The best way to protest against reddit is simply to not interact with Reddit
Haunting_Tale_5150@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 433 points – I see a lot of posts about how they uploaded anti-spez stuff onto reddit, or participated in the nsfw spams/john oliver spams. While I get wanting to let it all out, this ultimately keeps up engagement on reddit rather than bringing it down.
The best way to make sure things go your way? Vote with your wallet, or in this case your voice. Don't speak on reddit. Devote more time helping out the alternatives grow and flourish. And as much as it is a meme, touching some grass can help your mental fortitude.
If you absolutely 100% need to interact with reddit, I suggest installing a redirector addon (such as privacy redirect or... redirector) that can link to a teddit or libreddit instance. Or archiving it with wayback/archive.is/ghostarchive.
The only thing we ever need to do on reddit is encourage migration to further drive down traffic: Dm mods of your fave subs and ask about migration, something as simple as "Hey, I love this community but I no longer use reddit, will you guys be making a community on Kbin or other alternatives? Let me know please, thanks." will work!! We need more voices encouraging migration!
This is a good idea. At the very least, it’ll put the idea in their brands a maybe bring them along. Worst case scenario, it might spur you to start a community…
Thank you for writing that. I took that exact wording and sent it to some mods. Probably because it was easy and convenient, with the words given to me.
I'm treating the blackout and the aftermath as a worker strike, and treating any mods replacing removed mods as scabs. But more to the point, it's a strike and I do not cross picket lines. I will not go even to the Reddit front page until the corporation reverses course, accedes to the demands of their unpaid labor and backs the fuck up.
At this point, even if Reddit decides to do a full 180, I’m not going back. The community here is smaller, but it’s better right now. There’s a strong sense of unity and I’ve yet to see anything toxic.
I’m also not planning on telling others about kbin/ Lemmy/ fediverse. I am really appreciating the current self selection bias.
Same. They've fucked users over one too many times. Even if they go back to free API usage, I'm still not going back.
It reminds me of what Reddit felt like in the early days, except it feels more diverse and inclusive. It's kind of the perfect world of what I'd hoped Reddit could become.
It's inherently superior to Reddit: it's decentralized (federated), user friendly, light on resources, free and open source and has no shady obscure algorithms and bots tainting discourse.
Agreed, it reminds me of the discussion boards you used to get. I feel like there's an actual community developing here
I also feel replacement mods are scabs, but I've been enjoying all the free time I've had lately not browsing reddit. I'm actually getting shit done. I'm ashamed of how much I used that site. I will not go back.
There's a case to be made on either end. The best thing would be for people to move to better pastures with dignity, but the malicious compliance and worse create headaches and embarrassment for spez that may pay off in the press, or at some other date. Mods getting banned for making their accounts porn accounts certainly know they're going out the door, but they'd prefer to be thrown out.
And ultimately, for the veteran redditors who are watching all this, they want to see the end with their own eyes.
I just popped in for the first time since around the 10th and while there are still posts honestly the upvotes on popular seem really low and the content I saw scrolling through 40 or so threads was really meh and none of my usual favorites popped up... I'm really hoping this is the beginning of the end
I don't think the bots have much creativity
NSFW subreddits don't appear on r/All or r/Popular. (NSFW posts can appear, but only from subs that aren't flagged as NSFW themselves).
So the current protest method is somewhat counterproductive. People who never took the step of subscribing to these subs likely won't see them at all.
Plus, people are still over estimating how much impact has been made. If everyone participating in the 'protests' instead deleted their accounts and moved on, Reddit would not be hurt all that much.
I don't think they'd really be hurt at all. New mods would take over some large subs, but things will recover. They'd rather have a userbase of 10 people paying for Premium, clicking and converting on ads, and spending Gold, than a userbase of 1000 who don't. This is just an ad campaign optimization. Cut out the non-targeted parts of the lookalike to improve conversion metrics.
Despite having subscribed to video game and pcgaming related subs pretty much all of them are just proceeding as normal, so yeah I think people are overestimating impact because I wasn't subscribed to the major subs. And this is like tech related subs that you'd think would have been more wiling to push people to migrate, but majority of them didn't.
Of the subs I subscribed to I think only privacyguides which is their instance that I'm on ever made an effort.
Stepping away is sort of my plan at the moment.
I'm the solo mod of an 11K subscriber sub who posted most of the content. I took the sub private for the first 48 hours of the protest, then polled everyone to see if they wanted to keep going.
Only a third were in favor. The other two-thirds were "No" or "I don't understand and/or don't care".
I posted links to equivalent places in lemmy/kbin/discord to see if there would be any kind of migration to follow me here.
So far I have exactly one follower on lemmy, and 5 new members on discord (none of whom have interacted at all).
For now, I'm going to continue to monitor my reddit sub (to keep things in order) but will only be posting things in the fediverse. I just cant', in good conscience, keep contributing to "my" sub in the current environment. It makes me sad, to be honest; I felt a certain amount of pride in what I (we) accomplished over there.
We'll see what happens going forward.
I'm in a similar boat, except I barely used to post anything at all - ironically to avoid the toxic backlash that usually happened whenever I did, and mostly hid out in the comments - and barely anyone wants to leave. They could (not) care less. And I'm trying to see it from their POV: they just don't know, and MUCH more importantly, don't want to.
The house is burning down, and they're pulling the blankets over their heads. There's not much that can be done about it perhaps. Don't Look Up.
The responses are all "it won't affect anything anyway" (it already has), "nobody noticed the first blackout" (uh... not true), "this isn't a protest sub, lets get back to it" (why would such a thing even exist in the first place? strikes happen wherever people happen to WORK, when they are NEEDED).
But now I'm finally starting to see the difference between people who mod - i.e. offer their hard work to others - vs. people who do not. It's not as bad as I'm making it sound - it's sheer human nature, and some people have more capacity than others, like if you are in med school then you probably don't have time to mod a sub:-). But there is a difference, b/t forward-thinking people and people who wait for things to eventually trickle down to them. I wish I could help convey that thought to them, but... I already have, and now it's up to them to choose to receive it, or not.
The protests do help show instability to the investors which will hurt the IPO long term.
On the 12th, I uninstalled rif, signed up at Beehaw, heard about Jerboa and installed that, and put the icon for that where the rif one used to be on my home screen. I haven't been back to Reddit since.
I've been pressing the pressing the same spot on my phone for 13 years to access Reddit.
Just putting the kbin app there was all I needed to migrate.
Exactly this. I haven't been back on since before the blackout.
Yep. Deleted my account(s) last weekend and that was it. Have not been back.
Same. Also blocked it on my dns server, so I wouldn't be tempted to load it back.
I shuttered the two subs I was in charge of (moderate size so they've flown under the radar thus far) and simply haven't been back.
Unfortunately, they'll probably get reopened. But you'll just have to let them move on without you. Either it'll burn in a fire, or the new mods will carry it in a new direction. Either way, it's no longer your project/baby.
I think it makes sense to pour oil in the fire while it lasts, and only leave as you propose, once nothing can be won anymore.
The downside of leaving early is that it skews the picture. The apathetic remain, and their voice to return to BAU becomes disproportionally louder. It's also what the company counts on, that it 'will pass'.
But I also spend like 99% of my time here, and only visit the old site for a few minutes every other day. In the end, everyone will do what feels right for them, but arguments can be made either way.
I only return to see what's up in ModCoord. It's a healthy dose of "this is why I left". At least until RIF is dead, then I probably won't be going back anymore. Certainly not trying to navigate their garbage excuse of a mobile UI.
Agreed. I nuked my account today and when asked why I was deleting it i mentioned /u/spez and obviously that won't get back to him but i hope enough people do it to make others in the company realize he's toxic and needs to go
he'll get axed before the company goes public and they'll put some nameless suit in the role instead. i rekon calling out the entire corporate section might have been better, but then again huffman was one of the three founders so i dunno
the only reasons i'm looking at my reddit window currently are to check modmail (one of my subs is currently restricted but i'm accepting requests for member status) or to check r/modcoord and r/Save3rdPartyApps and other protest subs. i made a promise to the subscribers there when i took control of it from being unmoderated, and i'll keep that promise to them until the end of the month, but i'm also going to leave quite a bit to remember me by, namely i'm going to configure automod to at least attempt to get rid of most of the spam as well as make the sub effectively unable to be monetized. would rather fly under the radar until that's in place tho
Have the mods also been communicating on other channels like matrix or slack? With reddit being able to read all messages the idea of communicating with other mods over reddit seemed rather weird to me. Like a union discussing plans while corporate is sitting in with them.
As an outside observer it seemed like the biggest difficulties was that each mod team was doing their own thing. The mma mods who made https://kbin.social/m/mma said "Once the largest subs came back online there’s not really anything that smaller subs can do to hold the line anymore."
not as far as i'm aware. i know about discord servers (that i'm not a member of) where discussions are happening, but as far as i'm aware the majority of planning is happening either in the protest-centric subreddits or in this magazine right here.
i gotta admit, there has been a lot of arrogance and a lack of consideration of consequences by lots of people involved in this on all sides
I agree with your premise, but not all of the details. I believe that if you don't want to be on Reddit as it is, simply don't be on Reddit. Depart gracefully, don't burn bridges, don't troll or spam. It doesn't help anyone - your mental health included.
In many ways, I do believe that taking the high road is best when there's an issue like this. I don't mind being on Reddit, or kbin, or Lemmy, or Mastodon. The only social I'm never on is Twitter. I don't see a need to be there; so I'm not. For my own part, I didn't mind the 2-day blackout - I mind the spam, the NSFW from unexpected sources, etc. If the answer is that I need to stand up and start taking part in moderating communities to ensure that the content I want to see is what's there, I'll decide then whether I want to do so or not. I'm annoyed by the possibility of the app I prefer (RedReader) standing on shaky ground from now on with an "accessibility" label hung on it. I'm not a fan of ads, at the best of times, I block most advertising domains, and usually turn off ECMAScript on sites (or at least I'm picky about what is allowed to run). I'd prefer to turn it off altogether, but that's not an option at the moment with the way the web is going.
As I've said before, I do not believe there's a single active mod of a large community who doesn't know whether or not they want to lead a community on Reddit right now. If they want to lead a community, but not on Reddit, there's the various fediverse options, JCInk, Freeforums, NeoCities, or whatever - those people could even file an RFD and have it put up on Usenet. If they want to lead a community on Reddit, that means abiding by the rules, policies, and behaviors which have been set down. I have no problem with, say, r/piracy moving to their own Lemmy, and I'm honestly in favor of the wide adoption of alternate social media (though I worry what onerous monetization will be forced upon us when the costs get too high and each server can only afford customers, not paying users - we know ads won't work, because of so many of us using adblockers).
If you want to be part of a community specifically on Reddit now, then be a part of that community on Reddit. If you want to be part of a community, but you're ambivalent about Reddit, rejoin or rebuild it elsewhere. Don't make things worse for the people who make a different decision. That just makes them become reactionary and defensive, and likely they'll end up opposing you, and whatever it is you stand for (which in this cause could actively hurt fediverse participation).
"take your protests and picket signs to that dark corner over there where you wont bother the normies"
Thanks for this, I feel like there's a lot of black-and-white thinking going on here. It seems like the only options presented are "burn it down!" or "you're a scab".
I'm tempted to post a nsfw pic with both my penis and breasts visible at the same time to r/mildlyinteresting or something. It'd be funny, like "oh hey this is what a penis looks like when your estrogen levels are above 200 how mildly interesting". It would increase engagement, (engagement that reddit cannot monitize), but more importantly, it'd be funny
I haven't used Reddit since the protest began aside from dropping a pinned post on my profile linking to my profile on Kbin. I've seen this movie before and I know how it plays out. Reddit won't go away any time soon, but it's going to be slowly hollowed out while most of the active users migrate to Lemmy/Kbin. I have no doubt in my mind that this community has enough tailwind at this point to thrive.
If Google sends you there for an answer to something, don’t be logged in, and don’t go anywhere else on the site. Minimize engagement as much as possible.
With the demoddings I'm going to go on a full Reddit blackout. (Excepting for incidental hotlinks) Lemmy/Federation only now.
See here's the thing - if you are worried about protesting reddit, that inherently means you're hoping to interact with it. As far as I'm concerned, just don't care. Yes I disagree with what reddit is doing. Does that mean I shouldn't give it any visits or make any posts? well, depends on what I want to do. For example, just now I used it to spread info about some of this to fellow mods and within our local community. I believe it was worth doing. I don't believe it was less positive than just being overly simple minded and saying "I don't like what reddit is doing, therefore it's bad if i use reddit."
I don’t believe the message here is “i don’t like what Reddit is doing, therefore it’s bad if I use Reddit” at all.
The point is: reddit couldn’t care less what you say. Reddit at this point only cares about traffic and metrics. How many items posted in the last 7days, how many unique logins over X period, how many views on ad trackers. That’s why it’s bad to log in. As P.T. Barnum once said-“There is no such thing as bad publicity”. Whether you say “fuck spez” or “spez is the second coming in the flesh, all hail” doesn’t matter at all. Just 1m logins, 2m new posts in the last 24 hours.
They don't even care about logins anymore. They care about advertising impressions, sponsored post engagements, and ad conversions. Marketers on the platform don't care about how many users they have, they care about impressions, clicks, and conversions. That's all it comes down to - are you providing value by trackably converting on an ad, buying Reddit Gold, or subscribing to Premium? If not, why are you being a drain on server resources that could be used to benefit a paying customer?
Yeah this is the message I intend. I still check reddit occassionally for the random question (and also to work on my userstyle since it's inspired by the colorscheme). However, I don't stay in too long, don't upvote, comment, or create posts, since that adds traffic to the site.
What I'm about to say is going to sound like I disagree with you in spirit, but I don't think I actually am disagreeing. Despite using reddit for a specific thing when you made this post, you also just… didn't really give a fuck one way or the other. You could take or leave it, and for now, you chose to take it while it made sense and benefitted you.
There was a time when sites and apps (or "programs") didn't have so much longevity. No one really blinked when people stopped using the IM services. They just logged on while it made sense to because their friends were active, and then one day, they didn't log in anymore. No one thought twice when Napster was overtaken by KaZaA, or when that one went away for Limewire, or any of the other host of P2P services. They used them until broadband Internet became ubiquitous, and then they went to bittorrent. MySpace went quietly into the night and was gradually replaced by Facebook. Both of those (and their predecessor, Xanga) replaced the old geocities/tripod/angelfire personal websites. From my youth, Google is the only giant that remains.
Seeing the way people act about Twitter and reddit make me realize how much the standards have changed. It doesn't have to be a big event. This is nothing new. These things wane as they meet better, more efficient, and more user-friendly competition. This is no different. No one has to weep for it or give a concerted effort to make it change. The fedaverse options are modeled after a similar UI, it won't be such a big adjustment if people just let it happen and stop trying to save a corporate corpse. We used to not care about preserving the familiarity of failing services, and we were all the better for it. I think everyone could benefit from taking a page out of Web 1.0's book from time to time and inject a little more of that Wild West energy we used to be flush with. I know things can never be like that anymore - for good reason - but seriously, just stop giving a flying fuck about reddit in any capacity. It's making less and less sense to use it, so now we have this. One day, less and less might be zero, and that's an OK and natural progression.
I did install the official app juuuust long enough to give it a one-star rating and a scathing review. Unsure if that actually helps or hurts them, but it was cathartic just the same.
I opened my teeny sub for John Oliver pics but I'm taking it private again...
I haven't been on Reddit since the blackout started, and at this point, I have no intention of ever being on Reddit again. And it's been good for me, to be honest. Been reading an actual book again, for the first time in longer than I'd like, been going for walks when I'm bored instead of mindlessly scrolling.
So can confirm - go touch grass, go to your local library! It's good for you, and bad for Reddit. Win-win!
My interactions have been limited to 1-2 minutes to get some key pieces of info about my account (most recently, my client ID and secret so I can nuke my comments once I get my GDPR takeout). Teddit is a great way to view things without giving Reddit traffic.
My ArchiveTeam warrior instance has been going hard backing up Reddit for weeks now, however ;) I'm at 50+ gigs and 500K items backed up. A drop in the bucket compared to some of the folks listed on the leaderboard, but it feels nice to be doing my part. http://tracker.archiveteam.org/reddit/
Power Delete Suite should still work after they've taken the API down. It mimics you manually deleting the comments yourself.
Is power delete suite subject to the 1000 API request limit? I know Shreddit can work past that limit if you have your GDPR takeout.
I agree, I haven't been on reddit since the blackout. Just need to cut it out and focus on the new normal. We need to bring great content and support here to the fediverse. That is the only way forward.
Yup. Haven't been back since last Sunday. Which was surprisingly easy given I'd been a near-daily user for nine-ish years. I miss very little. I might log in one last time before the end of the month to trash my account.
Reddit killed the trust I had for it not even porn will bring me back and I've avoided reddit search answer like the plague on Google.
i'm hoping that the "privacy redirect" browser add-on OP linked to will help make that easier! then, if it works properly, you should be able to click reddit links with peace of mind knowing that you'll be taken to a different unaffiliated domain instead, giving spez and his corpo hogs 0 traffic
Reddit is dead for me once Rif stops working next month anyway, but I've stayed off since the 12th. I'll check in towards the end of the month to say my goodbyes to a small, private sub I'm in, explain why and where I'm going, and download/backup anything I'd like to save. Then that's it.
Screw spez. As long as he's in charge, I'm not going back.
Exactly my stance. Someone gave me reddit gold for changing all my comments, I sent them a message informing them about kbin. Everything I've been doing on Reddit has been cleaning house before I say my final goodbye once RIF closes its curtain.
I don't care about protesting, it doesn't work. For me, stopping reddit means to stop opening it out of habit. I find myself automatically opening social media out of habit. So instead of having Reddit be that habit response, I'm training myself to replace it with Mastodon and Lemmy. It's a bit hard since I'm missing a lot content, but it's significantly easier then during the Twitter migration.
User revolts do work. When Digg pushed that horrible update people just bombarded Digg with Reddit links. It's one of the most effective community migrations of a platform I've ever seen.
Do you think it's better to protest and don't go quietly, or just go quietly and hope it dumpster fire's itself to death in the face of whatever competition?
For my mental health it's better I go quietly. Focus on more positive things. Reddit doesn't care. I think it's reasonable to go out however suits you.
This is absolutely the thing to note about it. No matter how you feel about the situation, your health must come first, then your family's, then that of your friends, and so on. Work outward in concentric circles when you are ready to do so, but always be sure that your health (both mental and physical) is being supported and maintained.
Don't let Reddit or any other company or group drag you down.
Like on an airplane, put your own mask on first.
I mean at the end of the day they are making money from user activity via ads and selling user data. If you are not using the site anymore you are therefore useless to them, you need to starve the beast not give it a snack. I would suggest scrubbing your account as well even though its clear they already have a copy.
Yeah, and commenting even if it is to say something negative about reddit just leads to a very active comment chain that leads to people who do pay and not use adblockers something to keep them on the site longer throughout the day.
Just scrubbing and moving on seems the best route to go.
I don't think there is a point to commenting or submitting anything. Just overwrite and delete content and monitor your account to see if there's any restored material to wipe seems like the most an individual can do.
I deleted Apollo off my phone which curbed my Reddit habit.
The thing that I’ve been struggling with is how often Reddit comes up in Google search results. I know, you can remove Reddit from search, I just always forget. It’s muscle memory to just click and read.
Don't remove reddit from search results, there's still lots of useful stuff there, just use the cached version instead of giving them traffic.
Specifically, when I google stuff about how kbin works, I see the only answers are on Reddit and then I'm in a real pickle.
I've decided to only interact with Reddit for work, and so it might happen once a day now. I've started to use the Libredirect Addon to only view Reddit in a limited and tracker free experience: LibreRedirect - Firefox Addon. Before the API announcements i visited like 20 times a day at a minimum.
On my phone i've not been to Reddit since the blackout. It pains me to say, but i've deleted Sync for Reddit from my phone since that day. Great app, terrible admins. No plans to return to my accounts.
Edit: @metaStatic@kbin.social also has a great suggestion btw. Use the cached version from Google or something like Archive.is. There probably are addons for this kind of use by now. Everything to give them as little revenue as possible, if i'm kind of forced to find an answer to some technical question.
IDK, I'm having fun running around and throwing fuel on the fire in communities that have been forced open.
I'm exclusively using Lemmy and it's taken the place of boost on my home screen. I also exclusively open reddit in Google web cache and archive.org when I need a ressource that's within the years of reddit content. Fuck reddit and fuck spez.
I stopped posting on reddit before the blackout, but seeing all the creative ways people are finding to protest is honestly hilarious.
Good thing I got permanently suspended from Reddit for saying bullshit (I guess I never got a reason to why I was suspended)...
But I want to test Lemmy's tolerance of cuss words--- BULLSHIT Lets see what happens???
On July 1st my reddit usage will be zero. Until then I take a peek once a day or two to post http://join-lemmy.org where appropriate.
This is me , I logon once a day search api protest and add lemmy positive posts and maybe a lemmy post in one of my fav small subs. about 5% of my social media time. I expect to stop in july
Exactly. Been using this website for now as a replacement for Reddit, and not really using Mastodon much. On Mastodon you have to refollow a bunch of people, Twitter still works for me as a microblogging platform, despite being owned by someone I do not respect in any way.
Honestly, we're a minority of users and if we just left the only thing Reddit would notice is that posts were lower quality, and it's possible they wouldn't notice that at all. Going out loudly draws publicity to Reddit alternatives, and I think that harms them more in the long term.