So far Spez's legacy includes, in no particular order:
Changing other peoples' comments
Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn't nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn't agree with
Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you're taking it all away from them. I'm sure this won't backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Never even heard about this. Why haven't they been sued by the surviving family members or some pro-bono representative?
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Wow I didn't know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made 'subreddit of the month'. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I'm not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
Andrewsmith is right,
As he often is. That guy knows more about Reddit than Huffman does. Hope he moves to Lemmy.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don't agree with them politically, but it's still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can't let other peoples' rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah he changed one comment saying: "Fuck u/spez" by replacing "spez" with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
Yeah, he got busted for it and wrote a half asked apology claiming he would change. Claimed he was just trolling...
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Yes, its even listed on the Wiki page for reddit under 2016 controversies
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
He was briefly added without his knowledge. He removed himself after he noticed.
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
This one is a lie, he was added as a moderator by another mod, at a time when anyone could do so. Lets please stop spreading this.
Maybe he did not moderate it actively, but it was allowed to continue and even promoted by reddit until media got a whiff of it.
Honestly not too surprising. But good luck moderating the bigger subs without the old volunteers.
It's an absolute non-starter. The amount of random... I'm a medium fish there and there's SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you're constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you're gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Good summarization. And I am sure it WILL explode if they dont start paying serious mods serious money for something that was done FOR FREE by the community before. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It's ironic, too, because their entire refrain is "we're broke". Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you're broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.
Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You'd think that woulda been step 1 to fix.
Right? I'd have talked to OpenAi and told them the situation. OpenAI can probably afford ANY api fee by now so that would've been the most logical first step.
Well whatever, reddit needs me more than I need reddit so I'll stay here for now. I like it here :)
I'll like it better here when I can set up all my retro gaming communities again, but yeah. Same as when the twitter thing happened and we went to mastodon. Community is much better for being smaller, and full of the kind of people who seek something like this out.
Maybe I'm missing something but is there a reason they couldn't have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn't like it, this would still be a better posture than now.
The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I'm just a guy.
I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It's funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It's just corporate accounting. They're profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being "unprofitable". This is why amazon is still occasionally "unprofitable" even though they're growing year over year. You can't just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you're actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit's API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there's a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I'd bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman's net worth.
I was invited to become a mod on r/daystrominstitute a few years ago and within about a month realized that I didn’t have the time or emotional capital to invest in that job. It’s challenging, especially in a sub like that where there are pretty serious rules governing discussion and it burned me out really fast. The people who do it (well) have a passion for it; plucking some rando to be a head mod is going to kill a sub.
Everybody knows that it was bound to happen. Reddit is hopeless and the blackout on its own won't do good in the long run.
That's why I'm trying to kick this out:
If you're EU you can All those in EU can ask reddit for the entirety of your data as a GDPR request, much easier than downloading it yourself, especially since some apps have limits to how many posts they can fetch.
Asked for mine last week and still hasn't arrived, but I've been an active user for 17 years so yeah, might be taking a while to get those tape backups from the basement or something :P
Poor intern is in the basement writing it all down with a quill and ink. Expect the pony to arrive with your parcel in 10-14 months.
They say it can take up to 30 days, so I think you have a bit more waiting to do :D
No, no. They say it can take up to 30 days, yes.
But that’s not the correct wording. It legally needs to be done under 30 days (well, one calendar month), if you’re a EU citizen.
If they do not, I highly encourage you to contact your country’s data regulator and complain about it.
Oooh, thanks for the clarification! It wasn't clear to me it was a legal constraint.
I haven't submit mine yet, I was waiting for the blackout to end, but I'll sure check my calendar and report to my data regulator if they don't comply.
p.s. yes I'm a EU citizen
Well, just a heads up, I might have wrote total bullshit (sorry about that!).
I tried to find a reference to the “one calendar month” rule in the EU’s legalese, but I didn’t find anything.
What I found is that depending on your country, the data regulator might require services to give you your data in 30 days or less, but this might not be the case everywhere in the EU. The relevant legal article for this can be found here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
I am not a lawyer anyway, so your best bet would be to message an organization that fights for personal data protection to ask them about your rights in your home country.
Sorry about the confusion once again, as I might have been wrong!
I did this back when the Apollo shutting down post when out from Christian. It took a bit of googling to find out how to do this so thanks for putting it all together for others. I had 10 accounts spanning all my time on Reddit since the Digg days and did a fully scorched earth on it all, because you know, fuck u/spez.
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way I’m going back.
The experience has been a lot smoother than I expected.
Agreed. Feels like reddit but 15 years ago, before the dark times, before the Empire -
Loving it so far, and reminds me of how the internet used to be this huge frontier before Corporations, Shareholders, and Advertisers moved in and ruined everything.
These Communities are smaller and some of the more niche groups aren't here yet but that will change with time. Give it a year or two, and I'm sure those obscure, hilarious groups like Greendawn will migrate over, over.
It's funny how relaxing Lemmy feels. It's like I've been the frog in the slowly heating pot over the years and had no idea how harsh Reddit had become. Right now Lemmy feels like I thought Reddit has always been. But the idea of Reddit now feels so ugly. It's the same feeling as getting away from bumper to bumper traffic and finally being able to set the cruise control and enjoy the ride.
That's my hope for the Fediverse. We'll get that frontier feel back while also having the giant easy-access network we've come to appreciate in the 10's and 20's (over).
Super smooth. Just need the content levels to pick up a bit but that will improve over time as more people catch on
I was talking about this with a friend - reddit doesn't have many unique features that folks want, and generally speaking the only thing reddit has of value is the community.
I think that anyone who's been around reddit long enough knew this was coming. Reddit isn't a free and open platform, and never was. The admins allowed moderators free reign just so long as they didn't do anything that reddit didn't want.
This wouldn’t be a proper Reddit replacement if an anonymous user didn’t take the time out of his day to type that “free rein” was the correct spelling here
Well damnit you are right - in both that it's not proper reddit replacement without grammar nazis, and that "free rein" is the usual term. It could be argued that reign also works in this case because some moderators seemed to be under the impression that they were unchallenged kings within their subreddit kingdoms.
It is?? I've been typing it wrong my whole life.
I'm still writing 'reign' though.
I think "reign" is like "rule". - A king reigns over his people.
"Rein" is the thing that horse cart drivers use to control the horses. So the rope that goes from horses mouth to drivers hand. You can either "rein (in) the horses" for them to do something, or you can let them "free rein", meaning they can run as they please.
I always imagined it like a king being able to freely reign over his people - so that he can freely do whatever he wants in terms of governing them.
This is why they need to link an alternative like Lemmy and encourage to share it around.
Reddit doesn't disallow mods from posting "Join us on Discord" and this will create a slow and steady move to a new platform.
I've been posting about lemmy in r/modtools and a couple of the niche subreddits I follow that didn't shut down.
I'll be sticking with lemmy no matter what happens over at reddit, the people in charge over there have shown utter contempt for the users and moderators.
I was skeptical at first. Decided to give it a shot and, while obviously not perfect, I like it a lot so far.
I think my biggest issue before is actually a feature rather than a bug. I used to think, "federation is too confusing for the average person, it'll never take off".
But considering how hostile the average comment is on Reddit, keeping the "average" user away might be the best thing about Lemmy.
While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It's cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it's too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn't shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.
It's still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we're ultimately going to "need" an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.
The idea behind this place is pretty cool but I'm with you. Neither this place, nor are the users, ready for migration "today" to flip from Reddit to this experience.
It actually takes effort to understand what to do here. I deal with idiots at work all day, the first hint of effort or difficulty with anything, especially entertainment, people will walk.
It's like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I'll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.
Sadly, many people I have recommended it to have acted like it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. The initial learning curve really wasn't that bad, IMO but it seems like a lot of people want to be spoon fed.
It doesn't matter that it's not that bad, just that it's harder than staying on reddit.
This post seems somewhat disingenuous. One of the mods Cedarwolf posted his side of what happened 2 hours prior to this post appearing, and if we were to believe his side of the story the top mod who hasn't been active for a year just decided to join the blackout against other mods wishes.
Yes, it's two conflicting stories but he claims to have evidence that he's been inactive. Basically, people should look into this more than assume truth in the headline.
Both /r/tumblr and /r/AdviceAnimals had shaky mod teams. Even though I completely disagree with the admins on everything else this made perfect sense. Plus out of the 8k subs that blacked out only 2 had admins intervene which makes me think it really was just mods fighting and the admins stepping in.
def link and ill put it in the body, i just posted it as i ran across it this am
I'm in a number of subs with an inactive top mod who can't be removed because they threaten to demod people from larger communities where they also hold high up inactive positions...
I just returned for a couple of minutes and it’s a fucking shitshow. I don’t know if it has become worse or if it just feels like that because Lemmy is much more friendly, but Reddit seems to be much more toxic right now.
It is also so obvious that people are trying to use this as some kind of coup. Users interact with the thematic, get explained what the blackout is about, just to comment complete bs about it one comment later. They are acting dumb to gain momentum.
I really hope this will end up in a worldpolitics situation.
There seems to be a correlation between civility and willingness to put up with spez. If you're willing to put up with all the bs he's been spewing since this started, you're less civil. All the respectful people came here, or are finding other replacements. People who don't care stayed, and it shows.
Makes a lot of sense. Its a fun y microcosm for this kind of conservative attitude that is permeating through society. "No, change is scary and we will not only be against it, but will also be actively hostile towards it."
oh its def toxic, there are certain types running rampant and some people get VERY grumpy when deprived of thier volunteer curated entertainment feeds.
I had the same observations as well! Not sure if it's just my confirmation bias, but it does seem like reddit feels a lot more toxic right now. I feel like it really is compounded by how relatively welcoming lemmy has been for refugees recently, alongside it still being fresh. I feel like I can be more open here as well, and many others probably do so too.
I noticed that too. Like a lot of people are upset that users would mess with a company. r/JoeRogan is much more toxic than usual like a flood gate opened
Joe Rogan has always been toxic, its the alt right with a wig
Straight up, all the good subs locked themselves and all of the reasonable people walked away.
Twitter just did the same thing. Spez said he wasn't gonna mimic twitter and then fully mimicked twitter.
They should tread lightly. Reddit in no way has the ability to function (edit: at least on short notice) without volunteer mods. To some degree they can find scabs, but I honestly don't know how many and how good.
It's destined to become like Twitter, overrun by far-right assholes and lacking quality content. The mods who kept the worst of them off the subs will be gone, and the people who produced the best content will leave as the dregs take over.
That's entirely possible, although last I checked Twitter is only on it's way there.
Yeah, are they going to try to mod all the subs by themselves now? That's not going to work out really well. Either there will be no moderation and everything will be trash, or they'll have to hire people as moderators, which will cut into the profits they're trying to show.
They're trying to bully people to behave how they want, and I hope it fails badly. But I'm still waiting for people to stop using twitter...
or they’ll have to hire people as moderators, which will cut into the profits they’re trying to show.
How many, on what timeline? They could go to this model eventually if they wanted, but with little to no notice it's tough. (I also foresee niche subreddits becoming frustrating to use when the generic full-time moderators don't understand them, and who knows how NSFW subreddits would work)
I have hope it's different from Twitter, because there's a party with leverage that's fundamentally different from mindless scrollers. Not to mention I'm liking the alternative I've tried very much.
I'll watch spez digg this grave. I'm not shocked, we have all seen it happen before.
This place feels real, and personally that's all that matters. Reddit has been plastic for a while now. I'm happy to watch the ceo handle it like such a stooge, it almost seems like he wants to tank the company before tencent eats it all up.
I'm with you!
Also digg, nice one!
Maybe he is in bed with Elon musk, trying to tank the initial price of the stocks so musk can buy the majority of reddit as well...
i love that they're making this extreme choice over fucking advice animals which haven't been relevant in literally 10+years
Saw this coming the moment the blackouts were being planned
Wait...the comment seems to indicate that the primary mod did not want to go dark, and an inactive mod came in and made it go dark. I understand being upset...but this does not seem like anything a Reddit admin would do?
Yep. The idea that Reddit Admin did this to nullify the blackout was suspect from the start. Why would it only be on r/AdviceAnimals? Lol
People are mad at Reddit right now and we're looking for any reason to confirm their bias and run away with their narrative.
From what I saw the lower mod probably contacted the admins to make this happen by claiming that the inactive head mod went against the wishes of the community.
It's happened before to other subs like /r/wow but back then it was a positive move to circumvent a man child making the sub private over an expansion release that didn't go so well because he couldn't log in and play the game. A lesser mod was made head and the original head striped of his position and all was made right again.
In this case it appears that the community overwhelmingly supported the blackout and move to go private instead. The mod that took over was the only loud voice against the blackout.
The Reddit admins indicated in a modsupport thread that they would help any mods who didn't want their sub to go dark to take over from other mods.
yeah, i have no clue whats going on with that but i would not put anything past the admins anyway, years of broken promises, im going back to the way the internet was meant to work, central services for communication is a prevision of the network.
Well good for them, they can have a lot of fun paying reddit staff to be the mods now.
In all fairness, that's how Twitter did things from what I can understand.
Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.
I'm sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?
If they think that their API costs were high imagine how expensive paid moderation is.
Pretty sure spez said it wasn't the cost of running or maintaining the API that was the problem, but the opportunity cost of having users on third party apps. At least, that's what I cleaned from Christian Selig's post.
But man is he beating around the bush about that. Sprinkling "but Apollo won't play ball :(" to shift the blame. Fuck Spez.
It is all about the data collection that they are missing from people using 3rd party apps.
That and reddit is a goldmine for training llm's. It's a perfect shitstorm.
It isn't surprising at all, it's about hard money not about communities and fuzzy warm feelings. It seems everyone is working hard down at Reddit to make as much money as they can out of an IPO for a zombified carcass.
yes it is about hard money, it always is at its core, and what you are seeing is a natural reaction of a failure in valuation of a part of the operation.
this has happened before, reddit admins think "they" are the equity, when in reality its the subs, thier content and those operators that are the equity.
Some of these structural changes are in an attempt to "fix" that, the site is turning toward devaluing content posted in threads over things that keep you scrolling and clicking.
Its always been a slow hostile takeover for the better part of the last decade, anyone whose been around expected this day to come eventually.
This is extremely short-sighted on reddits part, elevating lower mods to leads can cause so much drama in a community particularly when the lower mods don't have experience, the lower mods will probably make basic mistakes that'll turn the average base away from the subreddit.
this is really going to bite reddit in the ass if they try it more its like trying to fix a leak by sticking random objects in the hole
This plays out like things I've seen in real life:
Get a community/club/church/workplace going with a good set of leaders.
The system becomes unwieldy through bureaucracy, excessive rules, whatever.
Leadership can't change it, so they storm off in a huff after nobody listens to them.
Power-mongering Assistant to the Regional Manager takes their shot to run the show.
It was a matter of time before the admins started doing this. Fuck Spez, you piece of shit
Ayy, fuck /u/spez
Lemmy should make itself as much like Reddit as it possibly can except for the small handful of money-grubbing cunts who'd rather destroy communities than allow them to exist without profiting from them.
And the insane amount of astroturfing!
The way things are going R*ddit is going to become what Digg is today - a minimalist editor run link agreggator
lmao, good fuckin luck replacing dedicated volunteers with one or two shitty ones obsessed with power
Don't worry, the mods will be paid now. Just by the NRA, Walmart and Russia.
Reddit is about to be run entirely by shills who will hop into mod spots.
I don't think it'll be that simple
There are sooooo many fuckin subs, and while I know there are small handfuls that oversee dozens and dozens, the niche ones that really help user retention will suffer.
Like, it's not the huge million+ subs that I'm missing, it's the smaller localized fandoms and obscure memory subs that I'm really missing.
lmfao no kidding. part of me is waiting to see the shitshow that happens to some subs without proper moderation. just the amount of bullshit thats gonna be submitted is gonna be intense. and the trolls, oh lord the trolls are gonna have a hayday with once properly moderated subs.
For example, /r/nba went dark for a Finals game - the final Finals game where a champion was crowned.
I'd love to see one or two lower-tier mods take over that sub. It'd become a complete pile of shit.
Gallowboob 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I haven't thought of that name since before COVID at least holy shit. Probably longer. What a throwback. Reddit used to be so different
People all over reddit have been bitching about supermods and the concentration of power forever. This is what reddit wants, this is the way they become filled with qultists. Easily manipulated, stupid, profitable, and valuable to the next billionaire who wants their own media outlet.
Have fun paying for moderation or have Spam running rampant. That won't get you out of the red numbers, spez. Just fuel for the fire.
There will always be someone willing to take over as mod and that is the problem
Yeah, there are 2 kinds of people that mod though. The ones who actively adore the community and subject matter, and the ones that just want power and prestige. People who would step up after a protest to fill a void that was forcefully created are GUARANTEED to be the latter.
Holy shit the amount of bootlickers in that comment thread makes me so happy to leave that place
Yeah, I'm a mod for a few subs that total about 800k people. 99% of them have been really nice, but dude. The ones who aren't REALLY aren't. You'd think I molested their cat or something, when in reality I let the users bring it up, then vote on it, then vote AGAIN to stay closed. It was overwhelming in all cases that we do this.
Sorry I listened to my users I guess, should I be like Spez and just do what I want? If so, it's closing anyway. Oops.
Do another vote to have anyone PMing vulgarities at the mods banned from the sub, or not.
Problem is, to do that I'd have to open reddit. I've done that exactly once, when I saw /r/gaming pop back up I went to their vote on going dark again and told them to do so.
You best believe we're gonna come out swinging if reddit pulls their heads out of their asses though. I get about 10-20 pms an hour of ban worthy material. This is gonna be fun. "Hey we're open again! Too bad you won't be invited."
Also probably a bit of servivorship bias at work here – the people who really dislike the change aren't on reddit to upvote/comment leaving the bootlickers to be the ones who do.
Well here is me abandoning reddit after 10 years. At the end they can do whatever they want with reddit and i can choose in which platform waste my time.
Same here after 11, they forget that the users create the value, they're only the middlemen.
They know users create the value but in order to turn that value into a form that makes investors happy they have to squeeze the users. It's like a digital Macquarie Island and we're all penguins.
Which is why I ran Power Delete Suite on my account on the way out. I created a lot of value and they apparently didn't appreciate that, so now it's all gone.
12 year user with 700k comment karma. Power washing my account by months end.
I'm quite happy here now. Given up on reddit. The day Apollo's API key is deleted is the day I edit all of my comments and give up on the platform completely. It's strange I how feel no regret over saying that. It's just the way it's going to be.
Same here. I've been a fly on the wall seeing the development of mlem progressing super fast, and we (I'm tangentially involved) are going to be releasing a big update soon that improves the GUI tremendously. You can go over to !mlemapp@lemmy.ml (or https://lemmy.world/c/mlemapp@lemmy.ml) to see what we're up to and to get the link to join the beta through TestFlight.
Yeah! I'll check it out. I use Jerboa in Android and it seems quite solid for such an early Stage of an App.
Just a heads up, the day that happens is probably when the services that will edit or delete your comments also run into API limitations. Might be better to get ahead of that change.
My understanding is that most scripts like the power delete one that I used use your own token as they are a JavaScript run in your browser. I don't believe that those would be considered API calls, but I could be wrong.
I'd probably recommend doing it before that - the day Apollo loses it's API key is the same day that all the scripts that will edit then delete your comments also die.
And I thought they wouldn't go any lower. It's disgusting how far they're willing to go - it's like they're so eager to prove us right.
I knew they were going to do this, but it's funny how fast it happened. The memo leak of the CEO to employees saying that "[this blackout] will pass" ups the comedy. Nothing like alienating your volunteer mods on your community-build website.
Mods should just reopen but refuse to moderate. Disable automod as well.
This is the way. Just remember what happened to /r/worldpolitics, the mods basically didn't want to moderate anymore and it became a shit show of spammers.
Crazy that /r/AnimeTitties came along to fill that void lol
I was going to say they should all turn into porn subs, but I think your way is easier and would likely have the same outcome anyway.
Reddit? Are they new? Never heard of it 🤣 Probably won't get very big
It'll just lead to a general decline in sub quality.
Yup. Driving away the mods by taking away the tools they need to moderate effectively means letting the site be overrun by low-effort shitposts and trolls, which in turn will drive away users who want at least a decent experience there. Considering how many awful people are there even with current moderation, I'm not sticking around to see what it starts festering into come next month.
It’s depressing that I’m not surprised one bit. At this point, I don’t even think it’s worth sticking around until 3PA shut down on the 30th.
Yeah, I'm out. I'm still learning this whole Lemmy thing, but it's scratching the same itch that Reddit did.
I think this killed reddit for me, even if they reverse their shit it's still the same company that desperately tried to push it in the first place. Only a matter of time before more of the things I liked about it are stripped away, might as well rip the band-aid off now.
bootlickers, inc.
So much for all the "oh, it's not hurting our revenue" dismissals.
Definitely called this. All the right wing trolls on Reddit are salivating at the thought of turning this into a coup by hopping into top mod spots in exchange for licking boot tread. The outcome is pretty obvious.
Keep the blackout going. Even if they boot mods and reopen subs, don’t visit. I wonder how much traffic/revenue they have lost so far.
They did the same thing to admins of other major subreddits even before the blackout. They also removed initial posts regarding it on major subreddits. Thats why I chose to leave.
Duuuuuude they didn't wait long did they? And they attack r/adviceanimals, one of the core subs, even though it isn't one of the defaults anymore.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Huffman brings back r/jailbait. The fucking dirty paedo.
Admins in /r/modsupport were breaking records last week to tell mods who had a dormant top mod come back and private the sub that they would “resolve the issue”. Then after saying that they didn’t do anything for a few days. Guess they are gonna start doing that to the big subs to reopen them.
That's insane. I honestly thought it was solely romours, like Spez editing messages on behalf of others (which I still don't believe in)
Edit: I believe it now though.
It happened live on Thanksgiving and he admitted to it shortly after. Believe it bud.
There's a verge article here talking about it. Unfortunately, the comment admitting it might be gone since it was in r/The_Donald. But yeah, it happened.
Fuck Reddit. But honestly I’m less and less invested with each passing day. I re-opened Apollo today and it’s already starting to feel old, foreign. I guess that means Lemmy is home now.
Same. Im already within more communities than i ever had subreddits. Theres simply more to talk about here imo. The platform just needs to grow a little bigger and well have the ultra-niche communities not be complete ghost towns. Cant wait!
It feels reassuring being here in Lemmy away of that shit show.
I'm just waiting for substitutes of my old groups to start populating instances here. I'll be deleting my reddit account probably before the end of the month when RIF goes offline.
Time to leave it all. They might not be taking over the small ones, but the writing is on the wall: this is not the place to host a community.
Yep, but it'll take some time to move the small ones in any meaningful form, unfortunately.
Why haven't more of the major subreddits, especially the ones doing long term indefinite blackouts, migrating their subs here?
I haven't touched the platform since the blackout started and couldn't be happier. I'm just dipping my toes in over here as a replacement and it's quite nice.
And of course the obligatory eff spez.
Anybody have a link to this post? I can't find it in the user's page.
Yup same. I've gone through their post history, and also the histories of mods listed on r/adviceanimals, and can't find this post or comment on this post. Huh.
I was looking at the reddit protest stream when it happened. Since it only says it reopened, i was a bit sad that such a huge sub would withdraw their desicion.
This makes more sense, and its awful.
Gee, what a surprise that everyone called last week. Of course Reddit admins are booting uncooperative mods in favor of those that will un-private their subs, they have zero reason to be loyal to mods protesting against them. And they're actively losing advertising revenue for each sub that's dark.
The real way to protest this is to delete your Reddit account and never look back. Monthly active users is the only statistic that will force them to backtrack on any of the API pricing changes, and loads of people that have moved to Lemmy are actively using both platforms.
A lot of these people volunteered their spare time to manage communities for no pay. Wondering how far downhill a lot of these subs will go with Spez putting himself in charge of everything.
they won't. Spez is learning how much of reddit's success has nothing to do with reddit itself. hopefully we have all learned from the messy and long experiment with letting corps control our gardens.
He's not learning anything LMAO
Corporations NEVER learn
His name is Steve Huffman, and he's a former mod of r/jailbait and as such a paedophile.
Biggie knew. Treat everything like it’s your first day because nothing is guaranteed.
Hey. Will you look at that. Any interest in reddit just disappeared. Gg spez.
At first I thought they chickened out, now somehow I am both relieved and extremely sad.
I figured this would happen
Off topic, who owns/runs the servers here and how does it make money? I'm new I'm curious.
The host of the instance owns/runs the server for any instance. There is no money to be made. The servers stay up because people donated or the instance owners paid for it.
Edit: the right way of saying it is.. the instances, at least the bigger ones, are crowd-funded.
I've been doing some reading. I love things that go back to the idea of old internet mentality.
Around ~180 euros a month for the server they were renting to run this Lemmy instance. Anybody can host though and any member of a Lemmy can see content and interconnect with other instances.
I was looking into potentially hosting my own Lemmy for my friends and I because the cost would be more manageable.
I'd imagine if people started doing that it would decentralize the costs and the administrative overhead.
similar to old usenet and fidonet, volunteers, there have always been people happy to help run hardware and help make the commons a thing. people were lured away from the gardens and parks by digital theme parks and shopping malls, where the users become customers.
people wonder "how can it possibly work"
email works great! same concept.
Love me some old internet. So basically were back to the cost of bandwidth for individuals who want to run a server.
Unfortunately, Reddit can just keep doing that as often as they want. Fortunately though, there are few people who will actually be able to do a good job moderating especially for FREE. They will burn through the good candidates and have to rely on unqualified people to do a mediocre job. This will ruin the content quality and eventually kill the sub. So long term we may still win, but short term we will likely see little change. The problem is always the level of involvement of the general public.
i imagine a lot of subreddits will have to deal with a loooot of spam and bullshit posts about nothing in the near future. i can't imagine anyone worthwhile that isn't just powertripping actually wanting to mod a large sub anymore. whats the point? you arent getting paid anything, and its not even on your terms. like wtf. fuck reddit man.
It's also timely that they are wanting to tank the website leading up to the US election. I know it's a long way away and I don't like conspiracy theories but Reddit was a hot bed for socially minded people to debate important issues ..... it was like the town square .... now they've paved over it, building a Starbucks/McDonald's outlet and telling people to go away and go talk somewhere else.
whoaaa thats a good conspiracy.
Are Reddit admins the sub owners or Reddit employees?
Admins are employees. The people running the subs are mods. There aren't even 1% of enough admins to moderate the subreddits, but there are enough to police the moderation stances of the large subs.
Admins are employees, sub owners are unpaid volunteers.
Reddit admins are Reddit employees.
Reddit moderators are (generally) not Reddit employees.
Regular users create the subreddits, but they all belong to Reddit.
I'm pretty sure the admins have installed mods before on subreddits where they didn't like the mod team. I think I remember people talking about it at one point, but I can't remember specifics, so I'm not entirely sure. (They do it for abandoned subs all the time, but that's different.)
I know over a decade ago when the IAmA subreddit creator was going to shut that subreddit down one of the admins said they'd take the subreddit over and put new mods in if he didn't change his mind. But at the time the admins weren't throwing their weight around like they would eventually, so it wasn't a consensus thing, just one admin talking.
So Orange is the New Blue huh?
OMG Who saw that coming! /s
What a DICK.
Apparently, a heck of a lost of drama involving this.
oh my god, what a turn of events. who would have thought?
This is huge! And should be shared far and wide!
This sort of crap is why a single company can't be in charge: sooner or later some CEO some board member or whatever decides to pull some crap like this and thinks accountability is not applicable because he said so. This is why federation is a must in this day and age.
This was inevitable, unfortunately.
Does that mean they're unmoderated now? r/worldpolotics here we come!
If someone were angry about what they're doing (not me, I've been through this so many times on so many sites that I'm apathetic) they could definitely put a coordinated effort into filling the subs that admins take over with anime titties to prove a point.
Actually I accidentally clicked a Reddit link on Google earlier today and (I don't remember the subreddit) my first thought was: I'm pretty sure this subreddit took part in the blackout so why can I see its posts like nothing happened?
Hang on, when I go to the Reddark website now a bunch of subreddits have gone from private to public. Is it because it's the 14th or because someone intervened with the protest?
Investors: "You took over a sub in concert with a user named u/PussyWhistle?"
I wonder if they saw a bunch of traffic trying to access advice animals and decided it was a good testing grounds for removing mods.
They did the same thing to admins of other major subreddits even before the blackout. They also removed initial posts regarding it on major subreddits.
It's a 2 day blackout for god's sake, and it's nearly at the end of it! Was it really necessary to do that?
shows how desperate they really are, honestly feeling like we should push for more communities to commit to longer. even just to the end of the week may create capitulation. not that ill go back!
@manitcor Wtf!! What an asshole CEO
So far Spez's legacy includes, in no particular order:
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you're taking it all away from them. I'm sure this won't backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Never even heard about this. Why haven't they been sued by the surviving family members or some pro-bono representative?
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Wow I didn't know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/comment/jnuy0xf/
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made 'subreddit of the month'. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I'm not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
As he often is. That guy knows more about Reddit than Huffman does. Hope he moves to Lemmy.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
Ahhh, ty. It did seem even worse than expected for him to have been actively running that sub.
He did not
Wait the guy changed someone's comment?
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don't agree with them politically, but it's still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can't let other peoples' rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah he changed one comment saying: "Fuck u/spez" by replacing "spez" with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
Yeah, he got busted for it and wrote a half asked apology claiming he would change. Claimed he was just trolling...
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Yes, its even listed on the Wiki page for reddit under 2016 controversies
Yea this will kill Reddit. Maybe not right away but soon.
I mean, look at what it's taking to kill twitter and influencers are still all over it.
Because it's actually not the same thing, "Twitter" = "influencers". Without celebrities, Twitter simply dies. The same cannot be said about Reddit.
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
He was briefly added without his knowledge. He removed himself after he noticed.
This one is a lie, he was added as a moderator by another mod, at a time when anyone could do so. Lets please stop spreading this.
Maybe he did not moderate it actively, but it was allowed to continue and even promoted by reddit until media got a whiff of it.
WAIT. Spez was a mod on fucking r/jailbait???? WHAT????
Honestly not too surprising. But good luck moderating the bigger subs without the old volunteers.
It's an absolute non-starter. The amount of random... I'm a medium fish there and there's SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you're constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you're gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Good summarization. And I am sure it WILL explode if they dont start paying serious mods serious money for something that was done FOR FREE by the community before. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It's ironic, too, because their entire refrain is "we're broke". Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you're broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.
Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You'd think that woulda been step 1 to fix.
Right? I'd have talked to OpenAi and told them the situation. OpenAI can probably afford ANY api fee by now so that would've been the most logical first step.
Well whatever, reddit needs me more than I need reddit so I'll stay here for now. I like it here :)
I'll like it better here when I can set up all my retro gaming communities again, but yeah. Same as when the twitter thing happened and we went to mastodon. Community is much better for being smaller, and full of the kind of people who seek something like this out.
Be the change you want to see and set it up!
Maybe I'm missing something but is there a reason they couldn't have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn't like it, this would still be a better posture than now.
The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I'm just a guy.
I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It's funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say "you must show our ads" and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don't even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it's quite common. But the price they're asking is completely absurd and doesn't scale appropriately. They also didn't give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I've said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn't understand reddit. Reddit's greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they've made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It's so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It's just corporate accounting. They're profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being "unprofitable". This is why amazon is still occasionally "unprofitable" even though they're growing year over year. You can't just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you're actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit's API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there's a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I'd bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman's net worth.
I was invited to become a mod on r/daystrominstitute a few years ago and within about a month realized that I didn’t have the time or emotional capital to invest in that job. It’s challenging, especially in a sub like that where there are pretty serious rules governing discussion and it burned me out really fast. The people who do it (well) have a passion for it; plucking some rando to be a head mod is going to kill a sub.
Looks like reddit is about to hire 1000 unpaid interns
Interns using chatgpt, we're gonna see such a firehose of shit
Imagine the seo blogspam grade comment threads it will turn into
Everybody knows that it was bound to happen. Reddit is hopeless and the blackout on its own won't do good in the long run.
That's why I'm trying to kick this out:
If you're EU you canAll those in EU can ask reddit for the entirety of your data as a GDPR request, much easier than downloading it yourself, especially since some apps have limits to how many posts they can fetch.How to request your reddit data
Asked for mine last week and still hasn't arrived, but I've been an active user for 17 years so yeah, might be taking a while to get those tape backups from the basement or something :P
Poor intern is in the basement writing it all down with a quill and ink. Expect the pony to arrive with your parcel in 10-14 months.
They say it can take up to 30 days, so I think you have a bit more waiting to do :D
No, no. They say it can take up to 30 days, yes.
But that’s not the correct wording. It legally needs to be done under 30 days (well, one calendar month), if you’re a EU citizen.
If they do not, I highly encourage you to contact your country’s data regulator and complain about it.
Oooh, thanks for the clarification! It wasn't clear to me it was a legal constraint.
I haven't submit mine yet, I was waiting for the blackout to end, but I'll sure check my calendar and report to my data regulator if they don't comply.
p.s. yes I'm a EU citizen
Well, just a heads up, I might have wrote total bullshit (sorry about that!).
I tried to find a reference to the “one calendar month” rule in the EU’s legalese, but I didn’t find anything.
What I found is that depending on your country, the data regulator might require services to give you your data in 30 days or less, but this might not be the case everywhere in the EU. The relevant legal article for this can be found here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
I am not a lawyer anyway, so your best bet would be to message an organization that fights for personal data protection to ask them about your rights in your home country.
Sorry about the confusion once again, as I might have been wrong!
I have a feeling they got a massive number of those,ni am one of them as well.
You don’t have to be in the EU to make a GDPR request, right? If I understand correctly, they can’t actually check.
I did this back when the Apollo shutting down post when out from Christian. It took a bit of googling to find out how to do this so thanks for putting it all together for others. I had 10 accounts spanning all my time on Reddit since the Digg days and did a fully scorched earth on it all, because you know, fuck u/spez.
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way I’m going back.
The experience has been a lot smoother than I expected.
Agreed. Feels like reddit but 15 years ago, before the dark times, before the Empire - Loving it so far, and reminds me of how the internet used to be this huge frontier before Corporations, Shareholders, and Advertisers moved in and ruined everything.
These Communities are smaller and some of the more niche groups aren't here yet but that will change with time. Give it a year or two, and I'm sure those obscure, hilarious groups like Greendawn will migrate over, over.
It's funny how relaxing Lemmy feels. It's like I've been the frog in the slowly heating pot over the years and had no idea how harsh Reddit had become. Right now Lemmy feels like I thought Reddit has always been. But the idea of Reddit now feels so ugly. It's the same feeling as getting away from bumper to bumper traffic and finally being able to set the cruise control and enjoy the ride.
That's my hope for the Fediverse. We'll get that frontier feel back while also having the giant easy-access network we've come to appreciate in the 10's and 20's (over).
Super smooth. Just need the content levels to pick up a bit but that will improve over time as more people catch on
I was talking about this with a friend - reddit doesn't have many unique features that folks want, and generally speaking the only thing reddit has of value is the community.
Hoping folks start migrating to alternatives
Is it just me or is this going directly against what Reddit once aimed to be?
Corporations and Shareholders ruin everything
This is what EA once aimed to be.
I think that anyone who's been around reddit long enough knew this was coming. Reddit isn't a free and open platform, and never was. The admins allowed moderators free reign just so long as they didn't do anything that reddit didn't want.
This wouldn’t be a proper Reddit replacement if an anonymous user didn’t take the time out of his day to type that “free rein” was the correct spelling here
Well damnit you are right - in both that it's not proper reddit replacement without grammar nazis, and that "free rein" is the usual term. It could be argued that reign also works in this case because some moderators seemed to be under the impression that they were unchallenged kings within their subreddit kingdoms.
It is?? I've been typing it wrong my whole life.
I'm still writing 'reign' though.
I think "reign" is like "rule". - A king reigns over his people.
"Rein" is the thing that horse cart drivers use to control the horses. So the rope that goes from horses mouth to drivers hand. You can either "rein (in) the horses" for them to do something, or you can let them "free rein", meaning they can run as they please.
I always imagined it like a king being able to freely reign over his people - so that he can freely do whatever he wants in terms of governing them.
This is why they need to link an alternative like Lemmy and encourage to share it around.
Reddit doesn't disallow mods from posting "Join us on Discord" and this will create a slow and steady move to a new platform.
I've been posting about lemmy in r/modtools and a couple of the niche subreddits I follow that didn't shut down. I'll be sticking with lemmy no matter what happens over at reddit, the people in charge over there have shown utter contempt for the users and moderators.
I was skeptical at first. Decided to give it a shot and, while obviously not perfect, I like it a lot so far.
I think my biggest issue before is actually a feature rather than a bug. I used to think, "federation is too confusing for the average person, it'll never take off".
But considering how hostile the average comment is on Reddit, keeping the "average" user away might be the best thing about Lemmy.
While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It's cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it's too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn't shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.
It's still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we're ultimately going to "need" an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.
The idea behind this place is pretty cool but I'm with you. Neither this place, nor are the users, ready for migration "today" to flip from Reddit to this experience.
It actually takes effort to understand what to do here. I deal with idiots at work all day, the first hint of effort or difficulty with anything, especially entertainment, people will walk.
It's like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I'll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.
Sadly, many people I have recommended it to have acted like it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. The initial learning curve really wasn't that bad, IMO but it seems like a lot of people want to be spoon fed.
It doesn't matter that it's not that bad, just that it's harder than staying on reddit.
This post seems somewhat disingenuous. One of the mods Cedarwolf posted his side of what happened 2 hours prior to this post appearing, and if we were to believe his side of the story the top mod who hasn't been active for a year just decided to join the blackout against other mods wishes.
Yes, it's two conflicting stories but he claims to have evidence that he's been inactive. Basically, people should look into this more than assume truth in the headline.
Both /r/tumblr and /r/AdviceAnimals had shaky mod teams. Even though I completely disagree with the admins on everything else this made perfect sense. Plus out of the 8k subs that blacked out only 2 had admins intervene which makes me think it really was just mods fighting and the admins stepping in.
def link and ill put it in the body, i just posted it as i ran across it this am
I'm in a number of subs with an inactive top mod who can't be removed because they threaten to demod people from larger communities where they also hold high up inactive positions...
I just returned for a couple of minutes and it’s a fucking shitshow. I don’t know if it has become worse or if it just feels like that because Lemmy is much more friendly, but Reddit seems to be much more toxic right now.
It is also so obvious that people are trying to use this as some kind of coup. Users interact with the thematic, get explained what the blackout is about, just to comment complete bs about it one comment later. They are acting dumb to gain momentum.
I really hope this will end up in a worldpolitics situation.
There seems to be a correlation between civility and willingness to put up with spez. If you're willing to put up with all the bs he's been spewing since this started, you're less civil. All the respectful people came here, or are finding other replacements. People who don't care stayed, and it shows.
Makes a lot of sense. Its a fun y microcosm for this kind of conservative attitude that is permeating through society. "No, change is scary and we will not only be against it, but will also be actively hostile towards it."
Fear the people that love peace and quiet, for they will do anything to get it.
oh its def toxic, there are certain types running rampant and some people get VERY grumpy when deprived of thier volunteer curated entertainment feeds.
I had the same observations as well! Not sure if it's just my confirmation bias, but it does seem like reddit feels a lot more toxic right now. I feel like it really is compounded by how relatively welcoming lemmy has been for refugees recently, alongside it still being fresh. I feel like I can be more open here as well, and many others probably do so too.
I noticed that too. Like a lot of people are upset that users would mess with a company. r/JoeRogan is much more toxic than usual like a flood gate opened
Joe Rogan has always been toxic, its the alt right with a wig
Straight up, all the good subs locked themselves and all of the reasonable people walked away.
Twitter just did the same thing. Spez said he wasn't gonna mimic twitter and then fully mimicked twitter.
They should tread lightly. Reddit in no way has the ability to function (edit: at least on short notice) without volunteer mods. To some degree they can find scabs, but I honestly don't know how many and how good.
It's destined to become like Twitter, overrun by far-right assholes and lacking quality content. The mods who kept the worst of them off the subs will be gone, and the people who produced the best content will leave as the dregs take over.
That's entirely possible, although last I checked Twitter is only on it's way there.
Yeah, are they going to try to mod all the subs by themselves now? That's not going to work out really well. Either there will be no moderation and everything will be trash, or they'll have to hire people as moderators, which will cut into the profits they're trying to show. They're trying to bully people to behave how they want, and I hope it fails badly. But I'm still waiting for people to stop using twitter...
How many, on what timeline? They could go to this model eventually if they wanted, but with little to no notice it's tough. (I also foresee niche subreddits becoming frustrating to use when the generic full-time moderators don't understand them, and who knows how NSFW subreddits would work)
I have hope it's different from Twitter, because there's a party with leverage that's fundamentally different from mindless scrollers. Not to mention I'm liking the alternative I've tried very much.
We can only hope reddit dissappoints their moderators so much they'd rather moderate lemmy communities :)
I'll watch spez digg this grave. I'm not shocked, we have all seen it happen before.
This place feels real, and personally that's all that matters. Reddit has been plastic for a while now. I'm happy to watch the ceo handle it like such a stooge, it almost seems like he wants to tank the company before tencent eats it all up.
I'm with you! Also digg, nice one!
Maybe he is in bed with Elon musk, trying to tank the initial price of the stocks so musk can buy the majority of reddit as well...
i love that they're making this extreme choice over fucking advice animals which haven't been relevant in literally 10+years
Saw this coming the moment the blackouts were being planned
Wait...the comment seems to indicate that the primary mod did not want to go dark, and an inactive mod came in and made it go dark. I understand being upset...but this does not seem like anything a Reddit admin would do?
Yep. The idea that Reddit Admin did this to nullify the blackout was suspect from the start. Why would it only be on r/AdviceAnimals? Lol
People are mad at Reddit right now and we're looking for any reason to confirm their bias and run away with their narrative.
From what I saw the lower mod probably contacted the admins to make this happen by claiming that the inactive head mod went against the wishes of the community.
It's happened before to other subs like /r/wow but back then it was a positive move to circumvent a man child making the sub private over an expansion release that didn't go so well because he couldn't log in and play the game. A lesser mod was made head and the original head striped of his position and all was made right again.
In this case it appears that the community overwhelmingly supported the blackout and move to go private instead. The mod that took over was the only loud voice against the blackout.
The Reddit admins indicated in a modsupport thread that they would help any mods who didn't want their sub to go dark to take over from other mods.
There's more to it than that, see: https://beehaw.org/comment/257522
yeah, i have no clue whats going on with that but i would not put anything past the admins anyway, years of broken promises, im going back to the way the internet was meant to work, central services for communication is a prevision of the network.
Well good for them, they can have a lot of fun paying reddit staff to be the mods now.
In all fairness, that's how Twitter did things from what I can understand.
Of course, that can be quite the payroll expense, especially with a weird model with a panoply of interest-based domains.
I'm sure the Reddit employees will be up to it and has all the equipment necessary for it. That protest was about the amazing internal tooling the mods loved using, right?
If they think that their API costs were high imagine how expensive paid moderation is.
Pretty sure spez said it wasn't the cost of running or maintaining the API that was the problem, but the opportunity cost of having users on third party apps. At least, that's what I cleaned from Christian Selig's post.
But man is he beating around the bush about that. Sprinkling "but Apollo won't play ball :(" to shift the blame. Fuck Spez.
It is all about the data collection that they are missing from people using 3rd party apps.
That and reddit is a goldmine for training llm's. It's a perfect shitstorm.
Eh, that's what India is for.
Thank you for doing the needful
It isn't surprising at all, it's about hard money not about communities and fuzzy warm feelings. It seems everyone is working hard down at Reddit to make as much money as they can out of an IPO for a zombified carcass.
yes it is about hard money, it always is at its core, and what you are seeing is a natural reaction of a failure in valuation of a part of the operation.
this has happened before, reddit admins think "they" are the equity, when in reality its the subs, thier content and those operators that are the equity.
Some of these structural changes are in an attempt to "fix" that, the site is turning toward devaluing content posted in threads over things that keep you scrolling and clicking.
Its always been a slow hostile takeover for the better part of the last decade, anyone whose been around expected this day to come eventually.
This is extremely short-sighted on reddits part, elevating lower mods to leads can cause so much drama in a community particularly when the lower mods don't have experience, the lower mods will probably make basic mistakes that'll turn the average base away from the subreddit.
this is really going to bite reddit in the ass if they try it more its like trying to fix a leak by sticking random objects in the hole
This plays out like things I've seen in real life:
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Fuck Steve Huffman
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
It was a matter of time before the admins started doing this. Fuck Spez, you piece of shit
Ayy, fuck /u/spez
Lemmy should make itself as much like Reddit as it possibly can except for the small handful of money-grubbing cunts who'd rather destroy communities than allow them to exist without profiting from them.
And the insane amount of astroturfing!
The way things are going R*ddit is going to become what Digg is today - a minimalist editor run link agreggator
lmao, good fuckin luck replacing dedicated volunteers with one or two shitty ones obsessed with power
Don't worry, the mods will be paid now. Just by the NRA, Walmart and Russia.
Reddit is about to be run entirely by shills who will hop into mod spots.
I don't think it'll be that simple
There are sooooo many fuckin subs, and while I know there are small handfuls that oversee dozens and dozens, the niche ones that really help user retention will suffer.
Like, it's not the huge million+ subs that I'm missing, it's the smaller localized fandoms and obscure memory subs that I'm really missing.
lmfao no kidding. part of me is waiting to see the shitshow that happens to some subs without proper moderation. just the amount of bullshit thats gonna be submitted is gonna be intense. and the trolls, oh lord the trolls are gonna have a hayday with once properly moderated subs.
For example, /r/nba went dark for a Finals game - the final Finals game where a champion was crowned.
I'd love to see one or two lower-tier mods take over that sub. It'd become a complete pile of shit.
Gallowboob 2: Electric Boogaloo.
I haven't thought of that name since before COVID at least holy shit. Probably longer. What a throwback. Reddit used to be so different
People all over reddit have been bitching about supermods and the concentration of power forever. This is what reddit wants, this is the way they become filled with qultists. Easily manipulated, stupid, profitable, and valuable to the next billionaire who wants their own media outlet.
Have fun paying for moderation or have Spam running rampant. That won't get you out of the red numbers, spez. Just fuel for the fire.
There will always be someone willing to take over as mod and that is the problem
Yeah, there are 2 kinds of people that mod though. The ones who actively adore the community and subject matter, and the ones that just want power and prestige. People who would step up after a protest to fill a void that was forcefully created are GUARANTEED to be the latter.
This is informative and unfortunate.
That's why we desperately need downvoting, making fake stories sink to the bottom.
my 2 'cents
who doesn't have downvoting? I can downvote everything...
Oh I see now, your home server hides the downvote. other servers can downvote that content, I think.
Jerboa (the mobile app) also doesn't hide the downvote, regardless of instance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/147eaw3/rsubredditdrama_is_in_restricted_mode_for_the/jo2duox/?context=3
Holy shit the amount of bootlickers in that comment thread makes me so happy to leave that place
Yeah, I'm a mod for a few subs that total about 800k people. 99% of them have been really nice, but dude. The ones who aren't REALLY aren't. You'd think I molested their cat or something, when in reality I let the users bring it up, then vote on it, then vote AGAIN to stay closed. It was overwhelming in all cases that we do this.
Sorry I listened to my users I guess, should I be like Spez and just do what I want? If so, it's closing anyway. Oops.
Do another vote to have anyone PMing vulgarities at the mods banned from the sub, or not.
Problem is, to do that I'd have to open reddit. I've done that exactly once, when I saw /r/gaming pop back up I went to their vote on going dark again and told them to do so.
You best believe we're gonna come out swinging if reddit pulls their heads out of their asses though. I get about 10-20 pms an hour of ban worthy material. This is gonna be fun. "Hey we're open again! Too bad you won't be invited."
Man I would love to see the reactions
Also probably a bit of servivorship bias at work here – the people who really dislike the change aren't on reddit to upvote/comment leaving the bootlickers to be the ones who do.
Well here is me abandoning reddit after 10 years. At the end they can do whatever they want with reddit and i can choose in which platform waste my time.
Same here after 11, they forget that the users create the value, they're only the middlemen.
They know users create the value but in order to turn that value into a form that makes investors happy they have to squeeze the users. It's like a digital Macquarie Island and we're all penguins.
Which is why I ran Power Delete Suite on my account on the way out. I created a lot of value and they apparently didn't appreciate that, so now it's all gone.
12 year user with 700k comment karma. Power washing my account by months end.
this is how reddit dies. not with a whimper, but with a greedy CEO.
get fucked spez!
the spez, who once moderated r/jailbail?
Not going back. Disgusting behaviour.
I'm quite happy here now. Given up on reddit. The day Apollo's API key is deleted is the day I edit all of my comments and give up on the platform completely. It's strange I how feel no regret over saying that. It's just the way it's going to be.
Same here. I've been a fly on the wall seeing the development of mlem progressing super fast, and we (I'm tangentially involved) are going to be releasing a big update soon that improves the GUI tremendously. You can go over to !mlemapp@lemmy.ml (or https://lemmy.world/c/mlemapp@lemmy.ml) to see what we're up to and to get the link to join the beta through TestFlight.
Yeah! I'll check it out. I use Jerboa in Android and it seems quite solid for such an early Stage of an App.
Just a heads up, the day that happens is probably when the services that will edit or delete your comments also run into API limitations. Might be better to get ahead of that change.
My understanding is that most scripts like the power delete one that I used use your own token as they are a JavaScript run in your browser. I don't believe that those would be considered API calls, but I could be wrong.
I'd probably recommend doing it before that - the day Apollo loses it's API key is the same day that all the scripts that will edit then delete your comments also die.
And I thought they wouldn't go any lower. It's disgusting how far they're willing to go - it's like they're so eager to prove us right.
I knew they were going to do this, but it's funny how fast it happened. The memo leak of the CEO to employees saying that "[this blackout] will pass" ups the comedy. Nothing like alienating your volunteer mods on your community-build website.
oh, I fucking called it a mile away.
Mods should just reopen but refuse to moderate. Disable automod as well.
This is the way. Just remember what happened to /r/worldpolitics, the mods basically didn't want to moderate anymore and it became a shit show of spammers.
Crazy that /r/AnimeTitties came along to fill that void lol
I was going to say they should all turn into porn subs, but I think your way is easier and would likely have the same outcome anyway.
Reddit? Are they new? Never heard of it 🤣 Probably won't get very big
It'll just lead to a general decline in sub quality.
Yup. Driving away the mods by taking away the tools they need to moderate effectively means letting the site be overrun by low-effort shitposts and trolls, which in turn will drive away users who want at least a decent experience there. Considering how many awful people are there even with current moderation, I'm not sticking around to see what it starts festering into come next month.
They can't just re-open subreddits and expect it to go over smoothly. These subs will collapse without moderators.
Sure they can. They'll outsource moderation to Bangladesh, pay mods like $0.20 a day, and double the number of ads shown.
Considering they didn't pay any of the moderators as is, I don't think they would pay for them now.
Lol .... All you have to do is give moderators permissions to a teenager with an axe to grind and they'll work for free for years
I hate Reddit because of all this stupidity ... I've jumped ship not looking back and I'm staying on Lemmy
It’s depressing that I’m not surprised one bit. At this point, I don’t even think it’s worth sticking around until 3PA shut down on the 30th.
Yeah, I'm out. I'm still learning this whole Lemmy thing, but it's scratching the same itch that Reddit did.
I think this killed reddit for me, even if they reverse their shit it's still the same company that desperately tried to push it in the first place. Only a matter of time before more of the things I liked about it are stripped away, might as well rip the band-aid off now.
bootlickers, inc.
So much for all the "oh, it's not hurting our revenue" dismissals.
Definitely called this. All the right wing trolls on Reddit are salivating at the thought of turning this into a coup by hopping into top mod spots in exchange for licking boot tread. The outcome is pretty obvious.
Keep the blackout going. Even if they boot mods and reopen subs, don’t visit. I wonder how much traffic/revenue they have lost so far.
They did the same thing to admins of other major subreddits even before the blackout. They also removed initial posts regarding it on major subreddits. Thats why I chose to leave.
Duuuuuude they didn't wait long did they? And they attack r/adviceanimals, one of the core subs, even though it isn't one of the defaults anymore.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Huffman brings back r/jailbait. The fucking dirty paedo.
Admins in /r/modsupport were breaking records last week to tell mods who had a dormant top mod come back and private the sub that they would “resolve the issue”. Then after saying that they didn’t do anything for a few days. Guess they are gonna start doing that to the big subs to reopen them.
That's insane. I honestly thought it was solely romours, like Spez editing messages on behalf of others (which I still don't believe in)
Edit: I believe it now though.
It happened live on Thanksgiving and he admitted to it shortly after. Believe it bud.
There's a verge article here talking about it. Unfortunately, the comment admitting it might be gone since it was in r/The_Donald. But yeah, it happened.
He admitted it himself
Fuck Reddit. But honestly I’m less and less invested with each passing day. I re-opened Apollo today and it’s already starting to feel old, foreign. I guess that means Lemmy is home now.
Same. Im already within more communities than i ever had subreddits. Theres simply more to talk about here imo. The platform just needs to grow a little bigger and well have the ultra-niche communities not be complete ghost towns. Cant wait!
It feels reassuring being here in Lemmy away of that shit show.
I'm just waiting for substitutes of my old groups to start populating instances here. I'll be deleting my reddit account probably before the end of the month when RIF goes offline.
fuck reddit, all thanks to spez and reddit admins
Time to leave every single major subreddit.
Time to leave it all. They might not be taking over the small ones, but the writing is on the wall: this is not the place to host a community.
Yep, but it'll take some time to move the small ones in any meaningful form, unfortunately.
Why haven't more of the major subreddits, especially the ones doing long term indefinite blackouts, migrating their subs here?
I haven't touched the platform since the blackout started and couldn't be happier. I'm just dipping my toes in over here as a replacement and it's quite nice.
And of course the obligatory eff spez.
Anybody have a link to this post? I can't find it in the user's page.
Yup same. I've gone through their post history, and also the histories of mods listed on r/adviceanimals, and can't find this post or comment on this post. Huh.
I was looking at the reddit protest stream when it happened. Since it only says it reopened, i was a bit sad that such a huge sub would withdraw their desicion.
This makes more sense, and its awful.
Gee, what a surprise that everyone called last week. Of course Reddit admins are booting uncooperative mods in favor of those that will un-private their subs, they have zero reason to be loyal to mods protesting against them. And they're actively losing advertising revenue for each sub that's dark.
The real way to protest this is to delete your Reddit account and never look back. Monthly active users is the only statistic that will force them to backtrack on any of the API pricing changes, and loads of people that have moved to Lemmy are actively using both platforms.
A lot of these people volunteered their spare time to manage communities for no pay. Wondering how far downhill a lot of these subs will go with Spez putting himself in charge of everything.
they won't. Spez is learning how much of reddit's success has nothing to do with reddit itself. hopefully we have all learned from the messy and long experiment with letting corps control our gardens.
He's not learning anything LMAO
Corporations NEVER learn
His name is Steve Huffman, and he's a former mod of r/jailbait and as such a paedophile.
This comment needs to be a lot higher.
Completely expected tbh
It was only a matter of time...
Welp, I'm officially never going back to reddit, might as well start deleting my account now...
Biggie knew. Treat everything like it’s your first day because nothing is guaranteed.
Hey. Will you look at that. Any interest in reddit just disappeared. Gg spez.
At first I thought they chickened out, now somehow I am both relieved and extremely sad.
I figured this would happen
Off topic, who owns/runs the servers here and how does it make money? I'm new I'm curious.
The host of the instance owns/runs the server for any instance. There is no money to be made. The servers stay up because people donated or the instance owners paid for it.
Edit: the right way of saying it is.. the instances, at least the bigger ones, are crowd-funded.
I've been doing some reading. I love things that go back to the idea of old internet mentality.
I asked about this.
Around ~180 euros a month for the server they were renting to run this Lemmy instance. Anybody can host though and any member of a Lemmy can see content and interconnect with other instances.
I was looking into potentially hosting my own Lemmy for my friends and I because the cost would be more manageable.
I'd imagine if people started doing that it would decentralize the costs and the administrative overhead.
similar to old usenet and fidonet, volunteers, there have always been people happy to help run hardware and help make the commons a thing. people were lured away from the gardens and parks by digital theme parks and shopping malls, where the users become customers.
people wonder "how can it possibly work"
email works great! same concept.
Love me some old internet. So basically were back to the cost of bandwidth for individuals who want to run a server.
Unfortunately, Reddit can just keep doing that as often as they want. Fortunately though, there are few people who will actually be able to do a good job moderating especially for FREE. They will burn through the good candidates and have to rely on unqualified people to do a mediocre job. This will ruin the content quality and eventually kill the sub. So long term we may still win, but short term we will likely see little change. The problem is always the level of involvement of the general public.
i imagine a lot of subreddits will have to deal with a loooot of spam and bullshit posts about nothing in the near future. i can't imagine anyone worthwhile that isn't just powertripping actually wanting to mod a large sub anymore. whats the point? you arent getting paid anything, and its not even on your terms. like wtf. fuck reddit man.
It's also timely that they are wanting to tank the website leading up to the US election. I know it's a long way away and I don't like conspiracy theories but Reddit was a hot bed for socially minded people to debate important issues ..... it was like the town square .... now they've paved over it, building a Starbucks/McDonald's outlet and telling people to go away and go talk somewhere else.
whoaaa thats a good conspiracy.
Are Reddit admins the sub owners or Reddit employees?
Admins are employees. The people running the subs are mods. There aren't even 1% of enough admins to moderate the subreddits, but there are enough to police the moderation stances of the large subs.
Admins are employees, sub owners are unpaid volunteers.
Reddit admins are Reddit employees.
Reddit moderators are (generally) not Reddit employees.
Regular users create the subreddits, but they all belong to Reddit.
I'm pretty sure the admins have installed mods before on subreddits where they didn't like the mod team. I think I remember people talking about it at one point, but I can't remember specifics, so I'm not entirely sure. (They do it for abandoned subs all the time, but that's different.)
I know over a decade ago when the IAmA subreddit creator was going to shut that subreddit down one of the admins said they'd take the subreddit over and put new mods in if he didn't change his mind. But at the time the admins weren't throwing their weight around like they would eventually, so it wasn't a consensus thing, just one admin talking.
So Orange is the New Blue huh?
OMG Who saw that coming! /s
What a DICK.
Apparently, a heck of a lost of drama involving this.
Link to reddit for those who wants to give traffic to reddit - https://old.reddit.com/r/wholesome/comments/148aw58/radviceanimals_just_had_the_top_mods_permissions/
Use teddit instead https://farside.link/teddit/r/wholesome/comments/148aw58/radviceanimals_just_had_the_top_mods_permissions/
oh my god, what a turn of events. who would have thought?
This is huge! And should be shared far and wide! This sort of crap is why a single company can't be in charge: sooner or later some CEO some board member or whatever decides to pull some crap like this and thinks accountability is not applicable because he said so. This is why federation is a must in this day and age.
This was inevitable, unfortunately.
Does that mean they're unmoderated now? r/worldpolotics here we come!
If someone were angry about what they're doing (not me, I've been through this so many times on so many sites that I'm apathetic) they could definitely put a coordinated effort into filling the subs that admins take over with anime titties to prove a point.
Actually I accidentally clicked a Reddit link on Google earlier today and (I don't remember the subreddit) my first thought was: I'm pretty sure this subreddit took part in the blackout so why can I see its posts like nothing happened?
Hang on, when I go to the Reddark website now a bunch of subreddits have gone from private to public. Is it because it's the 14th or because someone intervened with the protest?
I wonder what will happen to the subreddits that had voted to black out for the week from the get- go?
It's not a democracy... straight to jail!
So we can expect the mods of bigger subreddits to also lose their permissions? How will the admins manage to moderate 8k subs?
The fact that they need to work their asses to accomplish this makes me happy... Not the part of recovering control for sure.
They would want to test it on one subreddit first and see how it went. The quality will tank, but this is something they could get away with.
Oof, not a good look. We'll have to watch more of the larger subs to see if this happens to them too.
Clickable link: https://i.imgur.com/I7G25aL.png
Investors: "You took over a sub in concert with a user named u/PussyWhistle?"
I wonder if they saw a bunch of traffic trying to access advice animals and decided it was a good testing grounds for removing mods.
They did the same thing to admins of other major subreddits even before the blackout. They also removed initial posts regarding it on major subreddits.
It's a 2 day blackout for god's sake, and it's nearly at the end of it! Was it really necessary to do that?
shows how desperate they really are, honestly feeling like we should push for more communities to commit to longer. even just to the end of the week may create capitulation. not that ill go back!
literal assholes