
I see no way to change that from kbin
How does a 0.02% increase in traffic for one week benefit reddit? Are you familiar with their metrics and how investors judge their performance? Until you can support your baseless assertion that Lemmings using reddit will notably alter their overall activity, your argument is DOA.
It’s .02% on top of people who didn’t leave, and again: For something that will probably be mod-swept.
Why are you pushing so hard to make people go back for that?
Like there’s various ways you can take those same numbers and put them against the attempt, but the biggest factor is just the fact that Reddit already moderates against threads. So of course they will moderate against lemmy. So you’re practically giving them traffic for nothing at all.
It’s .02% on top of people who didn’t leave
That’s precisely why it’s so mind bogglingly insignificant.
I’m not pushing hard for people to go back, you’re pushing for people to not go back. I never told you that you should go back, it’s absolutely fine that you don’t.
You’re the one who started this thread by saying it’s a bad idea for people to go back. I explained why the traffic is insignificant, so it’s not a bad idea. Im not pushing for anyone to do anything they don’t want to, I’m simply pointing out that it’s possible to go back and help Lemmy and hurt Reddit.
This nonsense take around here that we can never visit reddit is ironically the best possible strategy to slow the growth of Lemmy, because the vast majority of people who would be interested in Lemmy are currently on reddit.
That’s all I got for you, I’ll see you around.
I also think LARPers and Reddit has been demonizing the word decentralized, better stick with just Lemmy.
I just can’t get over the name. My head cannon is lemmy is the name of a lemur, and lemmy users are lemurs
Can you imagine if lemmy were to celebrate an achievement?? We cannot be having lemmyparties
In case you, or anyone else reading this, wants to now the actual reason behind the name Lemmy, it’s stated in the link below :)
