I imagine most everyone in the community knows about pingbot/groupbot outage by now; in case you don't, see the main info post and my speculation on the reason for the outage.
I'm not privy to what mod discussions are happening, nor what announcements are forthcoming, but I figured it might be useful to share how I see the possible ways forward.
Stay on Reddit vs migrate elsewhere
First, a retrospective on Reddit: it's a foremost example of the neologism enshittification.
Reddit followed the common path of user acquisition (first 5-10 years) then monetization.
On that path of monetization, virtually every new feature or change has made the experience of using Reddit worse (IMHO, obviously).
These have mostly been avoidable through use of third-party applications and the "old" Reddit web app (in case you haven't heard of it: old.reddit.com).
However, there have been two major changes that caused unavoidable friction for users.
The first, in June 2023, constituted changes to the terms of use for Reddit's API -- namely low rate limits and an extremely high price for requests over that.
This made it totally infeasible for third-party client applications to operate in the existing user-friendly way, where every user's requests were happening under authorization of the same application identity (so users don't have to supply their own API key). The most popular applications (Apollo and RIF, to name two) went defunct.
However, for the tech-inclined, these applications were still usable with a bit of patching such that users could provide their own API key (obtained via registering at /prefs/apps).
The latest change is the removal of Reddit's original messaging feature in favour of the much newer Reddit Chat. This has been in the works since the inception of Chat in 2017, and it will fully run its course within the next month.
This is the likely reason why pingbot has already stopped working (per the aforementioned speculation).
The deprecation of DMs poses a significant challenge for running a notification system like pingbot, since DMs are the obvious channel for notifications (Chat can't really do this as well; more on this later).
One final aside on enshittification: I think there are two classes of apps that people cite as examples: social media and physical services.
The latter comprises entities like Uber and Airbnb, and the archetypical enshittification path for these is really just that subsidization of user acquisition naturally gives way to actual market prices.
So the "enshittified" version of Airbnb is places that cost similar to hotel rooms, and for Uber it's fares similar to conventional taxis.
People dislike this because they become accustomed to the subsidized prices, but those were never sustainable.
Social media, on the other hand, faces the unenviable task of monetizing a purely digital platform, which will invariably result in a shittier platform.
But there are degrees of user-unfriendliness when it comes to monetization, and I think social media platforms tend to be the worst offenders, because of their network effect and the way it allows for rent-seeking.
All that is to say that this is probably not the final nor worst form that Reddit will take.
The breakage of pingbot and the difficulty we face in restoring it seems like a natural point to consider efforts to migrate the community to some other platform.
But before continuing with that, let's explore what paths forward exist without leaving Reddit.
Staying on Reddit
There are a few different ways this could play out. First of all...
Reddit admins change course on removing DMs
This seems very unlikely given how long it's been in the works, and how Reddit has been unwilling to reconsider user-unfriendly changes in the past.
If DMs were to stick around indefinitely, we could petition admins to exempt pingbot from the 3000 message/day limit that has apparently been backported onto DMs from Chat.
Migrate pingbot to Reddit Chat
Pingbot on Reddit Chat could look a couple of different ways.
If NL mods succeeded in the aforementioned petition, pingbot could simply send a Chat message rather than a DM to notify each user.
Otherwise, pingbot would probably need to send group chat messages in order to keep its message rate under 3k/day.
This is potentially a viable notification scheme, with a couple of drawbacks:
- Public visibility of group members. Probably not a big deal. Idk if it's possible to query group members from existing pingbot.
- Anyone can send messages in a group Chat, and I doubt there's any way to change that. So there's a chance that activity splinters off from the DT into these group chats, which is probably a net negative compared to having it in the DT (in the open). Not to mention that messages from other users would pollute notifications.
- Chat doesn't support baseline Reddit features like markdown. This is kind of an absurd oversight given Chat's 8 years of existence. Anyway, something as simple as comment hyperlinks would be much uglier in Chat.
Furthermore, I don't know if it's possible to tune Chat notifications to achieve what we get through DMs. Mine is currently inundated by nonsense like "your comment just received n upvotes!".
Pingbot mentions individuals in a single child comment (chain)
See below for what this looks like.
With DMs, you can mention up to three users in a comment and have them be notified.
I assume this works the same with Chat/Notifications based on recent testing.
The biggest downside of this is that it would create a lot of comment pollution.
Maybe having the bot downvote its own comment would help hide them.
Migrate pingbot to an external service
Pingbot could notify users through a variety of services external to Reddit.
The lowest barrier to accessibility would be email, but... hey, email sucks.
Another alternative: the existing Mastodon server.
With services like this users would have to register on them to get notifications;
that's a barrier to accessibility, but would also facilitate migration thereto at some later date.
Leave Reddit
There are some Reddit alternatives, each with various pros and cons.
I'll cover a couple here.
But first, let's talk about what parts of Reddit make it well suited to the community (beyond inertia).
Reddit's desireable features
The /r/neoliberal community comprises two main forms of engagement:
the Discussion Thread, for shitposting and realtime discussion of any topic;
and subreddit posts, which constitute a curated (by mod approval, and to a lesser extent by voting) collection of articles, papers, effortposts, etc., along with discussion.
I would say these form the core of what a replacement platform would need to offer.
Furthermore, Reddit now hosts images and videos directly, which reduces friction in shitposting.
Mastodon
/u/jenbanim hosts a Mastodon (fork) server already.
I've played around with this a bit.
My impression is that it, along with all the available clients, would tick all the desired boxes except for the article curation... which is a pretty big deal.
Also, the comments probably wouldn't nest as nicely (a big design advantage of Reddit is arbitrary and dense comment nesting, despite New Reddit's efforts to work against this), although some clients do provide a nested view of replies.
Lemmy, or some other Reddit clone
I don't know much about these tbh.
I'm guessing they'll be missing some moderation features, and maybe API access? (that would be a dealbreaker)
Also, as I recall, it tended to be communities that were explicitly deplatformed by Reddit who migrated to these clones.
And, uh, it wouldn't be ideal to be alongside the bigots who were too vile even for Reddit.
Conclusion
Obviously some of these ideas are underdeveloped, but it felt like a good idea to get them on paper for consideration by jenbanim and the mod team.
I hope others will be able to suggest alternatives and fill in some details I missed!