Warm welcome to Reddit refugees

Starting today the moderators of /r/flashlight have temporarily taken it offline to protest Reddit’s recent policy changes. Some of their users will probably visit us here on BLF during this time, so I just wanted to acknowledge them and send a warm greeting to all. Thanks for visiting! I sincerely hope you all enjoy your time here and find a lot of useful information.

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Howdy! I uninstalled Reddit’s app and placed a shortcut to BLF in its place lol.

It’s a shame, Reddit is a better platform for what I’m looking for, but if spez is intent on running it into the ground, what can you do… Return to BLF, that’s what!

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Welcome @Lumenheir! By any chance did you previously have a BLF account? If so, it still exists and you can just reset the password.

Thanks! I did see the alert but nah, I used to lurk a long long time ago lol

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Thanks for the welcome. I came here from time to time before, this site is a wealth of knowledge.

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Lol, reddit refugees… :rofl: i didn’t know that was a thing till i saw this thread. Welcome :slightly_smiling_face:

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We are billions :flashlight:

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Billions of candelas at least – with 100K candelas per thrower, just 10K of them already makes a billion :wink:

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Welcome, everyone from Reddit!
I’ve posted a little on Reddit, but I much prefer BLF.
I think the upvoting/downvoting on Reddit is pretty toxic.
BLF is a lot more chill in my opinion.
I appreciate Reddit for some things, but not really for flashlights, so I hope Reddit gets better and continues to be successful. :+1:

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Thanks for the warm welcome!

r/flashlight being down indeed sucks big time, and the thing the admins decided to take it down to protest against – namely, Reddit acting to make 3rd-party clients/apps unworkable by setting API fees beyond anyone’s reach – are totally irrelevant for me particularly, as I don’t use any effing apps/clients (Reddit’s or 3rdParty’s), just the good old Firefox browser.

As a side note, Reddit going down the drain is expected, as are any ‘free’ internet products from any companies; just see Cory Doctorow’s “en!@#$tification” article; he’s talking about TikTok, but he does a great history of the issue starting with Google and Amazon quite a few years back, and the rationale applies equally well to what we are (starting to) see with Reddit.

/r/flashlight is a great flashlight resource and the moderators there do an excellent job. It actually surprises me how only two people are able to moderate such a popular subreddit.

With that said, BLF is the community for flashlights. Some of the in-depth reviews and other posts I have seen here over the years are fantastic. Keep up the great work!

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Apparent “toxicity” can be ignored, it does, however hurt the community by making groupthink, which is already an issue for such communities, even worse. After a while you start to understand that you’ll be downvoted to hell for saying certain things and you just avoid saying anything altogether in cases where you know your opinion would be unpopular…

This leads to many people parroting exactly the same answers to everyone asking questions because they know those answers are going to be upvoted.

As silly as it is, caring about some virtual “points”, it does happen and is the reason why i stopped visiting r/flashlight a while ago - groupthink is in terminal stage there. No more discussions, just everyone repeating the same stuff over and over and over…

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Ahh yes, these responses make perfect sense. A thread intended to invite members of another community, is exactly the place to make comments !@#$ting all over that community. :roll_eyes:

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r/flashlight community is lit! Mods and users!

We little folk have to support each other against the big folk. Even if you think the API changes mean nothing to you, they mean something to other little folk. Back up your homies and they will back you up too.

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This is completely relevant to you.

Reddit mods use 3rd party tools to automate many tasks - including spam removal. Bots (like /r/flashlight’s brokenrecordbot) will also go away with these changes. Since the “old.reddit” limits data gathering, it’s probably next on the chopping block.

Unless you only read subreddits that you personally moderate, these changes will worsen your Reddit experience.

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r/flashlight (my favorite subreddit) is moderated, so you are correct – if the moderators quit or can’t keep up without the 3rd party tools they presumably use now, I will certainly be affected. If Reddit doesn’t back out of these changes, let’s just hope they find a way to cope.

Now, re: brokenrecordbot, not so much: IME it’s broken (ie, not responding) most of the time, so I always end up posting links directly to its wiki.

As someone who frequently posts comments etc against the ‘thinking of the majority’ and has been downvoted to hell, I can certainly understand where you’re coming from.

Thanks for the warm welcome!

I’ve deleted the Reddit App, for now at least.

I’ve been a BLF member for a long time as well. I didn’t enjoy the old site but since the switch to Discourse I’ve been here more often.
I do 99.9999% of my computing from my Android phone and wish there was a BLF App.

I made a bunch of friends on r/flashlight and hope to continue those friendships here.

The BST(Buy Sell Trade) thread was the most active I’ve ever seen.
Hopefully we can increase the activity of the Buy/Sell category here.

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Thank you for the warm welcome!

Well it sucks that I went from being a long time lurker to an active user in r/flashlight just weeks ago, and now we are being a refugees :frowning:

Regardless, its great to see a dedicated community here just for flashlights!
I mean I was a lurker in blf as well but never even made an account here haha :slight_smile:
I guess this will be my new home now :laughing:)

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Hi there, glad to have you here! This Discourse forum is practically already an app, it’s really a lot more than a normal website or traditional forum engine. You can set up a shortcut on your Android home screen to open BLF with an icon, or if you prefer to use something more dedicated to the purpose that isn’t your regular browser you can try the Discourse app and add BLF to it:

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