I feel Epic CEO Tim Sweeney very strongly on this. But there’s an way for web browsing to feel much less horrible: RSS.
What if, say, a big internet company facing an existential crisis and growing trust issues decided to reverse its mistake and bring the beloved product back? What if they built in — I don’t know, not like they’ve ever done this before — a way to pay creators?
Imagine the goodwill Google would get just by trying it.
Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.
Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.
Here’s the full message, taken from screenshots I’ve seen:
The last time we messaged you, you were still discussing your mod team’s plans to re-open your community, had decided to close your community indefinitely, or had not responded to us. Per Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct, moderators are required to be active and engaged within their communities. Given this, we encourage you to reopen. Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.
The 48-hour timing is notable; Reddit mods had asked the company for a response to an open letter by June 29th (which would be 48 hours from now), and that means that this deadline would be up just a day before many popular Reddit apps are set to shut down on June 30th.
Some users on the Sync for Reddit subreddit reported running into rate limits on Tuesday, and Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig tells The Verge he’s been seeing rate limits, too.
While that might sound like an early rollout ahead of the official July 1st start date, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge that the company hasn’t implemented the rate limits ahead of schedule and that Reddit had a bug on its end on Monday. “Folks shouldn’t be experiencing issues anymore, as it was resolved yesterday,” Rathschmidt says.
Update June 27th, 2:31PM ET: Added further comment from Reddit.
A Friday blog post details the Bluesky team’s moderation proposals for “a shared public commons,” using things like lists, hashtags, and even “per-thread” tools that would give moderation power to each poster.
The latter treats threads like a mini-forum: if you don’t like a reply, you can yeet that skeet (or just hide it). The post acknowledges why this might be problematic:
If a thread contains misinformation, then giving reply controls to the author means they might use it to suppress corrections from other users. Our hypothesis... is that giving users more tools to protect themselves from harassment is worth some downsides like not always having the record corrected in the replies.
Along with algorithms, hands-off moderation fits right into Jack Dorsey’s original concept for decentralized social media.
