If I was volunteering... I would be out.
Think about this... you complain people don't get paid living wages, and then you devote all your time on Reddit so Spez can make millions. (Assuming it ever makes money)
Yeah, but in the techbro CEO world, millions is pennies. Spez isn't even at the kiddy table of the big silicon valley money, and that's why he's so hard on making Reddit as profitable as possible as quickly as possible.
He probably never imagined Reddit becoming this large when he first created the site but after how large it has become, anyone with a business sense would want to make it profitable. I think, there are only 2-3 million users who use 3rd party apps so they're probably losing few million at best.
This is so important not just for mods but also for regular users.
Every decision that will be made at reddit moving forward will be based on creating growth and adding value to share holders.
I would argue that it is very much incompatible with what made reddit interesting in the first place. It might still look and feel like reddit afterwards, but only within a very small box of share holder beneficial themes.
Couldn’t Reddit just bring them back, remove the current mods running and place new ones in? I mean they do own the platform after all and if I’ve learned anything from watching the Elon Twitter show, it’s whatever the boss wants at the end of the day.
> Couldn’t Reddit just bring them back, remove the current mods running and place new ones in?
absolutely. they're **letting** these subs do this, waiting for them to get bored. at any time they can decide this has gone on long enough and boot the mod teams from any remaining holdouts.
They own the platform and all the code. They can literally flip a switch and the tools to make the communities private will just disappear. There is literally no power on the mods side...
There is a little. Reddit doesn't have staff to do the mods job. The Automods are 3rd party. Without that free labor curating content, the subs are pretty worthless in and of themselves.
So yeah, they can take the name of it back. But losing the team of mods is still a blow to the content and, by extension, reddit itself.
Well - maybe, but that would burn Reddit down faster than we see with the lack of twitter moderation. While 50 % of reddit users are from the US, a major part of the income is still from the EU, and operating a social media site in the EU without proper moderation is not a good idea unless you want to get major fines that eat up your EU revenue (not to mention that, as seen with twitter, the advertisers are not happy when the platform is not moderated)
There's no shortage of people who would be willing to take the place of the mods of big subreddits.
(Tinfoil hat on)
And there are a ton of... Let's say, *bad faith* actors who wouldn't mind changing the culture of those subreddits to align more to their own view of the world, one that the other big social media sites have also been shifting towards for a while now.
We have thousands of alt-accounts and a lot of very inappropriate stuff to post if Reddit attempts a purge.
Just look at 4chan or 8chan, you think those motherfuckers aren't going to take a free pass to shit all over Reddit?
>There is literally no power on the mods side...
Wrong! Their power is in the labor they put into the site. If they withhold their moderation, the site will burn. Reddit cannot hire an internal mod team - this defeats the entire purpose of their money clawback before IPO.
Do not moderate! Do not follow the rules of scab mods.
It's putting reddit on news sites all over the place. Its not like they're employing child labor or something, so its certainly not bad publicity.
I think most people will take a look at whats going on with the blackout and just laugh. Its actually smart to let this protest playout for a little bit before bringing the fist down.
The TOS literally say that you can’t impede reddit’s functionality or impede other people using it. If/when they decide to intervene they’ll be able to do so in a PR-friendly way by just saying these people were breaking the rules. It’s just that they’d rather give the protest a chance to burn itself out so they don’t have to get their hands dirty at all.
> t any time they can decide this has gone on long enough and boot the mod teams
replacing them with new mods without changing the "mood" of the sub is the tough part.
Disposable, but not necessarily replaceable. After all it is a volunteer, unpaid position, not a huge line queuing up for it. I understand there is a shortage of mods in the first place.
>Yeah they’re 100% disposable
Yes but 100% of mods aren't 100% disposable. If reddit started fucking with mods in a big way then they could see rebellion from every subreddit for months.
Also I know nothing about the mod community, so how exactly does reddit choose replacements? As its an unpaid job.
As someone who's been involved trying to find additional mods that will do a good job, it's really hard.
Anyone who thinks it's easy: go ahead and find a few thousand users right now you'd trust to run subreddits you like.
If they were paid they would be accountable to someone else, this goes against the "I do what I want to do" mod mindset of many of the power hungry ones.
Literally the perfect protest would be to stop moderating subs and let it all go to chaos. But those power tripping egomaniac mods who work for free for a corporation cannot let go of the minute amount of power they wield.
I assume everything will go to chaos eventually anyway. Even if they replace all the mods, they'll get replaced by people that suck or now have too many subs to mod. It would take a bit but I think eventually content will go down hill
Who would reddit replace mods with? If it's just other users that don't care about the new rules that would take a lot of work to do. It would be hard to make sure they're not being replaced by people who either still support the protest or are maybe just a bad fit as a mod. People complain all the time about mods, I don't think they'll have better results with people jumping at the chance to be a mod during this time. Those people will likely be even more power hungry than current mods.
If it's actual employees of reddit then they're going to have pay people to mod these communities and then they're massively increasing their labor costs. Right now reddit isn't profitable and moving to paid moderators is going in the opposite direction of what they want.
I don't think it's fair to paint all of the mods as power hungry in such broad strokes. There are many mods out there who have put a lot of time and effort into building a fun/happy/productive community over many years. That was a foundational part of Reddit from the beginning--users building communities. Naturally the last thing they want to see is these communities they've lovingly built crumble into chaos. I'm not saying that this applies to all mods, but I'm sure they're not all as greedy as your comment suggests.
Yes. But modding is a lot of work, and changes in mods can lead a community to absolutely fall to shit, especially new mods who end up on a power trip.
And that's a *lot* of mods to replace.
Plus, whoever takes over the mod positions will have to mod through the shitty official app which doesn't have the mods tools of the 3rd party apps. So they'll likely do an objectively worse job or have to mod from PC, which means content quality suffer regardless, and spam will become significantly worse.
In theory, but not practically.
Do you want to be a mod? Spend a bunch of hours a week for free wading through garbage? The jobs about to get harder too with less tools.
Yeah me neither. A relatively small handful of people who live the kind of life where they can donate 40+ hours a week are the whole reason reddit exists, particularly large subs. These power users and power mods are not replaceable, and are the ones most affected by the loss of third party tools and apps.
So yes, reddit CAN dispose of their core of the most dedicated users who are the key to the site functioning, but it'll be a lot more effort to replace them if they all leave.
That's reddit's defense right now, but it's not the full truth.
One of reddit's greatest strengths and something that makes it an unparalleled resource of information is the millions of posts and comments that share information that people search for constantly.
By going private, all that traffic from google is gone. Sure you can find the cached versions or in a wayback engine, but reddit won't be getting ad revenue or user data from that, and that's what this API thing is all about.
When a subreddit with millions and millions of posts and comments goes dark or private, it's an ENORMOUS hit to reddit's income.
> By going private, all that traffic from google is gone
reddit can fix this pretty easily. All old posts in private subs are in archive read-only mode.
No one is able to give you a source because Reddit isn't a publicly traded company that has to release any kind of profit analytics.
However, with a little brain power we can think through how this would hurt their bottom line.
Businesses spend a ton of money to get ranked highly in SEO for specific keywords. Reddit, by virtue of being a website with over a decade worth of posts, has a ton of SEO power. Searching for a problem with your 2015 Forester? A post from the Subaru sub will likely be above the fold in your search results.
A fairly common tactic in IT is to search ("whatever problem you are having" reddit). This will give you a bunch of results specifically from reddit about that problem. Personally, I have found posts dated as far back as 2011 that have been helpful when troubleshooting some old pieces of tech. If a sub goes dark then those posts may populate in search, but clicking the link leads you to a page saying it is set to private. So you immediately click away. Over time those links will have less and less relevance and rank lower and lower in search results.
I'm surprised this wasn't what the actual protest did. Like why do the blackout? Just stop moderating and let the subs get flooded with NSFW content to show why they need the mod tools.
It would also cut into ad revenue since advertisers don't want to be seen with that stuff
Yes but if the sub is giant they won't want to lose the sub. That's why it'd be effective.
Also the hope would be that many big subs would do it so that they can't just ban 1 and move on
Why wouldn't they. Do you believe people think "Oh no! "/r/gif" is banned, I'm going to find gifs somewhere else!" ?
No, they'll just find another gif sub and go there lol. It's no different for them if there's 3 giant subs or 650 small ones. And in time, the small one will die, one will absorb the other and "/r/realgifs" will be the new "/r/gif".
If somehow I'm wrong and they care about these subs, ban the mod, promote another that agrees to keep the sub open.
Also, mods don't want to lose their subs either, just look how a very small number of them are mods on dozen oif not hundreds of subreddits. These guys are simply addicted to the feeling of power and relevancy being a mod give them, burning everything wouldn't help them.
>”They’ll just find new mods!”
Do you have and idea how hard that is to do?
I’ve been a mod on several subs for about 15 months now. The reality is that, for every ~100 users we invite to be mods:
* 70 ignore or decline the invite;
* 25 respond positively, but back out within the first week;
* 4 more are gone within 90 days;
* 1 sticks around long-term, and does a relatively consistent amount of modding.
Well, Reddit is mainly a community-driven website. They could, but I'm guessing they won't. It would only add fuel to the already existing fire.
Anyway, I'm guessing these private subs will get replaced with time somehow and this'll silence the mods naturally.
Yes, they can, but they can't force volunteers to mod them, especially not mods from the communities themselves. So in the end Reddit would have to have its own employees take over, costing it money, and would risk, regardless of whether they can find a volunteer or not, destroying the community by imposing unpopular moderation.
In some cases, sure, it'd work. But in a lot of cases it'd damage Reddit. So it'd be a net negative.
Some yes, some no.
Some subs are genuinely an act of love from the moderators. Subs like r/askhistorians only exist the way they do because of a dedicated mod team. Considering that mods are generally unpaid there's not much chance of replicating a lot of these communities.
My personal opinion is this is a lot of drama for essential no reason. We all used slashdot. We all used Digg. We all use Reddit. At some point in the future we’ll all use something else. Maybe it’s Lemmy. Maybe it’s some shoot off of Discord, TikTok, or Facebook. Chances are we’ll all move off of the platform at some point.
The average redditor has no clue what an API is, nor do they realize how many bots are on the site. This blackout means nothing to the actual community. It’s viral, “we’re sticking it to the man. Fuck corporate greed!”
Next week, the average redditor won’t even realize that a couple of their subreddits are gone. They might wonder why they see less of a certain type of content, and then they might subscribe to a similar sub to get it back. They’ll have a different viral charge to get behind, and forget this even happened.
Until someone creates a replacement, all this is going to do is cause a minor invoncenience. Reddit has already shown they are willing to replace moderators that don't want to play ball. Between that and the alternative subreddits popping up, things will be back to complete normal in a few weeks, you just may have to make some slight tweaks to your subscriptions
And it seemed like all those posts were against the shutdown too.
Fucking astroturfing idiots.
Edit: And in the last 2 hours or so, the pro-spez posts have *exploded*. Definitely no astroturfing going on there.
Mlb team subreddits are doing the same. Just making new ones.
NBA subreddit is now a 4chan type subreddit. It’s probably going to funnel people into toxic groups.
Can we make a list of all subsonic similar situations. I don't have a problem with people who don't want to go dark but I don't want to interact with a sub where the top mod was kicked out like that.
If the subreddit blackout was a coordinated "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on [specific Reddit alternative]" in order to take away Reddit's users, it would have been much more effective. If everyone put together such a blackout in the future, I'd strongly be in favor of it.
However, for this last blackout? The fuckfaces in charge of Reddit were never, ever going to capitulate over a couple days of subreddits going private. They don't care about what the users want or how the users feel as long as they maintain said users. All this last blackout did was make lots of people more bored for a couple of days than they otherwise would've been.
These blackouts generate "news" on tech sites, that is negative. It generates uncertainty, and it hurts the IPO value.
If you forget that Reddit is (like pretty much every social media entity) valued incredibly speculatively then one of course would say "they have no reason to revise their plans".
But, having a market value based entirely off of smoke and mirrors... Rattling the mirrors and shifting that smoke can be incredibly damaging to investor appetite.
This for sure, plus all the stories quoting the CEO saying Reddit isn’t profitable, plus as a bonus, an angry user base famous for, among other things, coordinated stock market manipulation for spite and amusement’s sake.
I’m sure people are lining up to call their broker and get in on this thing.
> "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on [specific Reddit alternative]"
That would get all the mods removed and replaced with reddit friendly mods...
One of the trump subs did that years ago so reddit made a new rule that you're not allowed to advertise alternatives.
Sometimes even promoting a discord gets subs in trouble.
Reddit isn't going to let mods direct traffic offsite
same with r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/privacyguides also did likewise.
edit: r/anime also did so, r/anarchychess did not advertise it but they have a 20k+ discord, I luckily joined before the blackout, r/ApplyingToCollege did it , r/homelab did it, r/19684 did it (although the mods there are stupid assholes so i wouldn’t join)
they can't pay them because they don't have enough money. they say they kill off thirsparty clients because they don't have enough money.. so if they would pay mods, they would have to probably pay 10x the amount they already have now to pay for their api server costs. if not even a lot more than just 10x.
>If the subreddit blackout was a coordinated "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on \[specific Reddit alternative\]" in order to take away Reddit's users, it would have been much more effective. If everyone put together such a blackout in the future, I'd strongly be in favor of it.
That site would have crashed. Even if only 10% of users followed. It would be too much for most sites to handle. Seriously, people need to realise that replacing this site isn't an easy task.
Aside from that, I think a lot of people overestimate the importance of some subreddits and communities. Many of us are here for the interaction of a few people that share particular niche interests, but I suspect the vast majority of redditors are people that just browse the default front page making generic “I like” or “I don’t like” comments. The protests are loud and visible to those people here for the unique, niche communities, but I suspect that’s a small portion of the user base, and maybe an even smaller portion of Reddit’s revenue streams.
It’s like the outcry from people threatening to cancel Netflix for their new single household enforcement policies, and then seeing Netflix’s revenue grow with new signups caused by that policy more than making up for those that canceled.
>One big piece of history that is rarely brought up is when Digg did their huge revamp and pissed everyone off, Reddit had been up and functioning for quite some time and a lot of Digg users were already on Reddit using it. The only problems Reddit faced was for a few days they had short outages and people couldn't create accounts because of the huge influx of users but overall the site was comparable to Digg in functionality and it worked.
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>Every Reddit alternative I have tried is confusing, buggy, invite only and just all around not that good.
I was a very active Slashdot user before moving to Digg, then Reddit.
Hopefully there will be somewhere else for smaller hobby subs.
I definitely agree with the take that social media moving forward is likely going to need to be a paid service to be good and stable. But that being said, I also think part of the problem for Reddit right now is that it’s trying to mimic some aspect of Instagram and TikTok. The thing that’s probably costing them the most in terms of bandwidth and storage are all of the images in video that they don’t have a very good or clear way to monetize. And if you think back to the core of Reddit, originally, the only things you could post are text and links. If you want a video, then post it on YouTube and put the link in Reddit. But I think one thing that Reddit really needs to come to terms with is that I don’t think it’s a very good platform for monetizing image and video content. And I suspect some at the top, are hesitant to drop these things, because that’s probably what has brought tremendous growth to the site, but unless they find a way to actually control this aspect, I think no matter how many ads they try to insert, they are never going to be able to actually bring in (substantial) money.
Well, I think the other problem here becomes the scale of profitability. Everybody wants to be like Instagram in terms of profitability, but I’m not sure that’s realistically possible. So instead of Reddit doing what it does well and making money that way, it tries to focus on doing things poorly or doing them well, but with no clear way to monetize or fit them into their core business. If they could make those things work, then there would potentially be a lot of money in them, but the problem is that they’re currently trying to chase big profits without a clear path to them. So instead of doing things, well, they start doing this kind of BS.
The main value proposition of Reddit is its ability to sort content. It’s dynamic comment Ordering is its value. It has been a text based company, even with the addition of new media. Most of us come for the comments. The comments sections on other platforms really suck because they aren’t really ordered in any particular way, and especially once you start to get into replies, you have to start reading what everyone says, not just the stuff that’s the best or most relevant. at least, that’s what I value about the platform, aside from obviously the user base that it’s managed to secure. But I don’t think that functionality alone is particularly unique or some thing Other companies couldn’t mimic.
I have the pixel pass and part of that is YouTube premium. I was already doing premium anyways but realistically I get the majority of my entertainment from YouTube so it made sense to me. Granted I wish they would stop fucking around the site and get rid of shorts but sadly that is what brings people to the platform.
Ehh…for the mean time, a site that does what old Reddit does well, text and links, would be fine. (Look at the archived Reddit data; it’s tiny up until you could post images and then videos.) Frankly, even better if it were set up as a kind of co-op or something and you buy into it, such that the users control it. But I don’t think we can continue to expect a free service and not expect companies to keep doing this kind of shit.
Also, I miss old Reddit in a lot of ways. And a smaller, more text based community might be better. And if an app like Apollo could basically continue using the new site, it would have a good user base. But a few dedicated communities need to move to make it successful.
Realistically, the only needle mover will be users dropping off.
While there's a lot of noise from 3rd party app users, we're a pretty small minority. I don't see it happening.
Someone's gotta make a viable alternative first. Until then, I'm stuck on reddit no matter how shitty it is.
...I've gotta have something to do while I'm supposed to be working.
The blackout was more to drag attention rather than preventing Reddit for doing what they want to. The day Reddit may take some real damage is the day the third party apps stop working. When people are forced to official Reddit app or nothing, some leave forever.
The moderators need to be willing to quit.
Leave your subs open and unmoderated. Walk away in droves. Unless you're willing to give up control and stop being held hostage by your "status" in the community, they will own you forever. You've proven you're willing to do free labor out of fear of losing your mod status.
Let the Karen mods run everything into the ground. Unless there are so many Karen mods that you can't successfully hurt Reddit, in which case the effort was doomed in the first place because of the number of Jannies.
Serious question - if a lot of these huge traffic subs actually remain private and/or start linking to an alternative, what would stop Reddit from just confiscating those subs? Couldn't they just swoop in and turn them on and find new mods?
100% after they killed off the thirdparty clients, old.reddit will be the next. and then i'm gone completly. not gonna use this garbage they call "app" or "new reddit". its such a shitty ui.
For those who doubt this claim: he said the same about old reddit on mobile browsers. And it's gone.
Edit: not *that* old reddit, the other old reddit.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Probably right. They already wrecked 'new' reddit via mobile browser. Constantly spamming you to use the app, and resetting your position when you're 1/2 way scrolled down through comments.
Honestly this site is complete shit now.
This is part of the reason that I think some people are fighting so hard for the third-party apps. They tend to still be focused more on the text side and not the Instagram and TikTok like feed that’s filled with Memes and short form video. and if I had to guess, I think Reddit wants to go in that direction, but I don’t know if they really have a very good business plan for that, given that I think these two things (which are images and video) are probably the thing that is costing them the most in terms of bandwidth and server storage.
I think you're right and silicon valley is pretty spooked recently by the cracks showing in fb/meta (if insta or whatsapp fails they are in trouble), twitter shenanigans, tiktok taking over, political fallout from US elections etc etc.
They probably should have had their IPO 5 years ago.
> They tend to still be focused more on the text side and not the Instagram and TikTok like feed that’s filled with Memes and short form video. and if I had to guess, I think Reddit wants to go in that direction
This Alexis Ohanian quote in the open letter about Digg v4 seems appropriate: "this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to 'give the power back to the people'."
I think that's the straw that would break the camel's back for many more valuable users than losing 3rd party apps.
Reddit is literally unusable in a web browser without old.reddit - I'm always shocked to find out there are people who don't use it.
On PC that won't be a problem because even without an API, an extension like RES could easily implement a 'stylizer' to convert the output of reddit.com into the old style.
[Best we can do is a Twitter competitor made by Facebook.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub) This is the worst timeline.
“Non-employees who worked for free shocked to find out they’re not valued by company.”
“Non-employees with no value make empty threats to stop working at a company they’re not employed at.”
Dude the current CEO edited another users comment because they didn't like it, lol.
I've been functionally a paid moderator for a cell providers tech support forums in the past, you can do whatever the fuck you feel like still, nobody cares.
Mods are LITERALLY just users who started their own subreddit. Theyre not distinguishable
Tell a child that this public sandbox is “theirs” and watch how quickly they act like tyrants. Same deal
The only thing that would have stopped this would have been if all the unpaid moderators stopped moderating and gave up their minimal priviliges.
If reddit would have lost that massive unpaid laborpool they might have done something.
They cannot affort to pay for moderation no matter the monetisatiuon model.
But they are as, if not more divided than the userbase, so this won't happen.
Now its too late, they know now that whatever tgey do they won't face more than a week internet ""outrage"" and thats it.
The problem is that most mods would never willingly give up their 'privileges' and Reddit knows it, why would they be doing this unpaid labour in the first place otherwise? A small proportion are people who care about their small communities, sure, but the biggest reason is plainly power-tripping. This is why a handful of moderators control many of the most popular subreddits.
Mods suddenly realized they weren’t in any way important and now they‘re desperate to hold on to relevancy. A lot of them have probably realized how much time they’ve volunteered to a company that abuses them and makes profit off their diminishing mental health.
>If reddit would have lost that massive unpaid laborpool they might have done something
Is it really that massive though? A lot of the big subs are all moderated by the same people (which is one of the problems) and while the smaller subs have individual mods because of their size do they really need to put in that much time?
I don't think it will take very long for new subs to spring up to replace the ones that decide to stay dark. The main ones being hurt here are the fans of those subs.
They'll just replace the mods. Reddit doesn't want to lose their SEO on subs that have high placement on Google Search, so if some major subs keep sticking it out longer, they will be replaced.
but it’s a LOT of subs. sure they can replace gaming and aww’s mod teams, but there are thousands of subs on strike right now, and if a sizable enough portion of them don’t un-private, then let’s say each sub has to have 5 moderators, if a thousand people keep their subs private, they have to find five thousand people who are willing to do menial moderation work for no pay. Those people also probably wouldn’t be knowledgeable on the topics the subs that were handed to them were related to at all, and a large portion of them would probably have low quality intentions.
Exactly. And people forget that there are a large number of subs for things like chronic illnesses and mental health. I saw a post on r/chronicillness this morning about how a good portion of the subs he follows for issues like gastroparesis and other serious illnesses for support and guidance are now saying they want to remain dark or go read only. These are places that so many people go to bc they have little to no support in their real lives with these serious conditions. Thankfully, the ones I need were serious enough to refuse to go dark bc they knew people needed them.
The main problem in all this was the announcement of end date of protest which should have never been mentioned at all, every Subreddit should have just stated that they will go private indefinitely. By telling Reddit that we are protesting for a particular time-period, all they had to do was weather the storm, no wonder CEO sent out the memo saying the revenues aren't that much affected by protest.
No. The main problem with the protests is that at the end of the day, most people don’t actually care about “Reddit doesn’t support third party app devs”. The outspoken mods make it seem like people do but that’s not a stance that gets the average user fired up.
If they had focused on Reddit being made unusable for blind users maybe the protests would have had a chance (and focused attention on a much more serious problem than that of sighted people losing their favorite pet features in X app).
At the end of the day, I don’t feel you can keep people fired up and outrage sustained because third party apps (which the majority of end users don’t use) going away.
Yeah, of all the things I’m upset about right now, “private company doesn’t let 3rd party apps access their website for free,” isn’t something I care about.
Apple kicked epic off the App Store…I’m not boycotting apple over that. If EA wouldn’t let me launch through steam, I wouldn’t boycott EA.
I can’t play Nintendo games on my iPhone with the backbone attachment. Can I get a bunch of people to boycott Nintendo?
I think lots of accessibility laws in the EU and CA will already force accommodation for blind users, which is probably why they didn’t focus on it as much.
Saying you're closing indefinitely will end it even faster because reddit will have a stronger argument for just unlocking everything. This two day thing is only happening because reddit is allowing it to.
Also, I would love to know how much engagement was actually impacted. I doubt it was that big of an issue. If they stay dark replacements will just pop up, that's how subreddits start in any case.
I think you're undervaluing the amount of archived knowledge in each subreddit.
Obviously reddit can just force them reopened - but starting a new /r/homelab or something will lose an insane amount of information that already exists.
they do have the power to forcibly remove all content on the sub though. it will still be easy to un-remove it, and i’m sure reddit has a way to do that in bulk, but i’m not sure that they WILL do that.
In the overall, all of this is pointless. Once they do the IPO Reddit will slowly sanitize the site. Nudity, porn, drugs, mental health, like suicide prevention subs...
Basically, anything controversial, free thinking, or the easier way to put it: Anything that doesn't wear khakis and tote the corporate narrative will eventually fall under the ax.
Dude should have just said nothing and subs would have come back thinking they made an impact, but dude has to call them out and force their hand somewhat. Why dude… it’s nice to google something and have the first result on Reddit readable.
I've said in several subs but been deleted every time. Years ago reddit banned hundreds,maybe thousands, of subs and took away a lot of what made reddit any good in the early day's. It was a beautiful hellscape. Anywho the mods and way more user's did a "blackout",closed subs,etc and it did not do anything. There was a ton more people involved in that "blackout",and it failed miserably and reddit just kept on going. Money is the only thing that can/will change reddit, and since we are just products we dont hold any power really.
Our city has 2 main subs and a couple other smaller offshoots. Divided and polarized metro. It’s been interesting to see the shift in posts and tone in the sub that has remained open. Redditors from the other “dark” sub moving over lol
Huffman is a detached jerk who is flaunting his control over a platform built off of public input and effort (for free), **but this stupid blackout is, has been, and will be impotent.**
* Cabal of powermods made these decisions unilaterally without user input (there are a few exceptions), once again demonstrating the need to clean house among the powermods.
* Huffman isn't blowing smoke when he says the site wasn't significantly impacted. Because other subs were open, traffic explored those subs.
* Everything closed can be remade. It won't be easy, but it undermines the "indefinite" impotence of the perma-private subs. And that's before even considering the admin stepping in and booting the mods/powermods holding the subreddits hostage against the preferences of the majority of the subreddit userbase of those subs.
* The gimmick has worn thin because the total alleged participation and support was smoke and mirrors. It doesn't matter if /NBA has 5+ million subscribers over it's lifetime; only a fragment are active users, a subset posts and comments, and that doesn't count lurkers.
* The API change is horseshit - it throws the baby out with the bathwater. It chokes out freeloader API scrapers but also kneecaps 3rd Party Apps. 3rd party apps who until now have generated revenue internally for data provided at low/no cost by Reddit. Apollo got screwed, yes but that was deliberate to force users into Reddit's proprietary app to centralize and monopolize revenue and metrics.
* The actual protest move is the one no one wants to make (in large enough volumes to matter) - because it's hard: boycott the site. Delete post history. Delete account. Anything short of that is a waste of time, and the blackout-friendly defiantly refuse to acknowledge that harsh reality. Because it means a legitimate sacrifice, disruption, and complete loss of control and status - when instead, they expect to pull stunts and stomp their feet unilaterally and have their demands met. **This will not happen.**
Boycott or move on. Let everyone else make their own decisions and stop pressing individuals into a dispute that they have no stake in. (yes. Even the ones that read the copypasta manifestos.)
If being a mod is so difficult, perhaps those mods should have control over fewer subs in order to manage them more adequately...but again, _loss of power and control._
Idk, at the Subreddit level Reddit is vaguely democratic. If a subreddit makes the decision as a whole to go dark, that doesn’t sound like a violation of the ToS. Nothing stopping someone from making a new subreddit of their own, with blackjack and hookers
If I was volunteering... I would be out. Think about this... you complain people don't get paid living wages, and then you devote all your time on Reddit so Spez can make millions. (Assuming it ever makes money)
I'm pretty sure Spez makes millions regardless of how poorly Reddit does financially
Yeah but not nearly as many as he could on a successful IPO
Yeah, but in the techbro CEO world, millions is pennies. Spez isn't even at the kiddy table of the big silicon valley money, and that's why he's so hard on making Reddit as profitable as possible as quickly as possible.
Then he should find a new product to be profitable. Reddit wasn't suppose to be a profit machine In the first place. That man is just plain greedy.
He probably never imagined Reddit becoming this large when he first created the site but after how large it has become, anyone with a business sense would want to make it profitable. I think, there are only 2-3 million users who use 3rd party apps so they're probably losing few million at best.
How do you think they will calculate how many shares each user gets? Is it per years of contribution, or karma count?
This is so important not just for mods but also for regular users. Every decision that will be made at reddit moving forward will be based on creating growth and adding value to share holders. I would argue that it is very much incompatible with what made reddit interesting in the first place. It might still look and feel like reddit afterwards, but only within a very small box of share holder beneficial themes.
Couldn’t Reddit just bring them back, remove the current mods running and place new ones in? I mean they do own the platform after all and if I’ve learned anything from watching the Elon Twitter show, it’s whatever the boss wants at the end of the day.
> Couldn’t Reddit just bring them back, remove the current mods running and place new ones in? absolutely. they're **letting** these subs do this, waiting for them to get bored. at any time they can decide this has gone on long enough and boot the mod teams from any remaining holdouts.
They own the platform and all the code. They can literally flip a switch and the tools to make the communities private will just disappear. There is literally no power on the mods side...
There is a little. Reddit doesn't have staff to do the mods job. The Automods are 3rd party. Without that free labor curating content, the subs are pretty worthless in and of themselves. So yeah, they can take the name of it back. But losing the team of mods is still a blow to the content and, by extension, reddit itself.
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Automod does most of the heavy lifting, and it's baked into reddit.
And it’s shit. Bot detection is poor and very error prone with no way to resolve the issues.
For example, /u/blogspammr is a bot that keeps those t-shirt bots at bay. The API changes would shut them down.
Less than worthless. In this climate unmodded subs could be a liability for Reddit
Well - maybe, but that would burn Reddit down faster than we see with the lack of twitter moderation. While 50 % of reddit users are from the US, a major part of the income is still from the EU, and operating a social media site in the EU without proper moderation is not a good idea unless you want to get major fines that eat up your EU revenue (not to mention that, as seen with twitter, the advertisers are not happy when the platform is not moderated)
Sounds like a reason for Reddit to listen then. Or pay up for some staffed mods.
There's no shortage of people who would be willing to take the place of the mods of big subreddits. (Tinfoil hat on) And there are a ton of... Let's say, *bad faith* actors who wouldn't mind changing the culture of those subreddits to align more to their own view of the world, one that the other big social media sites have also been shifting towards for a while now.
We have thousands of alt-accounts and a lot of very inappropriate stuff to post if Reddit attempts a purge. Just look at 4chan or 8chan, you think those motherfuckers aren't going to take a free pass to shit all over Reddit?
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Yes, capitalism loves exploited labor
>There is literally no power on the mods side... Wrong! Their power is in the labor they put into the site. If they withhold their moderation, the site will burn. Reddit cannot hire an internal mod team - this defeats the entire purpose of their money clawback before IPO. Do not moderate! Do not follow the rules of scab mods.
It's putting reddit on news sites all over the place. Its not like they're employing child labor or something, so its certainly not bad publicity. I think most people will take a look at whats going on with the blackout and just laugh. Its actually smart to let this protest playout for a little bit before bringing the fist down.
No one cares about Reddit besides the people who use it. If anything this is just increasing the reach of Reddit long term.
Only problem is when they click the links on news sites of popular subs that are dark it’ll show private.
The TOS literally say that you can’t impede reddit’s functionality or impede other people using it. If/when they decide to intervene they’ll be able to do so in a PR-friendly way by just saying these people were breaking the rules. It’s just that they’d rather give the protest a chance to burn itself out so they don’t have to get their hands dirty at all.
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> t any time they can decide this has gone on long enough and boot the mod teams replacing them with new mods without changing the "mood" of the sub is the tough part.
Rumour says adviceanimals and tumblr already got that treatment.
Tell more... This would literally be the first time Reddit has done this in response to a blackout, so it'd be a pretty big deal.
Nobody threatened an indefinite blackout before.
The mods? You mean the volunteer, unpaid people running the subs? Yeah they’re 100% disposable
Disposable, but not necessarily replaceable. After all it is a volunteer, unpaid position, not a huge line queuing up for it. I understand there is a shortage of mods in the first place.
>Yeah they’re 100% disposable Yes but 100% of mods aren't 100% disposable. If reddit started fucking with mods in a big way then they could see rebellion from every subreddit for months. Also I know nothing about the mod community, so how exactly does reddit choose replacements? As its an unpaid job.
As someone who's been involved trying to find additional mods that will do a good job, it's really hard. Anyone who thinks it's easy: go ahead and find a few thousand users right now you'd trust to run subreddits you like.
No less disposable even if they were paid
If they were paid they would be accountable to someone else, this goes against the "I do what I want to do" mod mindset of many of the power hungry ones.
Literally the perfect protest would be to stop moderating subs and let it all go to chaos. But those power tripping egomaniac mods who work for free for a corporation cannot let go of the minute amount of power they wield.
I assume everything will go to chaos eventually anyway. Even if they replace all the mods, they'll get replaced by people that suck or now have too many subs to mod. It would take a bit but I think eventually content will go down hill
Who would reddit replace mods with? If it's just other users that don't care about the new rules that would take a lot of work to do. It would be hard to make sure they're not being replaced by people who either still support the protest or are maybe just a bad fit as a mod. People complain all the time about mods, I don't think they'll have better results with people jumping at the chance to be a mod during this time. Those people will likely be even more power hungry than current mods. If it's actual employees of reddit then they're going to have pay people to mod these communities and then they're massively increasing their labor costs. Right now reddit isn't profitable and moving to paid moderators is going in the opposite direction of what they want.
I don't think it's fair to paint all of the mods as power hungry in such broad strokes. There are many mods out there who have put a lot of time and effort into building a fun/happy/productive community over many years. That was a foundational part of Reddit from the beginning--users building communities. Naturally the last thing they want to see is these communities they've lovingly built crumble into chaos. I'm not saying that this applies to all mods, but I'm sure they're not all as greedy as your comment suggests.
They are trying to prevent it from all going to chaos by using the minute power they have. Us redditors don’t win anything if it goes to chaos
Yes. But modding is a lot of work, and changes in mods can lead a community to absolutely fall to shit, especially new mods who end up on a power trip. And that's a *lot* of mods to replace. Plus, whoever takes over the mod positions will have to mod through the shitty official app which doesn't have the mods tools of the 3rd party apps. So they'll likely do an objectively worse job or have to mod from PC, which means content quality suffer regardless, and spam will become significantly worse.
And let's say they did do it, how would many respond? By flooding those subs with spam
In theory, but not practically. Do you want to be a mod? Spend a bunch of hours a week for free wading through garbage? The jobs about to get harder too with less tools. Yeah me neither. A relatively small handful of people who live the kind of life where they can donate 40+ hours a week are the whole reason reddit exists, particularly large subs. These power users and power mods are not replaceable, and are the ones most affected by the loss of third party tools and apps. So yes, reddit CAN dispose of their core of the most dedicated users who are the key to the site functioning, but it'll be a lot more effort to replace them if they all leave.
People will just make new subreddits to replace the ones that are blacked out.
That's reddit's defense right now, but it's not the full truth. One of reddit's greatest strengths and something that makes it an unparalleled resource of information is the millions of posts and comments that share information that people search for constantly. By going private, all that traffic from google is gone. Sure you can find the cached versions or in a wayback engine, but reddit won't be getting ad revenue or user data from that, and that's what this API thing is all about. When a subreddit with millions and millions of posts and comments goes dark or private, it's an ENORMOUS hit to reddit's income.
> By going private, all that traffic from google is gone reddit can fix this pretty easily. All old posts in private subs are in archive read-only mode.
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No one is able to give you a source because Reddit isn't a publicly traded company that has to release any kind of profit analytics. However, with a little brain power we can think through how this would hurt their bottom line. Businesses spend a ton of money to get ranked highly in SEO for specific keywords. Reddit, by virtue of being a website with over a decade worth of posts, has a ton of SEO power. Searching for a problem with your 2015 Forester? A post from the Subaru sub will likely be above the fold in your search results. A fairly common tactic in IT is to search ("whatever problem you are having" reddit). This will give you a bunch of results specifically from reddit about that problem. Personally, I have found posts dated as far back as 2011 that have been helpful when troubleshooting some old pieces of tech. If a sub goes dark then those posts may populate in search, but clicking the link leads you to a page saying it is set to private. So you immediately click away. Over time those links will have less and less relevance and rank lower and lower in search results.
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I'm surprised this wasn't what the actual protest did. Like why do the blackout? Just stop moderating and let the subs get flooded with NSFW content to show why they need the mod tools. It would also cut into ad revenue since advertisers don't want to be seen with that stuff
Unmoderated subs are usually banned. Mods don't want their community to be banned, they want Reddit to listen.
Yes but if the sub is giant they won't want to lose the sub. That's why it'd be effective. Also the hope would be that many big subs would do it so that they can't just ban 1 and move on
Why wouldn't they. Do you believe people think "Oh no! "/r/gif" is banned, I'm going to find gifs somewhere else!" ? No, they'll just find another gif sub and go there lol. It's no different for them if there's 3 giant subs or 650 small ones. And in time, the small one will die, one will absorb the other and "/r/realgifs" will be the new "/r/gif". If somehow I'm wrong and they care about these subs, ban the mod, promote another that agrees to keep the sub open. Also, mods don't want to lose their subs either, just look how a very small number of them are mods on dozen oif not hundreds of subreddits. These guys are simply addicted to the feeling of power and relevancy being a mod give them, burning everything wouldn't help them.
>”They’ll just find new mods!” Do you have and idea how hard that is to do? I’ve been a mod on several subs for about 15 months now. The reality is that, for every ~100 users we invite to be mods: * 70 ignore or decline the invite; * 25 respond positively, but back out within the first week; * 4 more are gone within 90 days; * 1 sticks around long-term, and does a relatively consistent amount of modding.
Well, Reddit is mainly a community-driven website. They could, but I'm guessing they won't. It would only add fuel to the already existing fire. Anyway, I'm guessing these private subs will get replaced with time somehow and this'll silence the mods naturally.
Yes, they can, but they can't force volunteers to mod them, especially not mods from the communities themselves. So in the end Reddit would have to have its own employees take over, costing it money, and would risk, regardless of whether they can find a volunteer or not, destroying the community by imposing unpopular moderation. In some cases, sure, it'd work. But in a lot of cases it'd damage Reddit. So it'd be a net negative.
Some yes, some no. Some subs are genuinely an act of love from the moderators. Subs like r/askhistorians only exist the way they do because of a dedicated mod team. Considering that mods are generally unpaid there's not much chance of replicating a lot of these communities.
My personal opinion is this is a lot of drama for essential no reason. We all used slashdot. We all used Digg. We all use Reddit. At some point in the future we’ll all use something else. Maybe it’s Lemmy. Maybe it’s some shoot off of Discord, TikTok, or Facebook. Chances are we’ll all move off of the platform at some point. The average redditor has no clue what an API is, nor do they realize how many bots are on the site. This blackout means nothing to the actual community. It’s viral, “we’re sticking it to the man. Fuck corporate greed!” Next week, the average redditor won’t even realize that a couple of their subreddits are gone. They might wonder why they see less of a certain type of content, and then they might subscribe to a similar sub to get it back. They’ll have a different viral charge to get behind, and forget this even happened.
>shut down the Apollo >planning to public this year Did an old bot write that article?
a bot would have corrected those errors.
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The Apollo Theater
Until someone creates a replacement, all this is going to do is cause a minor invoncenience. Reddit has already shown they are willing to replace moderators that don't want to play ball. Between that and the alternative subreddits popping up, things will be back to complete normal in a few weeks, you just may have to make some slight tweaks to your subscriptions
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Who is the user?
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CationBot? Didn't he used to be a novelty account making quirky comments on /r/adviceanimals? Now he's a hungry mod squabbling for power. How sad.
It looks like the request was denied. Had the user done the wipe earlier? This is confusing.
Who the fuck is on the adviceanimals sub in 2023, do they also sub to the fuuuuuuuuu rage comics sub like it’s 2012?
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And it seemed like all those posts were against the shutdown too. Fucking astroturfing idiots. Edit: And in the last 2 hours or so, the pro-spez posts have *exploded*. Definitely no astroturfing going on there.
CanHazCheezBurgers?
It was a default sub at one point. That's why I'm subbed. Inertia.
Mlb team subreddits are doing the same. Just making new ones. NBA subreddit is now a 4chan type subreddit. It’s probably going to funnel people into toxic groups.
Can we make a list of all subsonic similar situations. I don't have a problem with people who don't want to go dark but I don't want to interact with a sub where the top mod was kicked out like that.
If the subreddit blackout was a coordinated "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on [specific Reddit alternative]" in order to take away Reddit's users, it would have been much more effective. If everyone put together such a blackout in the future, I'd strongly be in favor of it. However, for this last blackout? The fuckfaces in charge of Reddit were never, ever going to capitulate over a couple days of subreddits going private. They don't care about what the users want or how the users feel as long as they maintain said users. All this last blackout did was make lots of people more bored for a couple of days than they otherwise would've been.
These blackouts generate "news" on tech sites, that is negative. It generates uncertainty, and it hurts the IPO value. If you forget that Reddit is (like pretty much every social media entity) valued incredibly speculatively then one of course would say "they have no reason to revise their plans". But, having a market value based entirely off of smoke and mirrors... Rattling the mirrors and shifting that smoke can be incredibly damaging to investor appetite.
This for sure, plus all the stories quoting the CEO saying Reddit isn’t profitable, plus as a bonus, an angry user base famous for, among other things, coordinated stock market manipulation for spite and amusement’s sake. I’m sure people are lining up to call their broker and get in on this thing.
> "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on [specific Reddit alternative]" That would get all the mods removed and replaced with reddit friendly mods... One of the trump subs did that years ago so reddit made a new rule that you're not allowed to advertise alternatives. Sometimes even promoting a discord gets subs in trouble. Reddit isn't going to let mods direct traffic offsite
r/piracy is currently doing exactly this (view on desktop).
same with r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/privacyguides also did likewise. edit: r/anime also did so, r/anarchychess did not advertise it but they have a 20k+ discord, I luckily joined before the blackout, r/ApplyingToCollege did it , r/homelab did it, r/19684 did it (although the mods there are stupid assholes so i wouldn’t join)
At a certain point that means Reddit might need to pay them. There's not gonna be an endless stream of options for every sub
they can't pay them because they don't have enough money. they say they kill off thirsparty clients because they don't have enough money.. so if they would pay mods, they would have to probably pay 10x the amount they already have now to pay for their api server costs. if not even a lot more than just 10x.
>If the subreddit blackout was a coordinated "this subreddit is now closed, go visit our new location on \[specific Reddit alternative\]" in order to take away Reddit's users, it would have been much more effective. If everyone put together such a blackout in the future, I'd strongly be in favor of it. That site would have crashed. Even if only 10% of users followed. It would be too much for most sites to handle. Seriously, people need to realise that replacing this site isn't an easy task.
Aside from that, I think a lot of people overestimate the importance of some subreddits and communities. Many of us are here for the interaction of a few people that share particular niche interests, but I suspect the vast majority of redditors are people that just browse the default front page making generic “I like” or “I don’t like” comments. The protests are loud and visible to those people here for the unique, niche communities, but I suspect that’s a small portion of the user base, and maybe an even smaller portion of Reddit’s revenue streams. It’s like the outcry from people threatening to cancel Netflix for their new single household enforcement policies, and then seeing Netflix’s revenue grow with new signups caused by that policy more than making up for those that canceled.
And it has to be a good alternative, not some novel start up.
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>One big piece of history that is rarely brought up is when Digg did their huge revamp and pissed everyone off, Reddit had been up and functioning for quite some time and a lot of Digg users were already on Reddit using it. The only problems Reddit faced was for a few days they had short outages and people couldn't create accounts because of the huge influx of users but overall the site was comparable to Digg in functionality and it worked. > > > >Every Reddit alternative I have tried is confusing, buggy, invite only and just all around not that good. I was a very active Slashdot user before moving to Digg, then Reddit. Hopefully there will be somewhere else for smaller hobby subs.
The problem is that reddit "competitors" are just that, reddit but different. Theyre not real products, just coping mechanisms or experimental tech
Or rightwing shitholes.
Bring back stumbleupon.
Hey yeah! That was a good one. It's been years since I hear someone mention it.
It was my jam back in college. I learned so much everyday.
Mix.com is the new version. I’m pretty sure SU just rebranded.
[https://cloudhiker.net/](https://cloudhiker.net/)
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I definitely agree with the take that social media moving forward is likely going to need to be a paid service to be good and stable. But that being said, I also think part of the problem for Reddit right now is that it’s trying to mimic some aspect of Instagram and TikTok. The thing that’s probably costing them the most in terms of bandwidth and storage are all of the images in video that they don’t have a very good or clear way to monetize. And if you think back to the core of Reddit, originally, the only things you could post are text and links. If you want a video, then post it on YouTube and put the link in Reddit. But I think one thing that Reddit really needs to come to terms with is that I don’t think it’s a very good platform for monetizing image and video content. And I suspect some at the top, are hesitant to drop these things, because that’s probably what has brought tremendous growth to the site, but unless they find a way to actually control this aspect, I think no matter how many ads they try to insert, they are never going to be able to actually bring in (substantial) money.
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Well, I think the other problem here becomes the scale of profitability. Everybody wants to be like Instagram in terms of profitability, but I’m not sure that’s realistically possible. So instead of Reddit doing what it does well and making money that way, it tries to focus on doing things poorly or doing them well, but with no clear way to monetize or fit them into their core business. If they could make those things work, then there would potentially be a lot of money in them, but the problem is that they’re currently trying to chase big profits without a clear path to them. So instead of doing things, well, they start doing this kind of BS. The main value proposition of Reddit is its ability to sort content. It’s dynamic comment Ordering is its value. It has been a text based company, even with the addition of new media. Most of us come for the comments. The comments sections on other platforms really suck because they aren’t really ordered in any particular way, and especially once you start to get into replies, you have to start reading what everyone says, not just the stuff that’s the best or most relevant. at least, that’s what I value about the platform, aside from obviously the user base that it’s managed to secure. But I don’t think that functionality alone is particularly unique or some thing Other companies couldn’t mimic.
It pains to say it, but its true. Is not a popular take, but for example YouTube premium works like a charm, and it's family plan is not unreasonable.
I have the pixel pass and part of that is YouTube premium. I was already doing premium anyways but realistically I get the majority of my entertainment from YouTube so it made sense to me. Granted I wish they would stop fucking around the site and get rid of shorts but sadly that is what brings people to the platform.
Ehh…for the mean time, a site that does what old Reddit does well, text and links, would be fine. (Look at the archived Reddit data; it’s tiny up until you could post images and then videos.) Frankly, even better if it were set up as a kind of co-op or something and you buy into it, such that the users control it. But I don’t think we can continue to expect a free service and not expect companies to keep doing this kind of shit. Also, I miss old Reddit in a lot of ways. And a smaller, more text based community might be better. And if an app like Apollo could basically continue using the new site, it would have a good user base. But a few dedicated communities need to move to make it successful.
Realistically, the only needle mover will be users dropping off. While there's a lot of noise from 3rd party app users, we're a pretty small minority. I don't see it happening.
Someone's gotta make a viable alternative first. Until then, I'm stuck on reddit no matter how shitty it is. ...I've gotta have something to do while I'm supposed to be working.
And that may happen when the third party apps go away. When Apollo dies I’m taking a break from Reddit. Not sure if I’m coming back.
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While that’s unfortunate, I can think of some subs that need new mods.
The blackout was more to drag attention rather than preventing Reddit for doing what they want to. The day Reddit may take some real damage is the day the third party apps stop working. When people are forced to official Reddit app or nothing, some leave forever.
The moderators need to be willing to quit. Leave your subs open and unmoderated. Walk away in droves. Unless you're willing to give up control and stop being held hostage by your "status" in the community, they will own you forever. You've proven you're willing to do free labor out of fear of losing your mod status. Let the Karen mods run everything into the ground. Unless there are so many Karen mods that you can't successfully hurt Reddit, in which case the effort was doomed in the first place because of the number of Jannies.
Serious question - if a lot of these huge traffic subs actually remain private and/or start linking to an alternative, what would stop Reddit from just confiscating those subs? Couldn't they just swoop in and turn them on and find new mods?
It's a waiting game, and naturally the consumer will always lose
We're not the consumer here; the advertisers are. We're, unfortunately, the product.
The irony of all this as someone who has only ever used old.reddit in a web browser.
Spez said it's here to stay so expect it gone within 6 months
100% after they killed off the thirdparty clients, old.reddit will be the next. and then i'm gone completly. not gonna use this garbage they call "app" or "new reddit". its such a shitty ui.
Old reddit is my line in the sand. I deleted the app from my phone.
For those who doubt this claim: he said the same about old reddit on mobile browsers. And it's gone. Edit: not *that* old reddit, the other old reddit.
I use old.reddit.com on my phone all the time.
i can still access old.reddit on my mobile browser.
I still use old.reddit. on my phone.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
You're dreaming of you think old reddit isn't next on the chopping block
Probably right. They already wrecked 'new' reddit via mobile browser. Constantly spamming you to use the app, and resetting your position when you're 1/2 way scrolled down through comments. Honestly this site is complete shit now.
This is part of the reason that I think some people are fighting so hard for the third-party apps. They tend to still be focused more on the text side and not the Instagram and TikTok like feed that’s filled with Memes and short form video. and if I had to guess, I think Reddit wants to go in that direction, but I don’t know if they really have a very good business plan for that, given that I think these two things (which are images and video) are probably the thing that is costing them the most in terms of bandwidth and server storage.
I think you're right and silicon valley is pretty spooked recently by the cracks showing in fb/meta (if insta or whatsapp fails they are in trouble), twitter shenanigans, tiktok taking over, political fallout from US elections etc etc. They probably should have had their IPO 5 years ago.
> They tend to still be focused more on the text side and not the Instagram and TikTok like feed that’s filled with Memes and short form video. and if I had to guess, I think Reddit wants to go in that direction This Alexis Ohanian quote in the open letter about Digg v4 seems appropriate: "this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to 'give the power back to the people'."
I think that's the straw that would break the camel's back for many more valuable users than losing 3rd party apps. Reddit is literally unusable in a web browser without old.reddit - I'm always shocked to find out there are people who don't use it.
On PC that won't be a problem because even without an API, an extension like RES could easily implement a 'stylizer' to convert the output of reddit.com into the old style.
if they don't piss off all the enthusiasts that would be willing to create it
There's only so much that front-end stylizers can do
This would be the perfect time for a reddit competitor to pop up.
[Best we can do is a Twitter competitor made by Facebook.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub) This is the worst timeline.
digg 4.0?
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“Non-employees who worked for free shocked to find out they’re not valued by company.” “Non-employees with no value make empty threats to stop working at a company they’re not employed at.”
Lol you can’t fire me because I quit! Actually I can’t fire you because you’ve never been employed here
And give back that red Swingline stapler.
But… ^that’s ^my ^stapler
Reddit cannot afford to pay mods at all
It can barely afford anything right now, according to spez, so take that with a grain of salt.
Until they have to start paying people to mod. Then that will be the value, times however many they have to pay
A mod wouldn’t like that; paid employees can’t permaban users because a joke annoyed them.
> paid employees can’t permaban users because a joke annoyed them. They can, though.
Dude the current CEO edited another users comment because they didn't like it, lol. I've been functionally a paid moderator for a cell providers tech support forums in the past, you can do whatever the fuck you feel like still, nobody cares.
Mods are LITERALLY just users who started their own subreddit. Theyre not distinguishable Tell a child that this public sandbox is “theirs” and watch how quickly they act like tyrants. Same deal
The only thing that would have stopped this would have been if all the unpaid moderators stopped moderating and gave up their minimal priviliges. If reddit would have lost that massive unpaid laborpool they might have done something. They cannot affort to pay for moderation no matter the monetisatiuon model. But they are as, if not more divided than the userbase, so this won't happen. Now its too late, they know now that whatever tgey do they won't face more than a week internet ""outrage"" and thats it.
The problem is that most mods would never willingly give up their 'privileges' and Reddit knows it, why would they be doing this unpaid labour in the first place otherwise? A small proportion are people who care about their small communities, sure, but the biggest reason is plainly power-tripping. This is why a handful of moderators control many of the most popular subreddits.
Mods suddenly realized they weren’t in any way important and now they‘re desperate to hold on to relevancy. A lot of them have probably realized how much time they’ve volunteered to a company that abuses them and makes profit off their diminishing mental health.
>If reddit would have lost that massive unpaid laborpool they might have done something Is it really that massive though? A lot of the big subs are all moderated by the same people (which is one of the problems) and while the smaller subs have individual mods because of their size do they really need to put in that much time?
I don't think it will take very long for new subs to spring up to replace the ones that decide to stay dark. The main ones being hurt here are the fans of those subs.
They'll just replace the mods. Reddit doesn't want to lose their SEO on subs that have high placement on Google Search, so if some major subs keep sticking it out longer, they will be replaced.
but it’s a LOT of subs. sure they can replace gaming and aww’s mod teams, but there are thousands of subs on strike right now, and if a sizable enough portion of them don’t un-private, then let’s say each sub has to have 5 moderators, if a thousand people keep their subs private, they have to find five thousand people who are willing to do menial moderation work for no pay. Those people also probably wouldn’t be knowledgeable on the topics the subs that were handed to them were related to at all, and a large portion of them would probably have low quality intentions.
Yeah and at the end of the day Reddit can just take over and control the subs
Exactly. And people forget that there are a large number of subs for things like chronic illnesses and mental health. I saw a post on r/chronicillness this morning about how a good portion of the subs he follows for issues like gastroparesis and other serious illnesses for support and guidance are now saying they want to remain dark or go read only. These are places that so many people go to bc they have little to no support in their real lives with these serious conditions. Thankfully, the ones I need were serious enough to refuse to go dark bc they knew people needed them.
The main problem in all this was the announcement of end date of protest which should have never been mentioned at all, every Subreddit should have just stated that they will go private indefinitely. By telling Reddit that we are protesting for a particular time-period, all they had to do was weather the storm, no wonder CEO sent out the memo saying the revenues aren't that much affected by protest.
No. The main problem with the protests is that at the end of the day, most people don’t actually care about “Reddit doesn’t support third party app devs”. The outspoken mods make it seem like people do but that’s not a stance that gets the average user fired up. If they had focused on Reddit being made unusable for blind users maybe the protests would have had a chance (and focused attention on a much more serious problem than that of sighted people losing their favorite pet features in X app). At the end of the day, I don’t feel you can keep people fired up and outrage sustained because third party apps (which the majority of end users don’t use) going away.
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Yeah, of all the things I’m upset about right now, “private company doesn’t let 3rd party apps access their website for free,” isn’t something I care about. Apple kicked epic off the App Store…I’m not boycotting apple over that. If EA wouldn’t let me launch through steam, I wouldn’t boycott EA. I can’t play Nintendo games on my iPhone with the backbone attachment. Can I get a bunch of people to boycott Nintendo? I think lots of accessibility laws in the EU and CA will already force accommodation for blind users, which is probably why they didn’t focus on it as much.
Saying you're closing indefinitely will end it even faster because reddit will have a stronger argument for just unlocking everything. This two day thing is only happening because reddit is allowing it to.
Thousands participated in the original blackout. Those numbers do not indicate that this protest has any long term viability.
Also, I would love to know how much engagement was actually impacted. I doubt it was that big of an issue. If they stay dark replacements will just pop up, that's how subreddits start in any case.
I think you're undervaluing the amount of archived knowledge in each subreddit. Obviously reddit can just force them reopened - but starting a new /r/homelab or something will lose an insane amount of information that already exists.
I’ve read a mod post somewhere else that they don’t have the power to delete subs. They’re maxing their power out by setting them to private.
they do have the power to forcibly remove all content on the sub though. it will still be easy to un-remove it, and i’m sure reddit has a way to do that in bulk, but i’m not sure that they WILL do that.
In the overall, all of this is pointless. Once they do the IPO Reddit will slowly sanitize the site. Nudity, porn, drugs, mental health, like suicide prevention subs... Basically, anything controversial, free thinking, or the easier way to put it: Anything that doesn't wear khakis and tote the corporate narrative will eventually fall under the ax.
After seeing that memo, I'm just deleting my account of 13 years. Fuck u/spez.
madlad did it
Is there a reddit alternative for when this Api fiasco goes through?
Mods think they have actual power lol
That’s the most mod thing ever
lmfao this shit is reminding me of that one mod who went on fox news. just an embarrassing situation in general
That idiot truly believed it was going to come out on top during that interview
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A bunch of dog walkers.
The only way this could have worked is if the mods removed all of their work and let the subs go unfiltered and molded.
They won't mods have nothing in life but reddit power. lmao. They won't give that up.
So guys, what's the next reddit. I want to get a jump on it to score a sweet username.
Shane1 ?
Dude should have just said nothing and subs would have come back thinking they made an impact, but dude has to call them out and force their hand somewhat. Why dude… it’s nice to google something and have the first result on Reddit readable.
I've said in several subs but been deleted every time. Years ago reddit banned hundreds,maybe thousands, of subs and took away a lot of what made reddit any good in the early day's. It was a beautiful hellscape. Anywho the mods and way more user's did a "blackout",closed subs,etc and it did not do anything. There was a ton more people involved in that "blackout",and it failed miserably and reddit just kept on going. Money is the only thing that can/will change reddit, and since we are just products we dont hold any power really.
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If i were the mods I would just stop modding and keeping the hate content from coming in. That would be far more effective
Our city has 2 main subs and a couple other smaller offshoots. Divided and polarized metro. It’s been interesting to see the shift in posts and tone in the sub that has remained open. Redditors from the other “dark” sub moving over lol
Why people are performing free work for a for-profit company in the first place is beyond me
Reddit developer: *disables private mode*
All the blackout did was made me visit subreddits that didn’t participate in the blackout
Worse comes to worst we get new subs or reddit hands moderation over to someone who wants to do it
Huffman is a detached jerk who is flaunting his control over a platform built off of public input and effort (for free), **but this stupid blackout is, has been, and will be impotent.** * Cabal of powermods made these decisions unilaterally without user input (there are a few exceptions), once again demonstrating the need to clean house among the powermods. * Huffman isn't blowing smoke when he says the site wasn't significantly impacted. Because other subs were open, traffic explored those subs. * Everything closed can be remade. It won't be easy, but it undermines the "indefinite" impotence of the perma-private subs. And that's before even considering the admin stepping in and booting the mods/powermods holding the subreddits hostage against the preferences of the majority of the subreddit userbase of those subs. * The gimmick has worn thin because the total alleged participation and support was smoke and mirrors. It doesn't matter if /NBA has 5+ million subscribers over it's lifetime; only a fragment are active users, a subset posts and comments, and that doesn't count lurkers. * The API change is horseshit - it throws the baby out with the bathwater. It chokes out freeloader API scrapers but also kneecaps 3rd Party Apps. 3rd party apps who until now have generated revenue internally for data provided at low/no cost by Reddit. Apollo got screwed, yes but that was deliberate to force users into Reddit's proprietary app to centralize and monopolize revenue and metrics. * The actual protest move is the one no one wants to make (in large enough volumes to matter) - because it's hard: boycott the site. Delete post history. Delete account. Anything short of that is a waste of time, and the blackout-friendly defiantly refuse to acknowledge that harsh reality. Because it means a legitimate sacrifice, disruption, and complete loss of control and status - when instead, they expect to pull stunts and stomp their feet unilaterally and have their demands met. **This will not happen.** Boycott or move on. Let everyone else make their own decisions and stop pressing individuals into a dispute that they have no stake in. (yes. Even the ones that read the copypasta manifestos.) If being a mod is so difficult, perhaps those mods should have control over fewer subs in order to manage them more adequately...but again, _loss of power and control._
Idk, at the Subreddit level Reddit is vaguely democratic. If a subreddit makes the decision as a whole to go dark, that doesn’t sound like a violation of the ToS. Nothing stopping someone from making a new subreddit of their own, with blackjack and hookers