Reddit risks losing its identity in pursuit of profits

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 1083 points –
Reddit risks losing its identity in pursuit of profits
techzine.eu

Reddit isn't profitable, despite having more than 50 million daily active users. In preparation for an IPO, CEO Steve Huffman put the platform's API

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This is what the API protests revealed as well, as a mod team could decide to go dark without input from its own users

No, just no. Nearly all mod teams had polls about this, and all of those polls with dominating majority selected to shut down. Who is this guy? Is he getting paid by Reddit? If anything the protests revealed that Reddit admins would do anything, including disbanding the moderator teams to bring subreddits back, to suppress protests.

Came here to say the same, it's BS, all mods asked their communities, most with polls, other with closely monitoring feedback in the blackout announcement threads, no mod acted on their own, they were all supported by the overwhelming majority of their communities.

I don’t agree with this at all. I saw maybe 3 polls in total across the dozen subs i was on that blacked out, and they were only up for a few hours max. One got like 60 votes to shut down and then the poll was closed - on a sub with hundreds of thousands of people - and they shut down and said that was conclusive 😆.

Oh well I don’t care anymore, I deleted my 13 year old account with 200k+ karma last night. From now on if I have to go to Reddit it’ll be on a browser with ad block and not signed in.

  1. You probably would want to link the subreddit vote next time you claim there are extreme disparities between the vote count and user count. The mods may very well have not given enough time for people to vote, or people just plain didn't vote at all. But we don't know, except from your claim.

  2. The users who vote will ALWAYS be much less than the people who lurk on social media, no exceptions. I'm of the opinion that if you don't vote/engage in the community you're in, you are complicit to anything the active users decide. Democracy.

I am pro-shutdown, but two subreddits that come to mind that revolted against their mods participating in the protest are r/nba and r/eggs_irl.

Anecdotally, I also experienced this, maybe I just missed the polls, but I only saw a handful.

Literally any sub with more than a dozen users had an extreme disparity between user count and vote counts 😂

Not to mention the polls were all gone not long after they closed on most subs. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.

I mean, going by the 90/9/1 rule, it's not unnatural if only 10% of users or less showed up to vote. Hell, if only 1% voted I won't be surprised either.

The subreddit I moderate has had a poll going for the last 2.5 days.

  • 1390 members.
  • 75 poll respondents (5% of members)
  • 7 commenters (0.5% of members)

It's a disappointing turnout. Also, I'm one of those poll respondents and commenters. (If you remind me, I'll post a link to the poll once it closes in 8 hours.)

I've had one going for 3 days now, 2k members, 160 votes and 7 comments. I was pretty surprised to see even 160 votes, its a vote for blocking a certain type of post that has been spammed recently and doesn't contribute much.