Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts
macrumors.com
As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
Edit, there seems to be conflicting reporting on this issue:
While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout
Everyone needs to realise it doesnt matter. Enough people already came to lemmy for us to carry on without reddit. Now we just do the normal long haul work - help users who need help so people start searching lemmy for tech solutions, post our normal content here so there is a reason to stay, upvote and comment others work so there is engagement. The rest will follow as this grows and grows. We have already won. Lemmy is no longer a fringe interest.
I feel the same way. Critical mass has already been reached
I feel like another critical change happened, and that is that Reddit's users views of themselves changed. The idea that we are giving Reddit free content and labor so they can profit from it is spreading around.
An ugly underlayer has been laid bare and many are finding they don't really like it.
For a moment, I misread this as "tech positions" and got excited about a job board on here.
Community idea: we develop a fake company that we all "work" at so that we can vouch for each other and use our "experience" on our resumes.
Lemmings re-discover ancient multibillion dollar corporate CEO secret strategies
Or just list it as volunteer work...
I'll be your reference if you'll be mine.
Lemmy is a “ground floor” for the next random tidbits of knowledge aggregator. And I don’t mean that as Lemmy is new, but rather it’d the next port-of-call and mature enough to be engaging while not being entrenched in decades’ old procedures.
I’m excited. I logged off Reddit when Christian shuttered Apollo, signed up on Beehaw and never looked back.
Yeah I agree that enough attention has been placed on Lemmy for it to pop in Redditors heads when they start thinking of other sites to go to. It won't happen overnight but that'll also give the Lemmy devs time to apply some fixes and add new features.
Agreed, I have moved on. Lemmy is at the place now that it feels more like what the Internet should be. It feels more personal and tight knit. By the end with reddit, I felt so much like a tiny fish in a gigantic pond that it felt completely pointless to comment on anything.
Im nkt here to hunger strike from reddit until i get hungry. Im willing to hunger strike till i die. Fortunatly lemmy seems to be a source of nourishment but ive made my decision.
Completely agree. As long as users keep engaging and don't into the old habit of lurking we have nothing to worry about.
Hell yeah. Quality content is what Lemmy needs right now, the rest will follow
Good luck with that! I'm excited to see the fireworks as their brand-new mod teams use their brand-new mod tools right as they go public. Should be quite a show.
And on top of that when the new mods find out it's just like a regular job but without pay tons will bail out.
btw: thank you mods, honestly, after doing for a little while I think you are saints.
I was a mod on a big sub for awhile many years ago and it was a literal horrowshow every day. It was an endless torrent that never stopped, the mod team basically ran 24/7. It was guaranteed you would see at least some fucked up bigotry every time you looked in the queue because the sub was a regular target for those people. It was really just a nonstop firehose of all the worst the internet has to offer, one reported Reddit comment at a time, forever. The tools I had access to were janky browser plugins and things like that, stuff previous mods had built themselves years before because the actual Reddit tools were inadequate. The sub involved so much moderation the team was very organized and you had to put in a certain amount of work every month, it really was like a part time job where you get to set your own hours but can be "fired" for slacking. You often feel emotionally drained afterwards just like a real job, and you start feeling anxious when you "clock in" because fuck not this same miserable bullshit yet again, just like a real job. I have so much respect for quality moderation, it is not at all easy in any way.
With all the time and effort mods like yourself put into looking after subs, does Reddit not have at the very least a way of publicly rewarding moderators that do some much work keeping subs running? I know fellow Redditors can hand out ‘rewards’ but something directly from Reddit would show the community how much mods are appreciated and required.
Not that I'm aware of, but this was many years ago now so things could be different. I personally wouldn't have wanted any kind of public reward because that can paint a target, you get direct messages from problem users and other issues that come with recognition. I never publicly mentioned being a mod anywhere on Reddit, it was one of the things the mod team warned new mods about because trolls and other problem users will start targeting you directly.
That's a very good and fair point.
@coldredlight @peyotecosmico interesting!
Do you have any thoughts on what kind of mod tooling the Threadiverse needs to make mods' work easier?
I don't really have enough experience with them yet to have specific thoughts but my impression is they are very basic currently and need a lot of work. One thing that's really important is being able to do bulk actions against multiple users quickly. I remember the times when big attacks would happen and we would have a sudden flood of obvious problem users posting comments blatantly intended to cause disruptions, being able to efficiently respond in the moment to that scenario can be really important. It sucks when the mod team lacks the ability to respond quickly because in the meantime users trying to have a real conversation end up getting harassed, angered, and driven away with the impression the mods are worthless. You don't want to have to fight your tools and spend a bunch of time per individual action because by the time you get to dealing with the full swarm of trolls the conversation might have really taken a turn or be basically over so you end up cleaning things up after it doesn't make much difference for the users. Also, bots like automod are extremely useful and important so I would say the fediverse needs them ASAP. I never messed with the bots when I was mod but they were definitely like a force multiplier for the mod team.
@coldredlight @rysiek It seems to me that search would be critical. An ideal workflow during a flood might look like:
@rysiek @coldredlight @peyotecosmico from my experience modding on Facebook, the things I most often wished for were just better views of incoming comments. Being able to sort and group by time on a certain post, for example, and then filter that list by keyword so I can take bulk actions.
Being able to restrict who can comment on a post helps a LOT. The amount of harassment I had to deal with dropped significantly when I could change a post to only accounts over a certain age, for example.
I think what will happen is that a lot of the subs are eventually going to end up in the hands of the few mods who love sucking up to the admins and the mods who are in it for the dopamine they gain power-tripping instead of the mods who are in it to make the subreddit the best version of itself.
This will only further the "5 Mods Control 92 Of The Top 500 Subs" issue and lead to overall less happy, less engaged users.
undefined> This will only further the “5 Mods Control 92 Of The Top 500 Subs” issue and lead to overall less happy, less engaged users.
With that many subs, they couldn't be good mods even if they wanted to. It is truly only a power trip and badge collecting at that point.
It's like bragging that they're the CEO of 3 companies...ok so you're doing a terrible job managing 3 companies instead of trying to do good at 1.
And on top of that when those "tools" don't materialize and they're more overworked than previous mods having to manually squash bots and alt right trolls, even more will bail.
And I bet spammers will target the subreddits where mods have been removed.
or the people who now see an opportunity to take over a sub and power-trip
there is no good outcome for reddit with this situation
There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate
Sure, but let’s keep in mind eagerness does not equal competence.
Funny how he repeatedly uses phrases such as “the extent that they were profiting off of our API” but has never used the phrase “the extent that we rely on freely provided content and freely provided moderation. If it weren’t for the tens of millions of people who are giving us free stuff we wouldn’t even exist.”
I have yet to profit a single dime off of Reddit. After over ten years (11th Cake Day is coming up), and nothing to show for it but piles of worthless Karma.
I'm deleting all my free content off reddit. It's not particularly exciting content, but I have answered a few questions people probably ask on Google (recipes, cleaning tips, etc) that will now be gone. Just gotta back up my most important stuff first
I nuked the past several years of gif making from my asking. Felt like slicing out a troublesome family member and it still weirdly hurts to have done that.
It's like cutting out a toxic family member when you still care about their kids.
but if you sell your account you can get hundred of dollars! That's upwards of $9 a year of pure profit.
Hmmm, assimilate my account into the faceless horde collective of disinformation drones for a cup of coffee... Hard choice
He was referring to app developers who charged for license or for premium features. Those people “profited” or at least, took in revenue.
Its probably going to end up like facebook.
A big lumbering thing, still heavily populated but ad choked and overrun by bots and bad actors, indoctrinating unsuspecting users. Even if it stays big, hopefully its reputation will suffer enough to keep most new users away.
Getting into fediverse platforms has been a godsend. Talking to real people and not dealing with the high percentage of bots is incredible.
I literally forgot what it was like to browse content without sponsored ads strangling my feed.
Hello. I am a real person. Would you like to invest in crypto?
I would argue that the default subs already suffer from a lot of those problems. What's kept me around in Reddit is definitely the more specialist subs.
I feel like Reddit already turned into a general social media underneath us already, with so many reposts from TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it had nowhere near the amount of original style content as it used to.
The comments became no longer worth reading, with the same lame jokes populating the top of the thread, the atmosphere became toxic and not like a community.
What Reddit are doing is intended to turn the existing known entity into a profitable social media app, they don't care about the quality decline. The existing owners will slowly sell as the valuation increases and they will get their winnings at the expense of the decade of free labour from the content creators, moderators & developers.
We made them rich.
It feels a lot like Reddit wants to be Facebook, especially with the recent changes it made to the official app to remove control over what Redditors read.
However, I don't think Reddit can afford the moderation required to be Facebook.
I felt strongly that the updated Reddit interface was explicitly meant to look like facebook, to make fb users more comfortable.
Have you checked out the official app? Last I looked, it defaults to about 1 post visible at a time. You can adjust it to about 4 posts visible. Last I check, 1 of those posts was an ad and another was a recommended post.
It already feels like Facebook.
Simply replacing all the mods sound like a good way to kill a subreddit, Reddit probably has no way to pick good mods... Mods will need some connection with the topic, and you don't want to pick random users with no experience for large subreddits.
get ready for sudden and radical rule changes, non enforcement of rules, nsfw, bots, spam, all kinds of fun crazy shit in the subs with mods removed. I'm sure a percentage of subs would stay the same, but I don't think that percentage is very high.
Don’t forget there are literally Nazis being employed as Mods
Finally! Godwin's law!
I can already hear the CPA/affiliate marketing bots spinning up lol.
Man, I was mod for a tiny subreddit for a TV show that was niche. We still got slammed with bots, nsfw, spam, etc. I can't imagine what the big subs are like, and I laugh at Reddit trying to insert their people into that situation.
I'm mod of one and I'm worried about that kicking up, I feel like I'm not ready. Any recommendations?
Just make it part of your routine to check on things. Encourage your users to report spam, etc.
I can’t say I’m shocked, but I am disappointed. But at the same time - Lemmy/Kbin is the answer. This is the way.
The changes are coming at a good enough clip that it feels like it's worth taking a stand here. Even if things don't feel like reddit yet, we're getting there. Enough people leave and they'll have a pool of content consumers and no creators and that's a fast ticket to a quick death.
It's important to remember it's early days. Things aren't as smooth as reddit now, especially with Federation, but they're going to improve.
— u/spez to potential investors. Maybe. Probably. Might be slightly paraphrased.
This is too emotionally intelligent to be u/spez
I mean… did you even ask his permission before just ripping his words verbatim for your own post?
😎
Yes, I got the "message" from the Reddit CEO, and decided to pre-empt that, and I spent a few hours today manually deleting each and every post I made in my subreddit. The content is already anyway on my blog, on The Internet Archive, and on the Fediverse. So my subreddit now looks like this (he is welcome to let someone else take it now):
https://gdpr.eu/right-to-erasure-request-form/ <3
These definitely sound like the actions of a company that is in no way threatened at all not even a little bit.
/s
I doubt anyone is actually surprised by this. reddit owns the site, and (according to their TOS) they have rights to everything posted on their site (while they at the same time take zero responsibility for anything posted). I'm only surprised it's not happened sooner.
I'm also not surprised that this came about from someone that wants to take over one of the privated subs. Most likely to stroke their own egos.
I guess the problem is that they rely on moderators to do the work for free out of their love for their community. Every time the reddit admins pull shit like this, they are giving moderators a reason not to trust them.
So if i make a reddit sub, they can kick me from it whenever they want? How has this not been adressed so far?
Reposting a comment that applies here:
I don't think they care? As long as they can pump the communities with ads so they can IPO.
can't pump the community with ads if the community gets overrun with content offensive to those advertising companies
I can’t believe the amount of people I see that are supporting Reddits decision not only with the API pricing and changes, but in removing mods like this.
The whole reason for the blackouts is a protest against Reddit and their new policy. Now they’re threatening to come in and remove mods with their own appointed ones to force subs to open? And they’re for this?
I…just…wow.
It's not that they're for this specifically... It's that they are self centered. They're the same 75% of the population that is willing to cross the picket line at Starbucks cuz they want their coffee. They don't think about the workers rights, they only care about coffee.
The same people just want memes and football and porn. They don't care about what's behind the scenes unless it directly impacts them. And let's be honest, the reddit changes (for now) impact like 10% of reddits user base. That's not enough for them to give up some dumb memes for
Exactly; see /r/PS5, which recently reopened after the loudest voices on the sub overwhelmingly said they don't care if the world burns around them as long as they get their gaming sub. It's sad.
Can't wait to watch the most entertaining stage of enshittification...
Hey everyone we're trying to keep the reddit threads centralized in technology in beehaw. I'm not locking this one because there's a lot of discussion, but consider moving the chat over to https://beehaw.org/post/576904
Glad I left Reddit tbh, so far Lemmy/the Fediverse seems to be way better.
We're not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we're going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.
Reddit was pretty unpolished when I joined 13? years ago. There is something awesome about being on a frontier where posts are getting 20 comments instead of 2,000. Everybody gets a chance to contribute and be heard.
I like the concept, and so far I like the implementation, but it's still far too early to gain mass adoption based on what I'm seeing from bugs (account creation silently failed on multiple instances, and login can also silently fail) as well as how registering can feel like jumping through hoops. I wanted to register for beehaw but don't much care to go through an interview process. Then I wanted to make sure I could access beehaw content, but saw they recently defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I had to make sure not to register on either of those.
I don't know this will catch on. Currently each instance is so small, and the communities are even smaller. I worry that content won't update often enough to warrant checking more than once or twice a day. We'll have to wait and see how much this all grows and matures. I'd like this to be my Reddit replacement, but we'll see.
I'm tempted to say it's better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it's not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that's anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There's no shift+select, ban.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be here, and Lemmy's great, and there's far less toxicity (so far). All I'm saying is, (1) there's work to do, (2) don't gloat.
OK, third time trying to post this comment after my previous two never went through 🥲
I've seen a lot of people predict that this would be their next move if the blackouts continued. It's sad to see them actually begin with the threats though :/
I'm wondering if this is a sort of desperation move because of advertisers looking at removing spending from reddit if things continue - starting to put the screws on the mods. :( Particularly since they say advertisers would start thinking about moving away if things stayed dark for a couple of weeks.
I don't know, I'm heading to bed, rewritten this three times and I'm not a good speaker, so apologies for it not being very coherent! 😅
Anyway, still many shames on reddit. I hope the blackouts continue so that advertisers leave. Booooo reddit booooo.
So much for no impact on revenue. Lol
Steve Huffman should resign.
CEO is beholden to shareholders. He would be replaced with someone tasked with doing the same thing.
Capitalism
Would still be poetic justice. Remember when they threw Ellen Pao under the bus? They forgot to hire a scapegoat for this round of unpopular decisions.
It feels right to be reading this from the comfort of Lemmy.
From NBC News interview :
Eat sand /u/spez.
Funny. When my 10 year old account gets banned by some 6 month old power tripping mod account I'm told "moderators get to decide who can participate in their communities" and given zero recourse.
Now when mods go on strike, they're told it's undemocratic and that mods shouldn't get to decide who participates in their communities just because they moderate those communities.
Fuck this weasel.
The labor situation in a nutshell.
And remind us who's been maintaining that system for so long? I seem to remember spez saying something to the effect of "it's democratic because you can just start another community".
business owners are accountable???
well they pay accountants to write-off all their mistakes
What's endlessly fascinating to me is how quickly Reddit (spez) dug this hole for itself. I'm (or was) an Apollo user, but didn't pay close attention to the finer technical points of app use, and was only half paying attention when the API changes were announced. In a matter of about two weeks, I went from not having particularly strong feelings (like a shrug personified) to be vehemently anti-Reddit and Steve Huffman. And it has literally all been based on the things Reddit (spez and his mouthpieces) have said and done. In other words, there hasn't been any "persuasive propaganda" that swayed me. Just them, in all their idiocy, taking me from neutral to bury them in an incredibly short period of time. The level of incompetence is truly impressive.
The thing that really disappointed me was that they pretended that he tried to blackmail them.
They clearly were not expecting that Christian would have recorded the call and that it was not going to be "he said, I said".
Very proud of him.
It sounds like total incompetence, but I can’t believe that they don’t have a bigger plan. Like they’re burning the forest to promote new growth. Only the way they are going about it is to pull the rug from under our feet and ruin their brand.
This is literally a copy and paste from another article with Huffman posted TODAY:
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout
He said just a few months back that the API wasn't changing anytime soon. Words are kinda worthless
Yeah, I literally just saw that in my feed and was about to edit the post. I don't know what's up with the conflicting reporting.
Sorry, everyone.
No, I’m not saying you or MacRumors are wrong. I’m saying Spez is being Spez, lying directly to the public’s faces while doing exactly what he says he’s not doing.
Don't be sorry! That MacRumors article is based on this admin comment on reddit, it's reddit contradicting itself.
@xray it's the theverge thestupid is thereal
@bird
How many people think any such "election" Reddit holds will be a sham?
I have no faith that spez won't add fake votes to his preferred candidate
They can’t keep their story straight. First the protest is “noise” that will “blow over”. Now they’re forcing subs to re-open.
Look, even if the protest “fails”, they stick to the API pricing, and forcefully re-open subs, some things will be obvious and for everyone to see that weren’t before:
Also "97% of users doesn't use a 3rd party app" but also "the opportunity cost" is very high. Which one is it?
They're probably just upset that /all is a graveyard of "Reddit is killing third party apps". That's gotta look embarrassing for them
I'm pretty happy with how many subreddits are continuing to go dark, or the ones who are actively helping their users transition to other platforms.
It reminds me of the scene in "The Quiet Place" where the surrounding farms go dark one by one…
I'm glad that smart people not participating in the ongoing protest are using Reddit wisely, to shame Reddit.
Yeah - obviously Reddit isn't going to go down in a fiery blaze, wiped from the internet, but it's entering a long, slow, spiral, imo, after having made a series of terrible decisions and bad PR moves that are likely significantly reducing its value as a company and casting doubt on its longevity as the power house its historically been. As far as I'm concerned, the protests were a success because it's forced Reddit to show its hand in a very public way (after all MSM picked up the story).
Their handling of this situation has been piss poor. It feels like every step along the way, from the initial announcement about API pricing to his awful Reddit AMA where he replied 12 times and then fled, it's been a terrible look.
I'm hoping more people see alternates like kbin and give them a go.
yes and only responded to questions that vaguely related to the prepared answers they had. It was more a press briefing than an AMA.
Rampart
To investors it also portrays utter ineptitude and an open hostility to the adminsitration of the site by a large portion of the users, and that Reddit is utterly reliant on said users to generate its value. Lord knows I wouldn't dare want to take any stock in this company, social media in general makes little profit and Spez has admitted, before a fucking IPO, that Reddit is not profitable. What fool would buy stock in this?
I dare to say any speculation about new Reddit stock will be to short the shit out of it.
Spez also completely contradicts what the macrumors link is referring to: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/reddit-says-it-won-t-overrule-mods-and-force-subreddits-back-open/ar-AA1cBvUP
He's like the dictator with the secret police who "disappear" people but who outwardly makes grand statements about protecting democracy and protest. Bad vibes all around.
Me trying to figure out which Spez to trust:
https://i.imgflip.com/7pik09.jpg
Bit of a Ministry of Truth vibe right there.
I swear Reddit is not only not learning from history but purposely trying to repeat it again thinking oh the previous guys were just too weak....
I do think they know exactly how fucked the whole situation is, they are just trying to make the jump and peace out as long as they can make any money. This is an exit-strategy.
Stop giving thus self righteous, money hungry dickwad a voice, The Verge. Jesus christ. The more he talks, the dumber and more like Elon Musk he looks.
There was also an article of how he admires the cost cutting of elon musk with twitter
You mean the massive NetzDG violations?
I think it was about the employee cuts, we don't talk about the bad stuff
The employee cuts were what lead to that clusterf...!
I'm treating the blackout like a strike, and I don't cross picket lines, and neither should anyone else. No scabs. No one should be agreeing to moderate a sub that has lost all of its moderators to forcible removal.
I agree, but at the same time, the people who are willing to cross the picket lines are facists. They are desperate to take over any spaces they're able to and turn those places into hellholes. A bunch of subs are about to be destroyed by right wing nutjobs forcing their way into the top slots. A former T_D mod has already set his sights on aww, which would be the death of a wholesome sub like that.
Well the more fucked it gets, the quicker it burns. After what they’ve done I’ll be glad to see it go. Spez poured the accelerant, he struck the matches and tossed them around. All the while being pled with and warned at the same time, that what he was doing was wrong. Burn, baby, burn.
Except there are inevitably power mods who would happily nump at the opportunity to claim a few more subs for their fiefdoms
Let em have it. Then they can be kings of shit.
There is no shortage of power-hungry mods willing to work for free.
Alright! Time to Boaty McBoatface this thing.
I hate to sail on that old hellsite
Leave her Johnny leave her
The algo’s fucked and the app is shite
And it’s time for us to leave her
Yarp. Time to start blasting holes in the hull.
How?
Either vote in our own orrrr vote in people who will just destroy the sub.
The enshittification only continues..
the idea that a cabal of mods were going to take things in a good direction was always unsound
Notoriously mature and level headed mods that spend all day on the internet putting an excessive amount of emotional energy into something most people barely care about... Who could have predicted this?
When r/WorkReform sprang up overnight and proposed to elect moderators, Reddit's admins threatened to ban the subreddit for that
Fuck Spez. Fuck Reddit. Build kbin.
I like Lemmy more than Kbin, personally, but we can federate together and build up the fediverse 😄
I think Lemmy looks a bit more manageable but the people running it seem slightly concerning. I don't want to get attached to a place just to leave again.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of them either so that's why I joined different instances. Beehaw has been a really good one but I was enjoying lemmy.world before this account too.
I like the fact Lemmy seems to have a ton more instances, but I like the look of Kbin.
I'm the opposite haha, I think Kbin has some cool communities and stuff but I way prefer the look of Lemmy. To each their own! Beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose our own platform but still interact 😄
Any mobile web apps for kbin I can use for iPhone? Like wefwef for Lemmy?
Idk maybe, I implied I don't use Kbin with that comment from 25 days ago. Not sure why you'd ask me tbh.
Was rather foreseeable but seals the deal for me. I will will waste my time here.
So much for moderators being "free to run their communities as they choose" as this article outlines
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204533859-What-s-a-moderator-
It's pretty obvious they're given free reign until they happen to disagree with admins and then it's "they're holding subreddits hostage", "they're just Stewarts" etc
Reddit admins will legitimately say and do anything to frame this as not their own fuck up
Archived link for posterity
Stupid Stewarts. >:-(
Lol stewards.
If you put people in charge who don't know / care about particular communities in charge, there could be huge trouble.
You know.... like the legal advice subr×ddit being moderated by cops. Which it is.
I feel like normie fed-based socials need to start going live like bluesky so people can finally get off these shitty platforms. We need a leader in the federation space.
Reddit is already dead. Old.reddit will be removed soon.
Reddit is deaddit. Long live the glorious Lemmy-Kbin Continuum.
OTOH, old.reddit.com will now always live in my /etc/hosts file, pointing to the 127.0.0.1 where the admin is only half as bad of a poop.
Spez claimed that there are no plans to shut old.reddit down. We’ll see.
The cops are moving in with tear gas and rubber bullets...
against which kitchen pots have proven surprisingly useful elsewhere. against all odds
Union busting 101 - claiming the organizers are lazy and trying to skirt work and fire them asap
It's not union strike cause those mods didn't get paid. It's more like I stop doing something I care deeply about to just say "fuck spez."
Well, you could stay private and continue to moderate as if it would always be a private sub, just have a few authorized users and a few posts a day to moderate...
Spez “this isn’t impacting our bottom line” surely is acting like it is. Let the fire begin. Turn off all mod tools, all spam filters. Let the website turn into a shithole.
I read an article yesterday that had a brief mention of an advertising manager advising his clients to hold their campaigns, etc and see how this develops. The hold seemed to be less permanent than with Twitter. But seeing how it's not resolving totally on its own with some communities even permanently abandoning the platform (/r/StarTrek and associated subs), it might start having a bigger impact.
I knew this is what they would do. :) OpenAI hired Kenyans at 2$/hr to train their AI chatbot. This is what Reddit will do. Hire Africans at 2$/hr to moderate the most popular sub and generate traffic, than try and recruit new volunteer mods, all the while going for the IPO.
Yeah, there seemed to be a consensus that it would happen eventually
There is no way they'd pay $2 having grown used to getting it for free.
/r/ModCoord is polling subs, a lot of support still for indefinite blackout
Credit to the subs.
I'm a bit paranoid that this could be a technical truth because the communities still closed have dropped in DAU.
Edit: Checked the blackout tracker, of the ones listed 205 are still closed or restricted, so it's probably an accurate claim, though it seems about half of the participating subreddits are still closed.
They already removed some mods, it's not a threat it's Spaz being a jerk and awful person.
Honestly entirely predictable. Should really be a wake up call to moderators and communities that haven't gone dark that Reddit, Inc is not trustworthy (just like how spez has been willing to edit posts).
Good luck to Reddit trying to moderate 5000 new communities and not devolve into Twitter 2.
Moderate 5000 new communities using unpaid labor specifically. Because we all know Reddit doesn't have the employee power to commit to moderation and they definitely don't have the budget to hire it out.
The least they could do is make it less obvious who they will replace the mods with. I expect this kind of blatant takeover attitude from a place with less legal department. Like twitter.
With WHO? Who's gonna take over that wasn't already part of the mod teams?
Almost anyone
You can pick a user out of the crowd and tell them they're moderators now, but that doesn't really mean they're going to actually do the job. Reddit's not paying anyone to do that, they have to be self-motivated
blinks loudly What could go wrong? 🤣
Oh, I know this one! A bunch of Nazis are going to get together, vote out the mods of transgender/gay/Jewish subreddits, and turn them into uber-right-wing hate parades.
While I do think that probably would happen
The most likely thing i'm expecting is people will vote out the r/adviceanimals /wholesomememes mod because of how much it was advertised that he took over the subreddit from the original mods.
Then they will put him back and disable the vote feature.
Optionally it just immediately becomes found out that certain mods can't be voted out to begin with
It can backfire for spez, but I mean that's a good feature given that some mods are indeed awful.
Does he even use his own site? What a fucking disaster that will be.
I'm pretty sure spez wants the site to be a right wing hell hole, the admins actions on removing content certainly reflect that in my experience
One of those ideas that seem good on paper, until it's actually put in practice and you see how dogshit it is.
Ooh, can we vote out admins too?
I kid, I kid. Sort of.
I know I'm just nitpicking the headline but leave it to the apple community publication to make this about their app.
There are other apps?
/s
What we need to do is work with Reddit mods on niche / civil subs to encourage their user base to move here before reddit starts using scabs / censoring content
Not every mod wants to start over. Additionally, the tooling is not as evolved for moderating as it was on Reddit with add ons. So we'll just have to rely on the communities naturally forming here
One of my niche subs went dark and has stayed dark, which I respect. But there was no mention of an alternative before hand, so now I have nowhere to discuss it.
"we will not force communities to reopen"
But
"we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users"
Hahaha you know before this many people didn't think of reddit as corporate corporate. They scewed themselves and ruined their goodwill
I have to admit, it has changed the way I think of reddit, both as an entity and as a source of information.
I mean, yes, ofc they are going to eventually do this. The team at Reddit isn't going to just let their popular subreddits shutdown indefinitely. They just kick the mods out, moderate themselves or bring some other scabs in to do it.
I think it's the very problem of Reddit. Too much power at the top in a centralized way and too much power to mods of large subreddits with....more subscribers than countries have population.
I think the fediverse is just more the answer top to bottom for more community control.
Why can't "the community" just make another subreddit and then pick it up from there? Oh right, because they want to sell our data.
@letsgocrazy as to sell data? and? your point? that's how social media works.
@bird
@bird Expected. They own the website, they do what they want.
@petrescatraian @bird and now they seem to want to Elonise it.
@petrescatraian @bird someone said lately "management the gull way", suddenly show up, screem around and shit on everything, which seems to be the Elon way of management as well.. so reddit get's in line too?
@utzer oh gosh! 🤦
Really good analogy tho.
@bird
Btw, I am really amazed that there was a way for the users to express their disagreement with spez's decision. I honestly did not expect that. If that happened on Facebook or Twitter, the reaction would've surely been less spectacular.
Unlike Twitter or Facebook,
Reddit put most of its moderation into the hands of community members.
So redditors have more ways to make trouble.
I guess spez gets what he didn't pay for.
@utzer Exactly, wow. It's worrying how fast they want it to bust. In my country, I think it is the most popular social media platform not owned by Meta. And the Subreddits seemed okay. Now this happens.
@bird
Guess it's time to back up certain subreddits off of Reddit and then perhaps... delete them entirely? If it isn't hosted on Reddit anymore, Reddit can't do anything about it.
This would be a job for some data hoarders, though.
Archive Team is already on it
the fuckening just doesnt stop. u/Spez lost complete touch with the platform itself.
But hey, they own the joint. they can make their own decisions.
He has not lost touch, he doesn’t care. He’s bought and paid for. If shit does go south, he’s the fall guy.
And he will leave with a huge payout so he is set either way.
Yeah and we own this joint! I'm going to open my own instance, with blackjack and hookers
Goodbye Reddit.
Didn't they already do that on /r/tumblr? Why threaten what you already did?
Well, removing the abusive, ban-prone mods of /r/Firefox wouldn't be a bad idea.
LMAO their response to the VPN ads they rolled out to every Firefox user was hilarious. Any poster got the comment from a mod that the user should use the already existing posts about it, the thing is, each and every post was locked by the mods with the same comment, not one post was available to comment on the situation. Eventually some posts went through after a while, but these hours, man, that's when i went Chromium, if i get fucked either way, i might as well use the objectively superior browser.
Oh, and to fix the issue "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" needs to be disabled, sure dude, the next week there is the next sponsor you have to disable before it even appears.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-stops-firefox-fullscreen-vpn-ads-after-user-outrage/
Agreed. That sub has done a lot to convince me that leavin FF would have been a good idea. Good job /s.
I thought if the community agreed that they could be private.
I also thought that the black out didn't really matter for Reddit.
Guess they are starting to sweat.
What the hell lmao, literally 2 posts down on my feed is the Verge article from today which states:
?????
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout
In the npr article spez states that only 3% of redditors use third party apps, implying they are insignificant, but later states how if they switch to the official app that the financial benefit would be significant. Huh?!
It cannot be understated how much Spez fudged up in that AMA.
Effectively saying that the 3rd party apps are profitable while the "real" product is not is literally mind boggling.
If it is really 3% that uses 3rd party apps that means than that 3% can generate enough revenue for 3rd party developers to be profitable than the 97% of the "official users" who are for some reason not profitable for Reddit.
It would be insanity actually and just hilarious.
Spez is lying out of his ass in that AMA. “Reddit isn’t profitable”. Bitch! You’re telling your VCs are fine propping you up for almost 20 years without returns? I smell bullshit.
The "key facts" thing linked in the article is hilarious...
they voted to keep it closed.
Which makes this article even more interesting: they want to give users the possibility of voting mods out to put an end to the strike; and I genuinely hope that that backfires.
Especially because it's unclear how they'd give users the ability to vote on that, without it ending in a shitshow, considering the size of the platform....
But what percentage of the top 100 communities? I don't actually know that answer, but top 5000 doesn't really tell me anything about the quality of the subs that are open right now.
80% of the top 5000 communities tells me that 1000 communities remain closed. That's a lot.
/r/StarTrek is one of them.
It's not forcing a sub to open.
It's removing mods that are squatting on a sub or vandalising a sub, as per described in the mod guidelines.
Whether the new mods that Reddit instates open the sub or not is up to the new mods.
They can say the first and do the second. The mods they instate will open the sub.
@MeowdyPardner the same people that brought you this: https://youtu.be/M-2Scfj4FZk
@bird
They are getting desperate.
Really digging their heels in
Really "Digging" their heels in, indeed.
I would think (hope) that any of the good, decent moderators have already begun the migration over and the replacements are just going to be awful. Many moderators of the big subs have been doing it for some time. Thats a lot of brain drain. I wouldn't want to invest in a company that wants those in supervisory roles to be bodies rather than quality contributors.
@bird
Wow! took them this long to do that?
@bird
I think the mods should open up-and only use the official app to mod. If anything would scare future investors away, it would be giant mess reddit would become.
Can people just start moving to kbin or tildes now that we know the protests won’t change anything
What makes you think nothing is changing? Reddit is being forced to tear many of its own communities apart
Exactly. Reddit needing to force communities back open is the point. This protest is forcing Reddit to follow through on burning the bridge rather than just getting back to business as usual for free.