Reddit: open /r/pics or else. Mods: OK but you didn't say how

LenticularTorsion@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Malicious Compliance@lemmy.world – 1377 points – POLL: Decide on the future of /r/Pics!
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I honestly don't know if this is allowed here but I thought this is malicious compliance at its finest.

If you don't want to drive traffic there I'll repost what the mods posted below:

POLL: Decide on the future of /r/Pics!

Hello, /r/Pics subscribers!

Boy, what a whacky time we've all had lately, huh? Reddit decided to kill off third-party applications, a protest got planned (and possibly exploited by bad actors), the site showed up in the news, various communities started opening back up, others decided to stay inaccessible, and then the CEO of Reddit implied that a bunch of moderators would be removed from their positions!

Crazy, right?

Anyway, we – the so-called "landed gentry" – definitely want to comply with the wishes of the "royal court," and they've told us that we need to run the subreddit in the way that its members want. To that end, we figured that the only reasonable thing to do was directly ask how you'd like things to progress from here.

Which of the following should we do?

  1. Return to normal operations

  2. Only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy To be clear, if people choose the second option, screen-grabs from videos will be allowed (provided that there aren't any visible logos, inserted graphics, or other digital elements present). You could – if you wanted to – look through episodes of Last Week Tonight on YouTube, find moments featuring John Oliver at his sexiest, then post images of those moments here.

It's entirely up to you! Whatever the /r/Pics community decides is best, we'll respect!

Vote, friends! Vote now!

(You can vote by upvoting either of the comments in the thread below.)

Voting has now closed.

Our final tally is as follows:

Return to normal operations: -2,329 votes

Only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy: 37,331 votes

It would seem that the community has spoken!

Henceforth, /r/Pics will only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy.

(Said images must adhere to all of the community's other rules, including those mandated by Reddit.)

Happy posting!

238

He will probably get wind of this and cover it on his show 🤣

Now videos should do the same but with rick astly..."you know the rules and so do I"

You know, if more subs do this, I might actually go back to reddit for a bit hahahaha

Only if it shows John Oliver looking sexy while marrying a cabbage :-)

And then people will go check it out.

Ironic engagement is still engagement.

I personally think the best "maliciouscompliance" act mods can do in the long term is to switch up all the subs.

So technology will be used for gardening, gardening will be used for android, android will be used for coffee, coffee used for pcgaming, etc. It'll make everything really confusing for new users and help slow their growth.

No this all seems too clever by half and is just putting more eyes on Reddit. People are drawn to drama. If mods were serious, they’d delete or pull all of their custom plug ins and delete their accounts. Let Reddit have the subs. Unfortunately a huge number of mods won’t actually endanger their positions, which means Reddit corporate has the ultimate leverage in the end. Just go. I respect the mods who have left. If more of them did it would leave a true void.

Image being Reddit corporate and waking up tomorrow and 5000 subreddits were open but all the mods and their mods tools were gone. No big dramatic pranks or drama from the mods, just a classy exit.

i agree. this is kind of a temper tantrum coming from the mods that will result in more eyes on reddit... the only way to win, is to not play.

How about sexy John Oliver promoting Lemmy? Make reddit delete the post instead of the mods.

The problem with that is, someone else who doesn't care about the issues would take over as mod, and the sub would go on more of less normally. This way, it will eventually kill the sub without trying to delete it or take it private (both things Reddit can undo).

Is this real?! What episode is it from!

yes, it's real. it's from the episode on coal from june 2017: https://youtu.be/aw6RsUhw1Q8?t=1443

Ah, probably my favourite episode! I've never been a big fan of john oliver purely because I find him aggressively unfunny, but showing everyone the ridiculous cease and desist letter with "Let us neither cease, nor desist" is amazing.

It's edited

no, it's actually not edited. that exact frame appears at 23:03 in the episode on coal from june 2017: https://youtu.be/aw6RsUhw1Q8?t=1443

Update on the vote results, for people who don't want to go there:

  • Pro John Oliver: 61.7k

  • Return to normal: -13.7k.

I like the malicious compliance but I find that to be a bad way to do a poll. Better would have been one comment with the text "Upvote if you want John Oliver pics, downvote if you want it to go back to normal".

The way they did it if one group only upvote their alternative and the other also downvotes the opponent then the result isn't representative. Or at least could be claimed not to be.

It would exacerbate the swing but wouldn't change the result

And I don't think maliciously compliant mod is interested in statistical representation.

I agree with you, it would legitimate the results though. Not that I believe that Reddit cares about that either.

Let's assume that everyone who upvoted their option also downvoted the alternative.

The group A, has |A| number of individuals. Group B has |B| number.

Option A: |A| - |B|
Option B: |B| - |A|

Option A = |A| - |B| 
         = -(-(|A| - |B|))
         = -(|B| - |A|)
         = -Option B

The results would be opposites of each other and would highlight the opinion of the majority anyway.

you can't both upvote and downvote the same item. the last option you selected is the only one that's counted at any given moment.

edit: wait, i see. if they're separate comments, you could just upvote the comment you like and downvote the comment you don't. i was assuming one comment that said upvote or downvote.

Spez really should have read r/maliciouscompliance a bit before he bit off more than he could chew

Spez is peak r/choosingbeggars wanting free work to be done but oh, not with your own tools that actually work, no you need the ones that are inside his Basement for the last 10 years and barely work at all.

That's how billionaires make their money isn't it? Get everyone to pay them while they themselves pay others as little as possible.

That's a classic reddit moment. There's such a good community on that website, it's tragic that reddit wants to use that against itself.

These kind of protest won't reduce the traffic on the platform though. They might even gain traction and increase it. If it's not linked to reduced ad revenue, I'm afraid it's counter-productive.

I think it will reduce traffic at some point, when the lurkers are getting tired of John Oliver pics

who the fuck could ever get tired of that? idiots and losers that's who.

the odds are stacked against the mods and the users, but any little bit of resistance is useful.

Look at the alternatives. It's either this kind of protest, or returning to normal operations or losing their sub.

Yeah they should've gone with something even more specific - like pictures of Joe Biden eating ham sandwiches. Something with limited content options so that the sub is essentially forced to become inactive.

I think their way was better. It lets the giant number of subscribers have fun and engage, while also screwing the Reddit execs. They'll eventually get bored and it will be the same result.

This is actually the reason I'm here on Lemmy now. I love John Oliver but with all the other dark subreddits it was a bit much, and already had been looking into it. Led to Lemmy by too much sexy John Oliver.

like porn, sexy John Oliver pics are the gateway to Satan.

On my way to post sexy feet pics because nobody's seen John Oliver's sexy feet, or have they...

4 more...
4 more...

"I want to see a sexy picture of John Oliver." "We have a sexy picture of John Oliver at home." Sexy picture of John Oliver at home: Adam Driver

Hey now, that’s Adam Driver slander

The only rational way to be upset would be if you were dead set on the steamy John Oliver exposure! I just had to do a role-reversal of John and the man whose foot was on his neck for over a season, daddy Driver.

4 more...

Glorious :) I hope John Oliver picks this up in his show...

the writers are still on strike. don't know where they are in the negotiation process.

Can't wait for that first episode after the strike though. It's going to be glorious, I just know it!

Can't wait for that first episode after the strike though. It's going to be glorious, I just know it!

This may be the best highlight of spez incompetence 🍿 For everyone talking smack on the moderators, this is exactly what they should be doing. Malicious compliance. Make it hard for Reddit to know what is going on. Love to see it.

Glad you posted this - its the epitome of malicious compliance! And a fantastic form of protest too. With Reddit admins threatening to demote mods unless they re-open subreddits, this move takes away that ammo. Additionally, after the initial boost in activity due to novelty, the sub will get stale quickly and users will think of migrating to other platforms like lemmy or kbin. I'm all for it!

Edit: This is what I'm talking about. Here is one of those Reddit refugees now!

https://lemmy.world/comment/273363

Welcome, @exixx@lemmy.world!

Thanks! It still feels weird, I had my account for a long time and have a fair amount of karma, but the site has been going to shit for a while and enough is enough. This feels like the very early web or fidonet and I’m stoked to be here.

Has John Oliver already had an episode about spez's enshittifying of reddit? Because if not, I guess this is one way to make him at least mention it on Last Week Tonight. xD

Unfortunately, no new LWT episodes until the Writer's Strike is settled...

That's probably the goal.

Why John Oliver and noone else though?

Last Week Tonight is mainly known for taking deep dives into things people ought to be more concerned about, whereas most other late-night shows tend to focus on politics and pop culture stuff.

I'd argue that what John Oliver does is more legitimately political than the "focus on politics" horse-race bullshit the other shows have.

Looks like a few other subs have joined. r/gifs and r/art did the same poll

I've never been so happy to browse old.reddit /r/pics with an ad-blocker on.

fucking lol!!!! big ol thumb to the eye of the High SlimeLord himself, /u/spez

spez can go suck a bag of musk dicks.

Musk is such a good flavour though... I used to buy a buck's worth of musk sticks for the train ride home... don't debase musk flavour for that sad ween

Incredible move. But I doubt it'll last. Reddit is going to became 9gag and iFunny very soon. Rest in peace old reddit. It was fun while it lasted.

The point is to hit reddit where it hurts - ad revenue. There will be a slight spike in interests as people laugh, then the lack of original content will cause people to be bored. New subreddits will have to be created and built from the ground up. Moderating a subreddit with 40m subscribers is hard.

Spez needs to realize that going to war with the users is a dumb move.

He will not realize that, because he wants money and he'll get it. On the one hand, Reddit was fun. On the other hand, it's archaic for the reasons we're experiencing right now. Progress.

Spez is thick as fuck but reddit will likely IPO and be just fine, this was a battle that didn't need to be fought.

Spez is a bad leader and his goals lie contrary to reddit's mission statement.

I left last time, I think it was the Victoria thing, and I joined Voat and that quickly went to shit. Reddit will get what they want from this which is more mainstream use.

I would argue that this whole thing will delay or devalue the IPO. Institual investors will look at this rather public fight and question his leadership. And the whole attempt at damage control makes him look bad. The only investors that will look past this fiasco are those who are doing the long play, and even then, they likely won't want Spez involved.

From a risk perspective, Reddit has just highlighted it's biggest risk: the volunteer moderators. The only way Spez will be able to fix that is to replace moderators with AI or paid moderation teams. At an estimated value of $3.4M, and a company that is not profitable, that increases the risk in terms of the business model.

In general, social media is inherently flawed for profits. The path to monetization is ads and data, and the fact that Spez is now squeezing the users make me think that the value of the data and the ads is not producing the returns to compensate for dumb ideas like the NFT project.

I visited 9gag last week for the firdt time in maybe 8 years...wow the boomer humour and aggressive bigotry rivals Facebook

Wow you ain't kidding! Its White nationalist this, and White nationalist that! They're going to replace us! /s

What a fantastic, creative and constructive reaction. Respect for the mods!

This is brilliant! I had just took a look at /r/pics without logging in and can see its just now filled with John Oliver pics

I haven't laughed this hard in so long. The malicious compliance is epic. John Oliver can't buy PR like this, and he has got to be one of the few people that can appreciate being the face of something like this.

/r/gifs currently is following suit! If you still have a reddit account go vote ASAP! (Also unsubscribe from all your "business as usual" subs as possible, immediately, if you can't delete your account immediately for whatever reason)

/r/showerthoughts is also doing something similar.

Took a peek and it doesn't look like there's any recent posts on /r/gifs ? Like, sort by new and everything other that 5 reddit is killing itself posts is at least 19 days old. What's up with that?

you probably were on /r/gif instead of /r/gifs

It might be a problem on your end. I'm looking at sub and I see posts of John Oliver.

I see it too! This is the best form of protest ever.

oh my god i love this. it would be a shame if all other subs followed suit...

Quite a few subs had polls today for how to run, one of them was r/showerthoughts voting on which days to be open and had a comment for each day for the next week for open and each day for the next week for closed and it was unanimous of (exactly equal numbers) all upvoted days closed and all downvoted days open.

I love this kind of justified pettiness. I am pretty petty myself, and its something that I guess is a supposed bad quality, but it can be so much fun.

Omg I really hope some of those pictures make it over here.

You have the power to create the first lemmy community for this purpose.

Get thee behind me Satan. It's 3 am, I have insomnia and I might just be sleep deprived enough to do it. 😂

maybe we need a johnoliverpics community...

This is the spirit. Might as well have fun protesting if you're not giving up just yet.

Both are bad choices. When reddit says open /r/pics or else, you just delete /r/pics.

Reddit has NEVER been profitable. It's the classic:

  1. Takes a bunch of venture capital funding
  2. Builds a huge user base
  3. Get bought
  4. Parent company tries to figure out a way to make money off of you.
  5. When they can't, they try to spin you off and IPO you.
  6. You have your "oh shit" moment and realize you actually have to be profitable now.

This is the crap that caused the dot-com bubble in the late 90s.

Their current business model is unsustainable.

They're doing the API war out of sheer survival.

The sad part is, we all went along for the ride, using the service and filling it with useful information, never wondering if it was still going to be there a decade or two later.

Reddit wants to IPO. Having gone through the IPO process twice now with a company, I can tell you, the only thing that matters is money in the bank. The more money you have in the bank, the more you can charge for your IPO. When I worked at CompUSA back in the 90s, we didn't pay any of our creditors for something like 6 months before the IPO to swell the bank accounts. I remember the week before the IPO, we had almost nothing in the store, because we owed everyone money. 30 days after IPO, trucks came rolling in again with product.

You can't delete r/pics, they would just restore it.

This unfortunately is the truth, at the end of the day they will just find new moderators who wont be acting for the users or at least the majority. I'm a mod and although I want this to work and it may still have some impact realistically mods are powerless. Only users talking with their feet can really make a long term difference and there isn't a like for like replacement yet..

All these antics can help get people bored with the site though.

Really we don't want to force users off, we want users to want to leave because of how reddit treats it's free labour and content or for reddit to actually work with the subs it's demonizing

Both are bad choices. When reddit says open /r/pics or else, you just delete /r/pics.

Hard disagree with your first sentence. As @Starmina@lemm.ee explained, Reddit would just force re-open it.

And as explained in my comment, this is causing Reddit users to switch over to Lemmy due to the protesting subs getting stale: https://lemmy.world/comment/289241>

Wow, I totally forgot about CompUSA. I used to love going there as a kid, back when Apple had that underdog appeal. Now I'm a FOSS maxi (just don't look at my iPhone...).

They're doing the API war out of sheer survival.

That would be true if they made i fees reasonable or at least gave more time. This change caused mobile apps to shut down. The revenue from that is $0.

This change sucks. But, from what I read, Reddit have NEVER been profitable. If they were smart, they would modified the API so it included ads. I don't think Reddit is long for this world. Even if these protests were effective, reddit is eventually going away. They're too big to make a profit now.

When you say "NEVER been profitable" is there a reliable source for that or is it spez?

Hosting a link agregator is cheap, it is purely just text. Yes they now host images and videos, and I think they shouldn't do that if the cost is a problem, also they could always discontinue it.

Going back to the API. If they really need cash they could work with developers. They could reduce the fees and give 3 months heads up like they have been asked.

The whole spectacle didn't sound "we need money to survive", it sounded like "we could make more money from users by forcing them to switch to our crappy app, by shutting down 3rd party apps"

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4477033-reddit-unprofitable-despite-growth

Nevertheless, like many IPOs, Reddit remains unprofitable. The question for investors is whether Reddit can achieve minimum viable economies of scale and achieve profitability. So far, there are no indications that this will happen.

There are few other sources that say reddit is unprofitale.

What I'm saying is that their core service doesn't cost much to run. They could have small team to run everything and would make a lot of money, but their goal is to make it a billion dollar business, when it is not.

BTW: I also find the article funny, on one bad it says they are seeking $15 billion valuation, then it says it doesn't generate money. So that creates a question, how come a company that doesn't generate a profit costs $15 billion?

That happens all the time with publicly traded companies. This is the reason why we had the dotcom bubble burst in the last 1990s.

Definitely allowed. For now, anything that fits in the spirit of malicious compliance is fair game, it doesn't have to be text only too.

Amazing work as always! Though I did have to check it out kind of defeating the purpose of the protest. I think the best way to achieve what they want is to just do a really shitty job in moderating. Let the entire site be over-run with scams / crypto bros / nazis.

It already is, /r/all used to be current and now it's just a constant stream of spam posts.

You should be able to block a webpage and all users that share it. Relay For Reddit has a feature where you can select "other conversations" and see all the posts of a specific link. If I could then block everyone who posted a shitty "Elon runs an ETH competition" post... There'd still be a millions others.

Nazis everywhere, Spez left #the_donald alone to grow in scope. Fuck Spez

It already is, /r/all used to be current and now it’s just a constant stream of spam posts.

and that's the whole point of this!

And this will become the same if it catches on, either it will die slowly or remain very niche or it will be victim to the same shit as reddit.

Reddit was astroturfed and spammed and that doesn't seem like something the fediverse can fight any better.

This is the way, we did it... - u/spez

Genius! I wish every other sub did this.

some others are - check out /r/gifs and /r/showerthoughts

Hahaha I hope this catches on, it's funny as hell

The people has spoken. I love democracy

I am now desperately sad that the Writer's Guild strike is still on, because I'd love to see John Oliver's response to this. Particularly the bit where they added in something like, "This means that almost every image of John Oliver is permitted, because John Oliver is always sexy".

is Last Week Tonight still airing with the writer's strike going on? I watch it sometimes but don't keep up with the schedules.

didn't spez want democracy? He said he was going to allow people to vote out mods lol. You want democracy, you get it!

Malicious compliance from both the mods and the users! I dust off my account to upvote it.

This is great. Tomorrow I'll see what I can do with stable diffusion.

I think their rules specifically say no AI pics.

I think that was before this John Oliver thing. Since the subreddit rule also says no screenshots, but the post even says screenshots of him are fine. So we'll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the only rule that matters now is John Oliver only.

Sexy pics of John Oliver is better than 90% of the stuff posted there anyways. Glad to see them sticking it to Reddit, though.

I hope all the subs have a variation on this.

Hope in one bucket and shit in the other.

Let me know which one fills up first.

That being said: fuck /u/spez

Why a variation? What's wrong with sexy John Oliver?

Nothing. Are you saying there is something wrong with badass John Oliver? Or with evil John Oliver? Stop typecasting him. He is more than just his sexy looks!

Fantastic! Really good idea from the mod team.

I can’t see what they did, my browser says it can’t establish connection to the server. Sounds like reddit admins took whatever it was down?

This is just hilariously amazing

Is Reddit having issues again right now? I can’t load the site properly in the last 5 mins

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. Absolutely brilliant.

I don't think this is a good idea. The point of the blackout is to hit Reddit where it hurts, by driving traffic down. This prank (partially) reverses the work of the blackout, by getting people back to the pics subreddit to post and see (John Oliver) pics. It turns the blackout into a joke. And I think is a step towards the community just moving on from the blackout without it actually having the long term effects that were intended.

I'm all for malicious compliance, but I think this is the wrong flavor of it.

Nah I disagree. Turning things less serious is not necessarily a bad thing. People will visit to check it out but long term it will get stale and die off.

When it gets stale then they'll have to decide whether to move on from the protest and go back to normal or continue in some other fashion. I think once the current "news cycle" is over they'll just go back to normal, but perhaps with 3PA shutting down in a couple weeks, they'll get a boost in spirit and keep it going.

I disagree, while driving traffic down is one way, filling the website with garbage is another way! Who wants to use a site full of nothing but sexy john oliver?

..wait. Bad example.

Who wants to use a site full of nothing but sexy john oliver?

Bout to say. Who wouldn't want to use a site full of nothing but sexy John Oliver?

This is essentially my problem with this plan, lol. It's content people want to interact with, meaning it's counterproductive to the blackout.

Short term it's going to increase traffic, which also increases awareness of the issue at hand. Long term it will become stale and reduce traffic. Both are good things for the mods to do and it forces spez to eat his words should he choose to retaliate further. This was a choice the community voted on.

Well, it'll put Reddit in an odd place. Spez in particular has cited the Moderator Code as a justification to remove mods and instate his own.

THAT would be worse, since then instead of any blackout at all it's business as usual (while being slowly crippled from bad moderation and decaying user behaviours).

The John Oliver thing is an alternative to THAT. They are technically doing what the users want, which was Reddit's whole ammunition against them. Closing a sub of millions of people could be said as harming the site significantly enough that reddit steps in. Opening it and maliciously complying with the rules IS what the users want, so Spez will be hard pressed the wrest control of the sub while simultaneously saying he supports the protests in line with the Code.

THAT would be worse, since then instead of any blackout at all it’s business as usual (while being slowly crippled from bad moderation and decaying user behaviours).

I view that as the next step in this protest: proving to Reddit that the previous relationship Reddit had with its organically grown volunteer moderation system is (was) quintessential to what made Reddit good. If instead Reddit thrives in a context where those moderators are simply replaced with Reddit stooges, then I guess we'd be proven wrong, about whether this protest mattered at all. Either way, the outcome will act as a transparent display of what Reddit's true value is, which I think is a useful thing for everyone to know.

Yes but all the blackout really achieved was replacing the normal top content with content from subs that didn't blackout.

A blackout prevents action. It prevents the usefulness.

A satiric malicious compliance focus does not categorically prevent activity, but does prevent general activity. It prevents the usefulness and value of the subreddit too.

When you are at risk of losing the blackout by losing control of the subreddit. it's the only thing you can do. It's the next best and next most effective thing.

I gotta go back to Reddit now. Haven’t been on /r/pics for years.

You have confirmed my words. Moderators consider themselves "nobility" who have the right to make decisions for the rest of the cattle. That was the point of the "protest.

The "cattle" were asked if they wanted to resume business as usual. They overwhelmingly voted no.

I have no idea how you can come to this conclusion. It stands directly opposite to the text.

They made a vote. And acted upon it. How is that "making decisions for others"?