- cross-posted to:
- internet@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- internet@kbin.social
A group of Reddit volunteers who transcribe media from around 100 subreddits are shutting down their community, partly due to the company’s controversial API changes…
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I never looked into the community behind those transcriptions but I always thought it seemed like good work. Individually a small effort, but collectively I bet it made a big difference for those who benefitted. And it looks like they did a lot more work than I ever saw.
It’s too bad they invested so much into bettering a company that doesn’t appear to have worked with them or even cared that they were bridging gaps in their underdeveloped platform. Funny I could be talking about mods here.
The discord alone has about 850 members, with each person having contributed anywhere from 1 to 29,000 transcriptions each (pretty much only the mods are at that upper count, most of us are anywhere between 5 and 300. I was about 30, since I mostly use mobile which doesn’t allow for proper markdown mode needed for transcriptions).
And I’m sure there’s a lot more. We worked not for the company, but for the users, hoping to get the company’s attention on bigger accessibility issues that need addressed. I’m not sure where it’s going to go from here, but I’ve talked to some of the mods about creating a smaller transcription force on the fediverse. But we’d need a reliable mod who understands and can operate within the fediverse, since the system we used to log transcriptions and filter posts was a lot more sophisticated and complex than a lot of people may have realized.
I’m sticking around on Lemmy, at least for the foreseeable future, in order to try to hop around and act as a sort of freelance transcriber until a more organized effort comes in. I like to think of myself as “going rogue” rn lmao but it’s very much not, even the mod I talked to is very much in support of me doing this. But a few of us are popping over to try to help out, it just remains to be seen if there will be a larger, organized effort towards it or not.
But we are planning to come together to clear the last of the reddit queue in a few days, to give ToR and the blind/VI communities on reddit as powerful a sendoff as we can. So I’m excited for that.
How does lemmy compare on accessibility issues?
The mods of r/blind spun up their own instance:
https://rblind.com/At the very least they’re confident enough in being able to get it where they need it to be with time and from what they’ve said, the devs seem more than willing to accept their PRs. The great thing about Federation though is that even if Lemmy devs tell them too fuck off and refuse to work with them, they can still maintain their fork and stay in contact with the rest f the lemmy/kbin instances while retaining their accessibility improvements.
Reddit seemed to actively be going out of their way to make things difficult, so I have to imagine it’s a nice change of pace to have some control over their future community, even if it isn’t as good as Reddit was.
ETA: The biggest hurdles for both KBin and Lemmy right now seem to be moderation at all, let alone moderation via apps, which is one of their big concerns. Again though, at least Lemmy devs want to get there and aren’t just trying to IPO and make a quick buck.
Reddit seemed to actively be going out of their way to make things difficult [for people needing accessibility functions]
I’m sorry, what?
Old Reddit is more accessible than new Reddit for instance, from what I’ve read.
On iOS the official app doesn’t even have up/down vote buttons labeled properly.
They’re whitelisting a few apps only, that they’ve identified as assisting disabled access, but those apps are lacking in moderation tools.
They’ve met with some of the r/blind team, but only to TELL them how things are going to be, rather than to get their actual input on the situation and are currently refusing to even define what an accessible app would include.
At some point, it stops being ignorance and starts becoming malicious. At the very least, u/spez just doesn’t care, at the worst he seems to almost actively want them gone, but doesn’t want to deal with the PR fallout
Ah, the “if we don’t have any vision impaired users anymore, we can save money on implementing accessibility; they won’t give us ad revenue anyway” gambit.
The only thing I can figure that makes any sense at all is maybe native web functionality that will help the blind will also allow for a alternative app to be built around it (ie a wrapper) and they don’t want to see that happen.
Ernest on KBin at the very least opened up a screen reader and played around to ensure it at least functioned for the blind (and this was before the first Reddit migration!)
Lemmy devs seem to have built to standards, so that helps a lot and at least allows for basic functionality to work, even if it’s not optimized at all.
And both KBin & Lemmy aren’t companies with thousands of employees! Just one guy & two devs respectively and they’re at least attempting to do what they can while simultaneously being overwhelmed with requests!
I think it’s a lot simpler than that, and u/Spez said it himself:
“It’s a minority of users that doesn’t reflect the general reddit population”
Same applies here. He just doesn’t care, they aren’t impacting his bottom line enough to make an impact. And that feels disgusting even to say
I can’t say how they stand, but it is clear that they won’t and indeed can’t with the current setup stop people from improving the situation. Reddit seems to be making it harder for people to make things accessible.
It probably can’t compete at the moment, but there’s nothing preventing people from adding the features they want on top of Lemmy, whether it be on the server side or client side. Because of federation and ActivityPub, even if you bolt on a bunch of extra features, the basics like seeing and commenting on posts from other servers will still work.
For example, I’m not even on Lemmy.World but I’m still replying to you. And to an even more extreme degree, I was able to view your profile and posts using my Mastodon account and app, since Mastodon also uses ActivityPub, even though it’s designed more like Twitter instead of Reddit.
