Reddit mods, face the music. Your volunteer work is only going to get harder and even more thankless from here. Quit while you're up.
I understand people's attachment to their community, but if even a significant minority of those who went dark mass resigned on the 30th, it would've had so much bigger an impact than any of the ongoing attempts at protest.
I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That's way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It's no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.
To me, it appears that the ongoing follow up protests keep the power-admins' hands full from reopening the smaller privated subreddits.
And if all mods are unified, it can be hard for the admins to figure out what to do with the sub. There is a reason why interesting as fuck hasn't come back yet; the admins will own whatever the mods do.
Mods have an attachment to their community, but most of them have a bigger attachment to mod power. Plenty of mods were willing to protest, until their mod position was threatened. It's also why most mods won't even consider resigning or moving their community to the elsewhere, because that puts their mod position at risk.
Having a significant impact was never on the table.
This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.
Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.
The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.
So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.
This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.
And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
It is kinda cynical, but it's also exactly what you're seeing on Reddit. Some subs stopped protesting the moment Reddit said they will start removing moderators. Not because the sub wanted to stop protesting, but because the mods of that sub decided so. /r/pcgaming for instance is one of those subs. Another sub I frequently visited, /r/europe, pulled an entire charade of having users vote whether they want to protest or not, when protest won they asked for suggestions on how to protest, the top suggestion was moving the community which got no response from the mod team, instead they had another vote on whether to stop protesting or continue, and when continuing to protest won they gave some bullshit response and opened the sub. I never said moderators don't care about their subs, I simply stated that some of them value their moderation of the sub above what the sub might want to do.
As for fracturing the community, I'd argue what Reddit did already fractured communities into people who want to protest and people who don't. Fracturing was always going to happen, it's only a matter of making it apparent or acting like it didn't happen. Because of that you're not going to move the entire community anyway. The community is fractured, some people just don't want to move. From the mod perspective it should come down to understanding who are the people that actually make up the community you're moderating and then doing what they want.
I don't have an issue with mods who had the community vote and then opened the sub (or didn't even participate in the protest in the place) if the community voted that way. I have an issue with the mods who effectively make those decisions themselves. If you've already decided to protest without discussing it with the community then IMO you can't just decide to back out later, unless the community wants it. But that's what some of the mods did. Decided to protest and then decided to stop. Then it is already in your self-interest because you've technically already abused your power to protest without communicating it with the community. If you then stop protesting you should also resign because it's a breach of trust and someone who the community cannot trust shouldn't stay as a mod. But the mods don't do that because "who else is going to moderate?", meaning they would much rather moderate a community that has no reason to trust them than have someone else moderate the community. How is that not putting their own interest of moderating over the interest of the community?
I liked r/europe but wouldn't go to it now. What's the lemmy alternative?
This fits my observations. It seems to be easier for some very small, tight-knit communities. I can see why migration would be more feasible for those.
The larger trend will probably be much slower. Lemmy and other solutions need to grow, develop, and do some search optimization. I suspect that the number of mods on Reddit will slowly go down over the next year or two. Hopefully, most will find a new landing place.
Absolutely will cause a lot more spam to go through. But why is that the custom written moderators tool/bot fault? Why isn't Reddit the company doing more to stop or combat spam/bots? Why keep doing their job for them, for free?? If it's so damn useful (and BotDefense is), then Reddit should be doing it, or I don't know pay for that service?!
Because ... You can say to tech illiterate investors: "hey look, look at all the activity that goes on in my site"with not much scrutiny and inflate those rookie numbers up.
There is no much incentive, in the capitalists sense, to deter spam or trolls, fear mongering and explosive comments, clickbait journalism, etc etc etc ... for owners of any online outlet, it's all in the service of ever growing traffic.
People were providing free labour to address their shortcomings, why would they prioritize duplicating work? The part where they fucked up was the part where their CEO doesn't understand their business model.
Dilution will kill Reddit. Wait until the AI scraping gets into a feedback loop with AI posting.
Good on the developers/maintainers. Why develop a moderation tool without payment for a platform that considers you a leech?
Oh no. Anyway...
Musk gutted Twitter, firing people all around and it took the site a few months to break. It may take a while, but Reddit will crap itself.
"Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."
- Reddit
Yar, there be a shitstorm a brewin’ on the horizon. With a flood of bots, not only is the content quality going to drop further on Reddit, but we’ll see more disinformation, phishing attempts, and other crap of the same ilk too. This is how big sites die off, not all at once, but in waves.
The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It's going to be so much worse going forward.
The cynical part of me wants to say that's by design. That reddit wants to get rid of good moderation tools so that it can allow more paid astroturfung to get more revenue.
Enshittification stage 3.
Reddit started as a service based on fake users and activity to attract real users, it's going to end as bots talking to bots.
This may be the most significant result of the API debacle. Without proper tools to stop bots, the site will quickly become a nearly unusable cesspool. This is the kind of thing that will actually affect users in the long run. When site usability degrades, people will have even more reasons to jump ship.
I've been waiting for reddit to realize how much of a mess they've caused because it seems like they just think they can "ignore it and it'll go away" kinda deal. I wouldn't want them to have more spam and such but it gets to a point where something has to break...
This may ultimately be the most impactful event so far in the Reddit API debacle. Without filtering bots, Reddit will quickly devolve into unusable garbage.
Spam is delicious. I should go pan fry some today and eat with eggs.
Would you make some spam, spam and eggs, or rather spam, eggs, spam and spam?
Reddit mods, face the music. Your volunteer work is only going to get harder and even more thankless from here. Quit while you're up.
I understand people's attachment to their community, but if even a significant minority of those who went dark mass resigned on the 30th, it would've had so much bigger an impact than any of the ongoing attempts at protest.
I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That's way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It's no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.
To me, it appears that the ongoing follow up protests keep the power-admins' hands full from reopening the smaller privated subreddits.
And if all mods are unified, it can be hard for the admins to figure out what to do with the sub. There is a reason why interesting as fuck hasn't come back yet; the admins will own whatever the mods do.
Mods have an attachment to their community, but most of them have a bigger attachment to mod power. Plenty of mods were willing to protest, until their mod position was threatened. It's also why most mods won't even consider resigning or moving their community to the elsewhere, because that puts their mod position at risk.
Having a significant impact was never on the table.
This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.
Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.
The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.
So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.
This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.
And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
It is kinda cynical, but it's also exactly what you're seeing on Reddit. Some subs stopped protesting the moment Reddit said they will start removing moderators. Not because the sub wanted to stop protesting, but because the mods of that sub decided so. /r/pcgaming for instance is one of those subs. Another sub I frequently visited, /r/europe, pulled an entire charade of having users vote whether they want to protest or not, when protest won they asked for suggestions on how to protest, the top suggestion was moving the community which got no response from the mod team, instead they had another vote on whether to stop protesting or continue, and when continuing to protest won they gave some bullshit response and opened the sub. I never said moderators don't care about their subs, I simply stated that some of them value their moderation of the sub above what the sub might want to do.
As for fracturing the community, I'd argue what Reddit did already fractured communities into people who want to protest and people who don't. Fracturing was always going to happen, it's only a matter of making it apparent or acting like it didn't happen. Because of that you're not going to move the entire community anyway. The community is fractured, some people just don't want to move. From the mod perspective it should come down to understanding who are the people that actually make up the community you're moderating and then doing what they want.
I don't have an issue with mods who had the community vote and then opened the sub (or didn't even participate in the protest in the place) if the community voted that way. I have an issue with the mods who effectively make those decisions themselves. If you've already decided to protest without discussing it with the community then IMO you can't just decide to back out later, unless the community wants it. But that's what some of the mods did. Decided to protest and then decided to stop. Then it is already in your self-interest because you've technically already abused your power to protest without communicating it with the community. If you then stop protesting you should also resign because it's a breach of trust and someone who the community cannot trust shouldn't stay as a mod. But the mods don't do that because "who else is going to moderate?", meaning they would much rather moderate a community that has no reason to trust them than have someone else moderate the community. How is that not putting their own interest of moderating over the interest of the community?
I liked r/europe but wouldn't go to it now. What's the lemmy alternative?
This fits my observations. It seems to be easier for some very small, tight-knit communities. I can see why migration would be more feasible for those.
The larger trend will probably be much slower. Lemmy and other solutions need to grow, develop, and do some search optimization. I suspect that the number of mods on Reddit will slowly go down over the next year or two. Hopefully, most will find a new landing place.
Absolutely will cause a lot more spam to go through. But why is that the custom written moderators tool/bot fault? Why isn't Reddit the company doing more to stop or combat spam/bots? Why keep doing their job for them, for free?? If it's so damn useful (and BotDefense is), then Reddit should be doing it, or I don't know pay for that service?!
Because ... You can say to tech illiterate investors: "hey look, look at all the activity that goes on in my site"with not much scrutiny and inflate those rookie numbers up.
There is no much incentive, in the capitalists sense, to deter spam or trolls, fear mongering and explosive comments, clickbait journalism, etc etc etc ... for owners of any online outlet, it's all in the service of ever growing traffic.
People were providing free labour to address their shortcomings, why would they prioritize duplicating work? The part where they fucked up was the part where their CEO doesn't understand their business model.
Dilution will kill Reddit. Wait until the AI scraping gets into a feedback loop with AI posting.
Wasn't there a subreddit dedicated to this?
Yup! Bots talking: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2 Discussions about what the bots say: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta Humans discussing with bots: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimGPT2Interactive
Good on the developers/maintainers. Why develop a moderation tool without payment for a platform that considers you a leech?
Oh no. Anyway...
Musk gutted Twitter, firing people all around and it took the site a few months to break. It may take a while, but Reddit will crap itself.
"Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."
- Reddit
Yar, there be a shitstorm a brewin’ on the horizon. With a flood of bots, not only is the content quality going to drop further on Reddit, but we’ll see more disinformation, phishing attempts, and other crap of the same ilk too. This is how big sites die off, not all at once, but in waves.
The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It's going to be so much worse going forward.
The cynical part of me wants to say that's by design. That reddit wants to get rid of good moderation tools so that it can allow more paid astroturfung to get more revenue.
Enshittification stage 3.
Reddit started as a service based on fake users and activity to attract real users, it's going to end as bots talking to bots.
This may be the most significant result of the API debacle. Without proper tools to stop bots, the site will quickly become a nearly unusable cesspool. This is the kind of thing that will actually affect users in the long run. When site usability degrades, people will have even more reasons to jump ship.
I've been waiting for reddit to realize how much of a mess they've caused because it seems like they just think they can "ignore it and it'll go away" kinda deal. I wouldn't want them to have more spam and such but it gets to a point where something has to break...
This may ultimately be the most impactful event so far in the Reddit API debacle. Without filtering bots, Reddit will quickly devolve into unusable garbage.
Spam is delicious. I should go pan fry some today and eat with eggs.
Would you make some spam, spam and eggs, or rather spam, eggs, spam and spam?
Spam musubi! Yummmmmmm