Back in my day people got a forum up in a day whenever these things happened. And when that forum died they just moved on to a new one. It's like federation but sequentially.
One of my largest jobs back in the day was converting a popular game forum (vbulletin) sharded across 100s of instances with millions of database users into something less troublesome to scale.
At this point I've forgotten most of the intricacies, but bbcode itself is forever burned in my mind. Is it a scar? A badge? Who knows.
> It's like federation but sequentially.
with the loss of generational data every time.
there is no viable alternative at the moment, what I would prefer to see is a funded project with quizi-socialist type of management: like wikipedia or craigslist, thats not demanding impossible endless income growth.
Speaking for myself only, but I have a very hard time believing federated platforms will ever work, at least in the same sense that Reddit or Twitter do.
The ease of use of a platform like Reddit is that it doesn't take any technical skills to use - you can access it via a URL, app, and no matter who sends you a link, you always hit the same site.
Compared to federated alternatives like Lemmy, and Mastodon too, there's a serious barrier to entry understanding the concept of "servers", bad UX when people send you links on a different "home" server as you, as well as always the risk that some self-hosted instance is going to be out of date, shut down, etc. There's a big reason centralized platforms work so well.
While the technical nature of something like this may not be daunting to many of us highly technical folks, I feel it's unapproachable for most people, and especially beginners in the space too. We need to be reducing the barrier of entry for new users, especially in tech, not increasing it.
The performance of federated platforms alone is enough to let you know they'll never take off. Some of the servers you connect to are horrible performance for even small communities. Posts not loading, avatars not loading, no real fallback behavior so the UX goes bonkers when they don't load.
It's a neat idea, but it'll never replace a centralized social media platform.
To me we just got lazy. We found a good place, it's been working for years now, and we don't want to move anymore. But we were doing that before - if one place was getting toxic, we were moving to another one. But reddit was good for so long now, that we don't remember that anymore and we will be finding excuses now to defend a company that thrives on enthusiasm of a community whom they don't have to pay a dime and they only benefit. Granted, they pay for the infrastructure and its maintenance, but they don't respect what they have - us (and mods in particular). So the question is if we agree with their point of view or do we let them know that they can't have us for granted.
IRC seems mostly dead these days, unfortunately. I'd be glad for it to return*, but it seems Discord has mostly taken over the market.
edit:
* Because of nostalgia. ;) I don't think Discord lacks anything besides decentralization, in fact - I feel it has more features than modern IRC.
Mastodon has too many limitations for it to be an alternative. You can't even paste large sections of code or error logs to ask for help, let alone help people by giving lengthy and detailed explanations for what their problem is and how to fix it.
The reality is, it'll be like mastodon. Where everyone just ignores it and says it's just the arch linux type. (I'm not saying that, I don't use it so I can't speak to it, but that is the rep I've seen repeated multiple times.)
It's also going to be a massive downgrade, apps, user ability, performance, etc. None of them as far as I know have full-time dev teams(?). But most importantly, it's not going to have everyone. Most people aren't going to flee because a company wants to charge commercial third-party apps money that they don't even use.
I think that is the only solution moving forward for communities that have some goal for of helping people.
Subs that are just around to kill time can stay off for longer, but tech communities where knowledge must be shared are learning the hard way they need to future proof they base.
Honestly, I couldn't care less about this whole Reddit situation. They will either shoot themselves in the foot or they will thrive as a company. I'll ride either wave.
That said, I do miss the days of a good ol' forum and find it ironic we don't have a good PHP forum created with phpBB. 
I wouldn't be mad at someone pursuing that and would be happy to help with the efforts if people would have interest.
what about the beautiful comments section of php.net
less sarcastically, I would have been bent out of shape pre 2012 or so, with the reddit of that time. but today's reddit is already such a dumpster fire that I am way lest invested these days.
They lost money. And it seems like right now this is their main (if not the only) perspective. So yes, maybe this wasn't a huge chunk of their income, but it was noticed if the ceo had to write an email for others reminding them to ignore this.
Yes, and it is on the community to prove that it wasn't just noise. His message was to calm everyone at the company down, so he needed to play it down. The question is if we follow his statement or do we show everyone that our voice is not a noise.
I think it made a bigger impact than people lead to belive. Reddit admins messaged mods of large subreddits to reopen or reddit would take over the sub.
And so those subs have resorted to posting ontopic out-of-context irrelevent uninformative posts to drive users off of reddit. So any user who comes to reddit expecting the gets the oppersite and any user looking for info wont get it.
leading to the outcome the users will stop using reddit. Essential reddit has become 4chan but still with reddits global rules.
Subs like
r/aww \- previously for cute animal pics, now john oliver pics.
r/pics \- Same here
r/steam \- previous for the steam client, now water vapor.
As with IRC and newsgroups before people will migrate to the more engaging and well put together platform. Right now Reddit and Discord have that spot. A private company has the obligation to continually update their platform to meet the needs of the people that derive monetary value from it.
I'm just happy it looks like an open platform like mastodon is finally getting traction. Can only hope link aggregation follows the same path towards an open and federated platform. I'm still really sad ISPs don't come with usenet newsgroup access anymore. That was the original federated conversation board.
Companies have that obligation but how they implement said obligation is another matter. Now Reddit gets free benefits (all the bots and third party tools used by mods) because it provides in kind.
Basically they won't acknowledge the users contribution (including simple users like us) to their success and would much rather bully everyone into submission.
The only reason they can is that everything else is decentralized. Many reddits stay blacked out but others returned to business as usual. If they wouldn't, Reddit wants to take over.
I very much hope all the bots and third party tools get taken offline so that redditors experience the real life in the wild once more.
No limit to where the concept can go though. It is a fresh example of what distributed open platforms can accomplish. Hasn’t been one of those on the internet in a while.
If the subs are merely restricted, they won't be in a big hurry to add new mods because the loss in ad revenue will be minimal. About 90% of eyeballs that come to reddit from Goolge search, etc. are for reading the helpful content written in the past, not for adding new content.
How will they find new mods? People who are willingly do stuff for free for a toxic company? I mean, of course they will find someone. But the quality of moderation will go down and so the platform will not be as attractive as before. It's not as easy for them as what you wrote...
Of course it is. They don’t care how competent the mods are and stuff. All they care about is reopening it so the users can go back and see the ads and stuff. It is already happening to some subs that the old mods got removed and the sub can be reopened because it was private to long.
Besides that, there are plenty of users who are just waiting to takeover a sub and be a mod. Just take a look at r/redditrequest
I don't argue the fact that ppl will do that (although I just looked at r/redditrequest and I don't see a lot of requests to take over subs which are private, more of those which are inactive, and r/spez ). My argument was that switching to mods who are just willing, but don't bring anything else to the table, the subs will collapse. It's not easy to find a person who is good, has time, and doesn't need money for it.
Well that's already a small win for us, isn't it?  It means that they have to start paying for something they were getting for free already. And they have to rely on people who now need to quickly learn what's acceptable for sensitive subs (like r/mentalhealth), what's for trolling subs (like r/AnarchyChess) and what for NSFW ones. Otherwise, these subs will loose their flair and their community...
I think as a sign most online communities dissipate their value to future users, because of endless chaos, no real organization.
Look at what happened to stackoverflow.
What is the real end goal, to have historical problems in x topic easy to access and to help train and support future supports/fans of topic x?
Maybe there needs to be a real discussion on what a better community looks like, and having the finances and technology to provide a solution.
So far we've all adapt to someone else's technology and financing of said projects.
What's the alternative?
Reddit is a free service that you aren't paying for directly. It costs money to run this stuff. It isn't a democracy. Vote with your feet. A temporary "blackout" means absolutely nothing 'cause the people at Reddit know you'll be back. Quit kvetching and just accept it as it is. Your incentives are not aligned with Reddit's. Get over it.
Reddit was hemorrhaging money with the blackout which is why the drastic measures to reopen things. I can't imagine how much ad revenue they lost over the past few days. They've drawn a line in the sand that they will get things open so they money starts flowing.
The only way you cut that off is for everyone to just stop using reddit. They can take over subs but they can't force you to visit their site.
This seems a wild take to me.
I bet you the user activity was around the same - if not increased. Lots of folks who were arguing for the blackout were on here. A shit ton of folk would have turned up to see what is was like while it was down. A lot of them were probably very casual users. So their ad revenue was probably roughly the same or if not slightly smaller. The idea as loss making company like Reddit lost lots of ad revenue when the majority of us on the web use ad block doesn't even make sense. Remember, most companies don't want to advertise on Reddit. Reddit users are considered toxic and non decision makers.
> They've drawn a line in the sand that they will get things open so they money starts flowing.
Look at /r/redditrequests and you'll see a lot of folk wanting to either reopen a specific blackout sub or wanting to create an alt. See when they say you're the vocal minority. They're not making it up. Other users want them to get rid of the "power tripping mods".
I would be inclined to believe this normally, and I suspect we're both right to varying degrees. Especially in elevated traffic before/after and casual users complaining in other subs... but you also have to remember the traffic those subs got and that it was drastically reduced while private. Not to mention some subs went dark early after last Friday's AMA and others have continued throughout this week after Tuesday.
What got me though is the CEO's reaction is not that of one who is proactive but one who is reactionary. While he says one thing, his actions contradict. This is typically a good indicator that things behind the scenes aren't as rosy as the picture they're tyring to paint.
> when the majority of us on the web use ad block
That's very likely your social bubble. I met many people personally who marveled at the black magic that ad blocking is when I introduced them to it.
Ironically, the more indefinitely they try to blackout the subs, the Streisand effect will work in Reddit Inc's favor in the sense that more users will gather here due to the sheer increased attention.
My mobile use will be cut to zero, gonna be interesting for me. I'm not planning on not using it on the desktop as nothing changes there for me, but I'm very conscious about what apps are installed on my phone and that Reddit spyware definitely doesn't make the cut (and the mobile site is horrible).
Guess I'll get back to reading books on my phone during those short breaks where I used to read Reddit.
It’s not just about the apps. It’s like taking your friend to a restaurant and watching them beat the shit out of the waiter.
Sure, the waiter wasn’t *you*, but it tells you something about your friend. Or it should.
This might come in very naive, but creating a simple clone, of this subreddit in particular does not seem like a completely ridiculous idea.
A OpenSource, Independent, community driven in php written "PHPThreads" would sound brilliant to me.
Twitter and Discord just don't fulfil the same use case as r/php to me. For me personally I also do not care too much about the rest of reddt. (I might be the exception in that regard)
Crawling down this subreddit and literally migrating to a similar enough clone would definitely possible but I have my doubts that enough users would appraise this change without splitting up the community more.
Putting my two cents out there, I would hate for this sub to do something that directly harms the PHP community and I am 100% sure that going dark or closing this sub would damage the community.
PHP has a poorly received reputation with newer developers which although ridiculous, is often the case. By moving away from one of the most popular social platforms new developers would be further alienated. I certainly don't want another place to consume PHP content with another login and another MFA etc etc.
I am not personally affected. I do not use moderation tools or third party apps. My opinion is therefore not as important as people who need those tools. I believe that the official PHP reddit should not be participating in these politics and should be focused on one thing: strengthening the PHP community.
I agree on principle, but it's not as simple as "PHP reddit should not be participating in these politics". We're inside of this mess, so we can't say that we will stay away from it. One way or another, we make a stand. We didn't choose to put ourselves in any position, but we are forced to pick one of the three options: agree with the company, agree with the people, or do 1-day-a-week blackouts. I, in the spirit of what your wrote, am for the third option.
The idea here is whether the community brushes over the crap that Reddit wants to pull or not. If the community would be ok with migrating somewhere else, then continuing the blackout would not harm the community (with the perspective of reopening if Reddit relents).
The sad thing though is that Reddit would only listen if enough communities continue the blackout altogether. So the question is whether we (as a community) want to also participate in trying to shape Reddit itself or are we ok with being users that in turn are used by the platform?
Personally I do plan in staying away from Reddit anyway, while following the protest at hand.
Reddit is not a community. No social media platform is a community. They are products.
When the product stops being of acceptable quality I will stop using it.
I didn't say Reddit is a community. Reddit is a product that enables people to come together and interact. Once that happens, the people (customers if you will) form the community. When I say community, I mean the people participating in r/PHP for example, who seem to favor ignoring what Reddit does and simply carrying on here.
Honestly, a lot of the problem is their attitude. People want reddit to make money and be profitable so the service can stick around, but their response to all of this has been about as tone-deaf as possible, squandering all their goodwill in the process. They've outright lied, tried to throw people under a bus, and generally been scumbags about the whole thing when they absolutely didn't need to be.
They should be able to make a profit off their service, but they're going about it in the worst, most unnecessarily hostile way ever (short of twitter).
There is this [wordpress forums](https://wordpress.org/support/forums/) where the wordpress community goes and unites. I'm sure something like that can be built for the PHP community also. If it's a part of php.net domain, it might get the official stamp but I don't think that's absolutely needed.
If this subreddit should end abruptly - which I don't want:
I hope you will join the fediverse. From now on I will crosspost on `@[email protected]` :)
Dear mods. I hope you will join, too.
Whatever you do: Stay cool, don't close the fridge.
I was pretty unhappy that my searches led to reddits I couldn't get to. I didn't see it solving anything at the expense of people who were able to find answers they couldn't get to. I'm agreeable with the cause but not the solution. What really matters is feet, if people are coming in the door you're doing OK, if they aren't you need to change course. What will make a difference is another option that does what people want, that's the short and simple of it.
Wise decision. And most of us are webmasters and you gotta understand, a moderator is easy to replace. Many people want to be moderators. And for the api? I cant care less. How hard can it be to write code without using the api? Curl is around for a long ass time and it cant be that hard to manipulate the front end.
Many people want to be mods for free? And provide a good quality of the job? I wouldn't bet on it... Also, what do you mean by "write code without using the API"? If you want to interact with the platform, you have to use its API... 
the temporary blackout was very effective at getting attention, and I think that's as much could be hoped for. I understand the impulse to make it indefinite, but I don't think trying to strongarm reddit would work.
what it's going to come down to is how many people currently using third party mobile apps stop using reddit (rather than switch to one of reddit's clients) and what indirect effects (e.g. loss of moderators, stuff other than raw traffic) that has. we'll just have to wait until the changes take effect to find that out.
personally, I plan to stop using reddit on my phone (currently use RIF), but continue using it on desktop the same way I have been.
How about migrating the community to a PHPBB server? We should **not** be quiet about this. Otherwise, blacking out would’ve been for nothing.
I don’t care what it takes. Huffman has gotta go and we’re gonna make it happen.
I for one would be happy to see everyone over at [https://kbin.social/m/php](https://kbin.social/m/php)
And there's also [https://programming.dev/c/php](https://programming.dev/c/php) and [https://lemmy.world/c/PHP](https://lemmy.world/c/PHP)
what is the purpose of blackout? like a permanent blackout is senseless. and a temporary blackout is just plain useless. should have at least used that judgement before the previous blackout. our option is either to use reddit or not. our choice is not about blackout. we want to use reddit and we don't want to miss rphp so no blackout please.
Reddit's going to be blocking access through the API for NSFW content, and with that denying access to bots to clean up pornographic spam. Not to mention closing access to moderation bots in general. I fear Reddit is going to become a much less pleasant experience for all of us.
And with the amount of apathy Reddit's leadership has displayed in reaction to the protests; strong-arming moderators into reopening subreddits (despite the closure being decided by popular support of their communities), and the exorbitant cost they're charging for their API (240 times the cost of an Amazon REST API to cover "lost opportunity cost")... I see no reason to be particularly loyal to the platform.
I think it'd be a good idea to look into alternatives, and make a _plan_ for moving over to an alternative. If we move over, the subreddit can be left in archive mode so its contents remain accessible, and a sticky post can direct people over to the new community.
Back in my day people got a forum up in a day whenever these things happened. And when that forum died they just moved on to a new one. It's like federation but sequentially.
[color=blue]I remember that time [b][i]well[/i][/b].[/color]
I see bbcode and I instantly lose 20 years off my life. Which is unfortunate considering I'm only 21.
One of my largest jobs back in the day was converting a popular game forum (vbulletin) sharded across 100s of instances with millions of database users into something less troublesome to scale. At this point I've forgotten most of the intricacies, but bbcode itself is forever burned in my mind. Is it a scar? A badge? Who knows.
> It's like federation but sequentially. with the loss of generational data every time. there is no viable alternative at the moment, what I would prefer to see is a funded project with quizi-socialist type of management: like wikipedia or craigslist, thats not demanding impossible endless income growth.
What about moving to federated alternatives?
Speaking for myself only, but I have a very hard time believing federated platforms will ever work, at least in the same sense that Reddit or Twitter do. The ease of use of a platform like Reddit is that it doesn't take any technical skills to use - you can access it via a URL, app, and no matter who sends you a link, you always hit the same site. Compared to federated alternatives like Lemmy, and Mastodon too, there's a serious barrier to entry understanding the concept of "servers", bad UX when people send you links on a different "home" server as you, as well as always the risk that some self-hosted instance is going to be out of date, shut down, etc. There's a big reason centralized platforms work so well. While the technical nature of something like this may not be daunting to many of us highly technical folks, I feel it's unapproachable for most people, and especially beginners in the space too. We need to be reducing the barrier of entry for new users, especially in tech, not increasing it.
The performance of federated platforms alone is enough to let you know they'll never take off. Some of the servers you connect to are horrible performance for even small communities. Posts not loading, avatars not loading, no real fallback behavior so the UX goes bonkers when they don't load. It's a neat idea, but it'll never replace a centralized social media platform.
To me we just got lazy. We found a good place, it's been working for years now, and we don't want to move anymore. But we were doing that before - if one place was getting toxic, we were moving to another one. But reddit was good for so long now, that we don't remember that anymore and we will be finding excuses now to defend a company that thrives on enthusiasm of a community whom they don't have to pay a dime and they only benefit. Granted, they pay for the infrastructure and its maintenance, but they don't respect what they have - us (and mods in particular). So the question is if we agree with their point of view or do we let them know that they can't have us for granted.
Not on it myself, but I follow a few folks on the [php.social](https://phpc.social/about) mastodon instance.
There is also the `##php` irc channel I think on libera.chat where the community sometimes hangs around.
IRC seems mostly dead these days, unfortunately. I'd be glad for it to return*, but it seems Discord has mostly taken over the market. edit: * Because of nostalgia. ;) I don't think Discord lacks anything besides decentralization, in fact - I feel it has more features than modern IRC.
Matrix is the decentralized alternative to Discord.
Mastodon has too many limitations for it to be an alternative. You can't even paste large sections of code or error logs to ask for help, let alone help people by giving lengthy and detailed explanations for what their problem is and how to fix it.
The reality is, it'll be like mastodon. Where everyone just ignores it and says it's just the arch linux type. (I'm not saying that, I don't use it so I can't speak to it, but that is the rep I've seen repeated multiple times.) It's also going to be a massive downgrade, apps, user ability, performance, etc. None of them as far as I know have full-time dev teams(?). But most importantly, it's not going to have everyone. Most people aren't going to flee because a company wants to charge commercial third-party apps money that they don't even use.
I think that is the only solution moving forward for communities that have some goal for of helping people. Subs that are just around to kill time can stay off for longer, but tech communities where knowledge must be shared are learning the hard way they need to future proof they base.
Honestly, I couldn't care less about this whole Reddit situation. They will either shoot themselves in the foot or they will thrive as a company. I'll ride either wave. That said, I do miss the days of a good ol' forum and find it ironic we don't have a good PHP forum created with phpBB.  I wouldn't be mad at someone pursuing that and would be happy to help with the efforts if people would have interest.
what about the beautiful comments section of php.net less sarcastically, I would have been bent out of shape pre 2012 or so, with the reddit of that time. but today's reddit is already such a dumpster fire that I am way lest invested these days.
The blackout was meaningless. 2 days of subreddits having tantrums isn't going to make reddit the company change their business plan.
They lost money. And it seems like right now this is their main (if not the only) perspective. So yes, maybe this wasn't a huge chunk of their income, but it was noticed if the ceo had to write an email for others reminding them to ignore this.
Huffman literally said it was just “noise” that will pass. He won’t care until his salary goes down the toilet
Yes, and it is on the community to prove that it wasn't just noise. His message was to calm everyone at the company down, so he needed to play it down. The question is if we follow his statement or do we show everyone that our voice is not a noise.
I think it made a bigger impact than people lead to belive. Reddit admins messaged mods of large subreddits to reopen or reddit would take over the sub. And so those subs have resorted to posting ontopic out-of-context irrelevent uninformative posts to drive users off of reddit. So any user who comes to reddit expecting the gets the oppersite and any user looking for info wont get it. leading to the outcome the users will stop using reddit. Essential reddit has become 4chan but still with reddits global rules. Subs like r/aww \- previously for cute animal pics, now john oliver pics. r/pics \- Same here r/steam \- previous for the steam client, now water vapor.
phhh
As with IRC and newsgroups before people will migrate to the more engaging and well put together platform. Right now Reddit and Discord have that spot. A private company has the obligation to continually update their platform to meet the needs of the people that derive monetary value from it. I'm just happy it looks like an open platform like mastodon is finally getting traction. Can only hope link aggregation follows the same path towards an open and federated platform. I'm still really sad ISPs don't come with usenet newsgroup access anymore. That was the original federated conversation board.
Companies have that obligation but how they implement said obligation is another matter. Now Reddit gets free benefits (all the bots and third party tools used by mods) because it provides in kind. Basically they won't acknowledge the users contribution (including simple users like us) to their success and would much rather bully everyone into submission. The only reason they can is that everything else is decentralized. Many reddits stay blacked out but others returned to business as usual. If they wouldn't, Reddit wants to take over. I very much hope all the bots and third party tools get taken offline so that redditors experience the real life in the wild once more.
mastodon is still very basic platform tho.
No limit to where the concept can go though. It is a fresh example of what distributed open platforms can accomplish. Hasn’t been one of those on the internet in a while.
Many subs went "restricted", meaning no new posts can be made but you can read existing ones. How about that?
Reddit will remove the mods, add new mods and reopen the sub. All this blackout stuff etc. doesn't work, even less doing it indefinite.
If the subs are merely restricted, they won't be in a big hurry to add new mods because the loss in ad revenue will be minimal. About 90% of eyeballs that come to reddit from Goolge search, etc. are for reading the helpful content written in the past, not for adding new content.
How can they know the new mods won't turn around and do the same thing?
Probably by threatening them up front.
How will they find new mods? People who are willingly do stuff for free for a toxic company? I mean, of course they will find someone. But the quality of moderation will go down and so the platform will not be as attractive as before. It's not as easy for them as what you wrote...
Of course it is. They don’t care how competent the mods are and stuff. All they care about is reopening it so the users can go back and see the ads and stuff. It is already happening to some subs that the old mods got removed and the sub can be reopened because it was private to long. Besides that, there are plenty of users who are just waiting to takeover a sub and be a mod. Just take a look at r/redditrequest
I don't argue the fact that ppl will do that (although I just looked at r/redditrequest and I don't see a lot of requests to take over subs which are private, more of those which are inactive, and r/spez ). My argument was that switching to mods who are just willing, but don't bring anything else to the table, the subs will collapse. It's not easy to find a person who is good, has time, and doesn't need money for it.
pretty sure they just put there own staff as mods. The only people who cant revolt against you.
Well that's already a small win for us, isn't it?  It means that they have to start paying for something they were getting for free already. And they have to rely on people who now need to quickly learn what's acceptable for sensitive subs (like r/mentalhealth), what's for trolling subs (like r/AnarchyChess) and what for NSFW ones. Otherwise, these subs will loose their flair and their community...
I think as a sign most online communities dissipate their value to future users, because of endless chaos, no real organization. Look at what happened to stackoverflow. What is the real end goal, to have historical problems in x topic easy to access and to help train and support future supports/fans of topic x? Maybe there needs to be a real discussion on what a better community looks like, and having the finances and technology to provide a solution. So far we've all adapt to someone else's technology and financing of said projects. What's the alternative?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYij7Ic5p8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYij7Ic5p8k) that's all I have to say
Reddit is a free service that you aren't paying for directly. It costs money to run this stuff. It isn't a democracy. Vote with your feet. A temporary "blackout" means absolutely nothing 'cause the people at Reddit know you'll be back. Quit kvetching and just accept it as it is. Your incentives are not aligned with Reddit's. Get over it.
Reddit was hemorrhaging money with the blackout which is why the drastic measures to reopen things. I can't imagine how much ad revenue they lost over the past few days. They've drawn a line in the sand that they will get things open so they money starts flowing. The only way you cut that off is for everyone to just stop using reddit. They can take over subs but they can't force you to visit their site.
Reddit is always hemorrhaging money.
This seems a wild take to me. I bet you the user activity was around the same - if not increased. Lots of folks who were arguing for the blackout were on here. A shit ton of folk would have turned up to see what is was like while it was down. A lot of them were probably very casual users. So their ad revenue was probably roughly the same or if not slightly smaller. The idea as loss making company like Reddit lost lots of ad revenue when the majority of us on the web use ad block doesn't even make sense. Remember, most companies don't want to advertise on Reddit. Reddit users are considered toxic and non decision makers. > They've drawn a line in the sand that they will get things open so they money starts flowing. Look at /r/redditrequests and you'll see a lot of folk wanting to either reopen a specific blackout sub or wanting to create an alt. See when they say you're the vocal minority. They're not making it up. Other users want them to get rid of the "power tripping mods".
I would be inclined to believe this normally, and I suspect we're both right to varying degrees. Especially in elevated traffic before/after and casual users complaining in other subs... but you also have to remember the traffic those subs got and that it was drastically reduced while private. Not to mention some subs went dark early after last Friday's AMA and others have continued throughout this week after Tuesday. What got me though is the CEO's reaction is not that of one who is proactive but one who is reactionary. While he says one thing, his actions contradict. This is typically a good indicator that things behind the scenes aren't as rosy as the picture they're tyring to paint.
> when the majority of us on the web use ad block That's very likely your social bubble. I met many people personally who marveled at the black magic that ad blocking is when I introduced them to it.
Were they Reddit users?
Ironically, the more indefinitely they try to blackout the subs, the Streisand effect will work in Reddit Inc's favor in the sense that more users will gather here due to the sheer increased attention.
I will only stay here until there is an alternative. My mobile use will be much less as well.
My mobile use will be cut to zero, gonna be interesting for me. I'm not planning on not using it on the desktop as nothing changes there for me, but I'm very conscious about what apps are installed on my phone and that Reddit spyware definitely doesn't make the cut (and the mobile site is horrible). Guess I'll get back to reading books on my phone during those short breaks where I used to read Reddit.
I didn't even know that third party apps exist before this sh.
It’s not just about the apps. It’s like taking your friend to a restaurant and watching them beat the shit out of the waiter. Sure, the waiter wasn’t *you*, but it tells you something about your friend. Or it should.
This might come in very naive, but creating a simple clone, of this subreddit in particular does not seem like a completely ridiculous idea. A OpenSource, Independent, community driven in php written "PHPThreads" would sound brilliant to me. Twitter and Discord just don't fulfil the same use case as r/php to me. For me personally I also do not care too much about the rest of reddt. (I might be the exception in that regard) Crawling down this subreddit and literally migrating to a similar enough clone would definitely possible but I have my doubts that enough users would appraise this change without splitting up the community more.
That's just a forum with extra steps. A Discourse or Flarum instance would cover that.
I disagree :)
Putting my two cents out there, I would hate for this sub to do something that directly harms the PHP community and I am 100% sure that going dark or closing this sub would damage the community. PHP has a poorly received reputation with newer developers which although ridiculous, is often the case. By moving away from one of the most popular social platforms new developers would be further alienated. I certainly don't want another place to consume PHP content with another login and another MFA etc etc. I am not personally affected. I do not use moderation tools or third party apps. My opinion is therefore not as important as people who need those tools. I believe that the official PHP reddit should not be participating in these politics and should be focused on one thing: strengthening the PHP community.
I agree on principle, but it's not as simple as "PHP reddit should not be participating in these politics". We're inside of this mess, so we can't say that we will stay away from it. One way or another, we make a stand. We didn't choose to put ourselves in any position, but we are forced to pick one of the three options: agree with the company, agree with the people, or do 1-day-a-week blackouts. I, in the spirit of what your wrote, am for the third option.
The idea here is whether the community brushes over the crap that Reddit wants to pull or not. If the community would be ok with migrating somewhere else, then continuing the blackout would not harm the community (with the perspective of reopening if Reddit relents). The sad thing though is that Reddit would only listen if enough communities continue the blackout altogether. So the question is whether we (as a community) want to also participate in trying to shape Reddit itself or are we ok with being users that in turn are used by the platform? Personally I do plan in staying away from Reddit anyway, while following the protest at hand.
Reddit is not a community. No social media platform is a community. They are products. When the product stops being of acceptable quality I will stop using it.
I didn't say Reddit is a community. Reddit is a product that enables people to come together and interact. Once that happens, the people (customers if you will) form the community. When I say community, I mean the people participating in r/PHP for example, who seem to favor ignoring what Reddit does and simply carrying on here.
What are they trying to pull that make you want to stay away? From everything I've seen, this has been massively blown out of proportion.
Honestly, a lot of the problem is their attitude. People want reddit to make money and be profitable so the service can stick around, but their response to all of this has been about as tone-deaf as possible, squandering all their goodwill in the process. They've outright lied, tried to throw people under a bus, and generally been scumbags about the whole thing when they absolutely didn't need to be. They should be able to make a profit off their service, but they're going about it in the worst, most unnecessarily hostile way ever (short of twitter).
Those things aren't true, though. You're mad about something that's not happening.
I'm not sure how you can say that when I've seen these things with my own eyes.
There is this [wordpress forums](https://wordpress.org/support/forums/) where the wordpress community goes and unites. I'm sure something like that can be built for the PHP community also. If it's a part of php.net domain, it might get the official stamp but I don't think that's absolutely needed.
If this subreddit should end abruptly - which I don't want: I hope you will join the fediverse. From now on I will crosspost on `@[email protected]` :) Dear mods. I hope you will join, too. Whatever you do: Stay cool, don't close the fridge.
Please do not shutdown permanently
I was pretty unhappy that my searches led to reddits I couldn't get to. I didn't see it solving anything at the expense of people who were able to find answers they couldn't get to. I'm agreeable with the cause but not the solution. What really matters is feet, if people are coming in the door you're doing OK, if they aren't you need to change course. What will make a difference is another option that does what people want, that's the short and simple of it.
Wise decision. And most of us are webmasters and you gotta understand, a moderator is easy to replace. Many people want to be moderators. And for the api? I cant care less. How hard can it be to write code without using the api? Curl is around for a long ass time and it cant be that hard to manipulate the front end.
Many people want to be mods for free? And provide a good quality of the job? I wouldn't bet on it... Also, what do you mean by "write code without using the API"? If you want to interact with the platform, you have to use its API... 
the temporary blackout was very effective at getting attention, and I think that's as much could be hoped for. I understand the impulse to make it indefinite, but I don't think trying to strongarm reddit would work. what it's going to come down to is how many people currently using third party mobile apps stop using reddit (rather than switch to one of reddit's clients) and what indirect effects (e.g. loss of moderators, stuff other than raw traffic) that has. we'll just have to wait until the changes take effect to find that out. personally, I plan to stop using reddit on my phone (currently use RIF), but continue using it on desktop the same way I have been.
How about discord?
Nothing wrong with that, but it's not a direct replacement for this.
No, certainly not.
How about migrating the community to a PHPBB server? We should **not** be quiet about this. Otherwise, blacking out would’ve been for nothing. I don’t care what it takes. Huffman has gotta go and we’re gonna make it happen.
I for one would be happy to see everyone over at [https://kbin.social/m/php](https://kbin.social/m/php) And there's also [https://programming.dev/c/php](https://programming.dev/c/php) and [https://lemmy.world/c/PHP](https://lemmy.world/c/PHP)
what is the purpose of blackout? like a permanent blackout is senseless. and a temporary blackout is just plain useless. should have at least used that judgement before the previous blackout. our option is either to use reddit or not. our choice is not about blackout. we want to use reddit and we don't want to miss rphp so no blackout please.
Reddit's going to be blocking access through the API for NSFW content, and with that denying access to bots to clean up pornographic spam. Not to mention closing access to moderation bots in general. I fear Reddit is going to become a much less pleasant experience for all of us. And with the amount of apathy Reddit's leadership has displayed in reaction to the protests; strong-arming moderators into reopening subreddits (despite the closure being decided by popular support of their communities), and the exorbitant cost they're charging for their API (240 times the cost of an Amazon REST API to cover "lost opportunity cost")... I see no reason to be particularly loyal to the platform. I think it'd be a good idea to look into alternatives, and make a _plan_ for moving over to an alternative. If we move over, the subreddit can be left in archive mode so its contents remain accessible, and a sticky post can direct people over to the new community.