Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.
There’s been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren’t coming to our spaces. Mods will post “going to Discord, fuck this place” and they’re like “it’s temporary, Discord isn’t a forum”.
Sure; it’s just so good at being a chat app that it makes a terrible forum.
My understanding is that it can be done and with a whole host of third party tools and bots and a little legion of mods - but that’s a ton of work both setup and ongoing, just to reshape Discord into the sort of format that Reddit or Kbin/Lemmy offer pretty much right out the box.
Worth noting they’re not just ‘discontinuing’ coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.
This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it’s not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.
As long as they honor what people have currently bought,
From the announcement, this is a “yes, but also no” because any unused coins on an account stop being honoured after Sep 12, when there will no longer be awards to purchase with them.
According to the people most likely to feel oppressed by the existence of rules limiting what they can do or say, yes.
Practically speaking? No. Reddit branded itself as “free speech” and pseudo-libertarian during it’s launch phase, from a combination of the political leanings of its founders and as a cynical branding decision to differentiate itself from its competition. It never actually was a free-speech platform, so much as a platform that saw free speech as a branding decision and would generally aim to preserve that veneer when there wasn’t a good reason to go against it.
In addition to the legal arguments around “platform” vs. “publisher”, a solid portion of how the subreddit system started and why it’s structured the way it is was so that Reddit Inc and Reddit.com could posture as being broadly “pro free speech” while letting mods take the heat for the content being removed.
During the Yishan/Pao eras, people were forever citing Swartz, Spez, and kn0thing as OG founders who believed in “free speech!!” that new admin and bad mods were destroying their original vision. The Spez came back and made it clear he’s not aligned that way. kn0thing very publicly and firmly stated that Reddit was never about absolute free speech and admin had been quietly removing shit for years, this time Pao just announced it. So now you still get originalists trying to argue that Swartz was a free speech absolutist founder whose vision supersedes all the rest as the Pure and True and justifying their outrage. I think if Swartz were still alive during that fiasco, he wouldn’t have been digging in to defend their absolute right to screech slurs at people or rally hate brigades against the spherically-inclined; or even continuing to support free speech absolutism in abstract for the platform.
Graph also ends at 2010.
It spans May 1 2010 to December 31 2010; the 4.0 redesign launched August 25 of that year.
You can see searches for both sites spike at about that point in the graph - the 4.0 launch inspired a shitton of Digg traffic from people checking it out, and a shitton of Reddit traffic as the users left Digg.
Like so many of those sorts of decisions, Digg leadership ultimately assumed - incorrectly, to be sure - that their users would “get over it” in time.
They’d had minor revolts over the 2.0 and 3.0 redesigns, they’d had sitewide discontent several times during the 3.0 era due to changes in the content algorithm … Digg had weathered several storms by that point, and I think site management simply assumed they would continue that trend.
There’s a perennial issue I think for Authorities in that sort of position where you’re exposed to so much baseless griping and complaining from the extremely-vocal minority that you need to gain some ability to filter out negativity and criticism, or you’re crippled by it. You cannot make everyone happy and only the unhappy people will bother to express themselves, so you learn to filter out the discontent and focus on the theory, on the goals. Many times you genuinely know better than this or that upset user, and you take solace from that. But from that position, it’s so easy to then also block out the more important negative feedback, the necessary criticisms, under the assumption that ‘you know better’ - because that’s how it went the last ten, hundred, thousand, times this sort of thing came up.
Which is IMO a lot of what happened to the whole of Upstairs staff at Reddit. They got so used to users complaining and users being upset about this or that little thing that they had to develop a certain amount of resistance to that feedback - but they’ve reached a point where they’re so resistant to all feedback about their site that they wound up losing touch with the site and its users.
I think a huge part of where Reddit went wrong and will continue to is not having and/or listening to people on staff who are skilled and qualified at simply understanding site users and site user culture. So much of their current issues could have been avoided if they had a person in a leadership position, an equal at the C Suite table, whose whole and total responsibility was understanding the users and speaking ‘for’ them accurately - representing them as if they’re stakeholders in the company.
I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it’s one that’s seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.
There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you’re talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.
Which is kind of … a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don’t get their way.
The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren’t protesting because they’re part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They’re going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.
AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they’re going to let it return to it’s natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
In this case, what do you think “scorched earth” would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.
In that time period - 2008 to 2011 - if you’d told an internet person you’d never heard of digg, they’d look at you like you’d asked them what their favourite flavour of crayon was. It was the social news aggregator for normal people; all the appeal of news aggregators and comments sections, but without the nerdy belligerence of Slashdot, the lul-so-randum basement humour of Fark, or the primitive interface and sneering elitism of Reddit.
Just took a look at it, and… what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.
That’s the now digg, not the then digg.
Here’s an example of their frontpage when they were at their peak, in 2009. Then, for contrast, here is the redesigned frontpage that killed them, launched August 25, 2010. … Ok, only half joking - the bugs and errors were a problem - but this is a stable version of digg 4.0 - the controversial redesign that ‘killed’ the site, though half of the changes that drove off their userbase were related to the algorithm and how pages/posts/content was promoted. I never really used the site so I don’t remember exact details, but it did result in ‘poweruser’ problems with a few people dominating content, and users also complained that the 4.0 version of the site seemed to promote a lot of content they didn’t want while making it hard to access what they were interested in.
After it’s collapse the company’s assets were broken up and the domain/website/‘digg’ name were sold off as a package - it looks like the new owners have redesigned the site to look more like a news site and less like a news aggregator.
I don’t think there “must” be an age cutoff where people are supposed to stop playing - instead, there’s an age cutoff for where people didn’t grow up with or have access to computers or gaming.
I was born right on the cusp of video games moving from niche nerd shit and becoming relatively mainstream. I can see that there’s a clear gap between friends who game and friends who don’t that nearly directly ties to whether or not they played games as a kid. A lot of the time for my generation, that’s a socioeconomic division more than anything else. Computers were expensive as a kid, so most of my friends who grew up poor found other interests in childhood and grew up to be adults who don’t really play games. The kids I grew up around whose families were more well-off have continued gaming as adults. Maybe less, maybe different games; but in many ways it’s like asking what age someone is supposed to outgrow “having hobbies”.
The older someone is today the less likely it is they had access to games and gaming, and often the more intimidating they find learning about computers and gaming - and the more time they’ve had to find some other hobby that they find compelling.
There definitely is a thing in the dating market where some people can be particularly judgmental about gaming. Personally, I’ve found that is loudest and largest for some of the more … “serial” daters I know, who have found themselves in relationships with lots of different people and have found that gaming, or identifying as a “gamer” tends to correlate with other bigger issues. There’s also the side concern when something that’s big in your life isn’t something they can relate to - a little like the ultra-fan Sports Dudes where all of every game day will always be booked off for watching the games with the boys.
I think in regards to the dating market, it’s less that anyone needs to “grow out of” gaming, and more that adults are more expected to have a mature relationship with their hobbies, gaming included. And given that there are negative connotations about degenerate adult gamers not really grown up, that may be something to keep in mind regarding how you present that hobby and how you talk about your relationship with it.
Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that’s one of the best changes they’ve made in ages and I’m glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it’s been an occasional frustration to hit ‘hide’ by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.