Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers.
- regular people get a break from their echo chambers
- VOLUNTEER mods get a break
- journalists get their news article
The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users data via comments and posts. I said this in another post but the existing CEO needs to get replaced. Maybe throw in a few other C—level executives to serve as additional blood sacrifices.
Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
I added reddit.com to my ublock filters - it was kind of an automatic click a few times a day and it's been a nice way to break the habit so strongly. I've got friends doing the same, and our microcommunity has formed around another platform already, after collectively losing reddit.
It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.
Breaking the muscle memory has been the hardest part for me. I don't have that much investment in Reddit succeeding and I'll be damned if I don't try to tap the app on my phone 3 or 4 times a day still, even after deleting.
I deleted my account and my 3rd party app and I found myself reflexively tapping the now-empty spot on my home screen 5-10 times yesterday. Today I haven't and only went to the mobile site a couple times to see what's going on with the state of things, but left as soon as the first "Oops, this /r/AskReddit text-only post is NSFW, open in the app!" message came up.
I have however visited HN and kbin 5-10x more today.
I treat Reddit now like I do Facebook. Containers in Firefox, accessed only through VPN. It's no longer a reflex - I have to put in at least a little effort to view its content. With pi-hole and ublock origin too.
I don’t know why they didn’t just offer API access at a fair price, it seems like it would have resulted in a better outcome than their current rock and hard place decision between backpedaling and never getting rid of the API awhile unprofitable, or getting rid of it and creating a diggv4 fiasco of the site being used to promote leaving the site.
I also added reddit to my ublock filters. Amazing how I never realized how often I go on autopilot and type reddit.com/r/whateversubreddit. If anyone else wants to do it, just add ||reddit.com^$all to your filters in ublock origin.
It’s crazy that slashdots moderation and meta moderation didn’t spring up elsewhere, but it was probably too complicated for what most people want out of a voting system.
Instead of plain up- and downvotes, you rated a given comment with one of several positives (insightful, interesting, funny, informative) or negatives (troll, flamebait, offtopic)
The best part was you could set your personal filters to exclude “funny” comments, or boost “offtopic” ones if you want. With thresholds! So the funniest stuff could still break through, but you didn’t have to wade through a million pun posts to find the serious comments.
They also have a metamoderation system where others’ moderation choices are shown to you and you agree or disagree.
Never seen another site like it. Kinda hope /. makes a resurgence.
If I remember correctly, you also couldn’t moderate on posts that you had commented on so it prevented using downvoting as extra signaling that others agreed with you in an argument. Also, you got 5 moderation points sort of randomly, you didn’t have the option to always be moderating. I browse Slashdot occasionally but once I found HN, the topics and discourse interested me here more, haven’t really spent much time there in years.
Thanks. I forgot about the 5-at-a-time thing! But now I remember the tiny delight when I was entrusted with that little clutch of power. I “spent” them wisely.
And this is another thing I think made that mod system good. Only so many points available.
Also -- people would randomly be given moderation points, and you only had so many at a time. I think people's chance of getting moderation points was weighted by how 'good' of a community member you were (account age, participation in moderation, metamoderation 'agreement')
Soylentnews also exists based on the slashdot source, and uses the same/similar moderation.
I only have a 5 digit Slashdot ID, but I remember the early days. I really, really liked /. back in the day. I don't remember what happened to drive me away but going back now the content seems to be very similar to what's on the HN front page now. However, there's something about the look and feel that is off-putting to me. Maybe its the fonts or the stuck in the 00's design.
IIRC, they also limit the base scores from - 1 to +5, while only giving people a limited number of points to distribute. It helped avoid what you see on reddit sometimes where a comment gets piled on for no reason.
I've always felt the downvote option was a colossal mistake and just allowed controversial or unpopular points of view to disappear, strengthening the filter effect for everything else.
I mean even 4chan doesn't have downvote functionality, if people disagree with you they'll just call you a f* or n* which, while nasty, doesn't actually change visibility of your post, plus only the admins can ban you or delete a post, not jumped-up mods, and frankly you'd have to be pretty extreme on there to earn that.
But 4chan is also a complete cesspit. Like any place that adopts "free speech absolutist" attitudes. Reddit's heyday is long passed, but at least it is still very useful for grassroots information amalgamation. If you've ever had to google some issue, typing reddit into the query will land you some posts with discussion in them. Good luck finding that on 4chan.
It is a cesspit but for broadening perspectives it is much much better than reddit, even with less structure of discussions and worse discoverability.
"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.
You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.
> You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.
The main issue with that is that it assumes anyone on the internet is arguing anything in good faith. Boosting checkmarks has turned twitter to nearly unusable to actually unusable, because the signal to noise ratio on the replies from checkmarks tend to be somewhere on the factually provable incorrect to outright slurs spectrum. Expecting any better on 4chan of all places will be a a fruitless endeavor more akin to self-harm. If you don't want to wade through shit, maybe don't have your discussions in a sewer.
HN, while not perfect, will often be a place that cultivates some rare insight.
There is no trivial way to detect motivation, on the contrary leveraging the accusation of someone arguing in bad faith is usually seen as ending an intellectual exchange.
To be realistic, this can be that case, especially on the net, and there are ways you can make an educated guess. But it stays a guess and in the end I want to do the guessing myself. It cannot be outsourced aside from the most trivial cases like spam, advertising, etc.
That aside people with a foul mouth might use words differently while others people might receive it as a slur. We now have words that have much more might than they had before with the better approach to such issues.
This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst getting more soundbites than I could possibly debunk, so I lose the optics part of the debate by default.
And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.
It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.
I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.
there's a few semi-shady things that 4chan does better than anywhere else though.
like finding pdfs for rpgs. not to say it's not a pit, cess or otherwise, but there's a good few nuggets swimming around in there.
I agree, downvoting is a bad idea across the board for silencing people that are not in the majority group-think. You don't even have to have a reason to down vote someone.
What I find interesting is that on HN, downvoting doesn't seem to have a negative impact, not as much as Reddit anyway. And I wonder if that's because folks who use HN really care about HN - I do - and make a good-faith, concerted effort to contribute in a positive way, with moderators who will enforce rules, but will not remove posts they disagree with (Reddit), or mandate arbitrary and inconsistent standards (Reddit).
We are experiencing almost a reverse Library of Alexandria of House of Wisdom moment. The people are Boston Tea Partying their own contributions, destroying the value by using scripts to delete all their comments. As sad is it is to see the platform go to shit over time, I feel a poetic peace along with my bittersweet sadness to see such a loss of information, all at once. In some sense there is no undoing this week, even if the blackout ends. As they say in The Worlds End, “for the greater good.”
The last part is really what gets me. How could they possibly get that far along with the plan of "charge for the API" without doing a basic analysis of all the stuff people currently use the API for? That really gives an indicating of where their focus is.
> Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
I agree this is likely, which will extend the negative reactions further and alienate even more users. Unless Reddit execs do a 180 in the very near future I think the platform will be forever crippled.
Large networks rarely die overnight and whatever happens they will still have a number of users for the foreseeable future, but the steady fade to irrelevance will begin in earnest.
Power users drive a huge amount of content and moderation, and they are especially livid right now for good reason.
There are not enough volunteers to handle the load. Companies depend on free labor to moderate things and will never be able to afford the actual cost of doing business without that free labor.
I currently moderate 2 subs (down from 5). I'm looking to offload those 2 without having them get banned for being unmoderated (again).
I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators.
To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. At least if the mods of some sub go haywire, users can always create another sub. With widespread use of AI moderation, there'd be nowhere to go to escape.
> I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators.
THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi.
The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah."
We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing.
Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.
Strange, I had all of my accounts banned but my spouses weren't. Same wifi. Appeal process was over 48h later and I was unbanned. If they were doing that, it seems any account that ever used Tor or a VPN would be banned.
Maybe they saw your "it was my neighbor on my wifi, I swear!" and reflex-nuked.
Also, mods don't suspend accounts, employees do. From user reports. Then admins reinstate or don't.
I wouldn't put it past them to auto-nuke any appeal with the word neighbor, though. That's the "my dog ate my homework" equivalent of trying to get out of a warranted ban.
FWIW, I've played around with Palm a bit and if you feed it some rules it's pretty good at explaining which rule a "bad" post violates. It could be a good initial triage
We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.
Something like GPT 4 didn't exist 5, 10 years ago, re Zuckerberg. It won't take much further improvement for eg OpenAI's models to effectively handle moderation based on learning from instruction for a given community's moderation needs.
There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity.
This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon.
Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.
Pretty arrogant to call it a comical failure when OpenAI is openly stating they're not training GPT 5. I think people who think we can do much better than GPT 4 without insane cost scaling and a nuts amount of data (that's going to get harder to collect when regulations start to kick in), probably don't know what they're talking about. We're deep into diminishing returns here.
I do think we can do much better than GPT4. Size isn't everything. Small models can outperform large models, when trained and finetuned in the right way. And transformers are hardly the be-all and end-all of language AI either - there's plenty of reason to believe they're both inefficient and architecturally unsuited for some of the tasks we expect of it. The field is brand new, and now that the ChatGPT has brought the world's figurative Eye Of Sauron on developing human-level AI, we're going to see a lot of progress very quickly.
Yeah, but if the tech keeps improving at the rate it has been then more and more of it is going to get automated. And tbh, that’s a good thing. Moderating is a horrible job that frequently causes mental health issues for the people who have to do it.
I expect that AI will increase the need for human moderation. LLMs are better at producing passable spam than identifying it, so any gains in AI moderation will be more than offset. I actually worry that AI spam will become too powerful for even good human+AI moderation and we'll see the death of high quality open discussions online.
Where will reddit get enough mods to police the hundreds (thousands?) of subreddits each with tens of thousands of members that are rebelling against the API changes? Blocking/firing the existing mods would make the site descend into chaos.
They are really only going to care about the top tier subs, the rest will be replaced by the community. So really we're only taking 20-100 subreddits, depending on definitions.
Depends on what you consider "top tier". 26 subs with over 20 million subscribers are private or restricted. 86 subs with over 5 million subscribers. I was too lazy to count, but there's several dozen more over 1 million subscribers and a ton over half a million.
I'm skeptical they can afford to lose all those subs or replace their mods.
Besides alienating the users even further directly, forcible replacement of the mods with sycophants will also make the subs be ruled by people who don't quite get theie local cultures, don't know what's it's "normal", and that'll be overburdened and outright despised by their userbases, who'll shit the subs even further.
Your view is a little simplistic. There is plenty of useful information on Reddit. I'm a big fan of home-related subs for example, where a lot of trade-knowledgeable people seem to hang out. There is a wealth of information on subs like r/DIY, r/HomeImprovement, r/paint, r/woodworking, etc.
I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.
My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.
Reddit also offloads the complexity of forum management from moderators and removes the friction of registration.
If you want to create a traditional forum, you have to figure out how to host it, what forum software you want to use, how that software works, how to configure it, etc. If you get attacked by spammers, hackers, or trolls, you have to figure out how to stop that more or less from scratch. It requires a significant amount of technical knowledge, time, and money to make it work.
Then, even if you use a dedicated forum hosting service, your forum is still basically on an island. You have to find a userbase and attract them, convince them to register dedicated accounts for your forum specifically, and keep them coming back, which is really hard if you don't have an existing userbase to make your forum compelling in the first place.
With Reddit, nearly all of that goes away. Creating a subreddit is extremely easy and costs nothing but time. Moderators still have to moderate, but they don't have to figure out how to manage forum software or handle DDoS attacks. Since any Reddit user can join and participate in any subreddit, and since posts appear on users' homepages in one feed, communities can grow much more quickly and are less likely to die out due to inactivity. And there's only one UI for the whole site, so users don't have to learn how to use whatever random forum software each site has chosen.
What, you don't want to sign up for 27 different forums, all using their own variations of CRUDs?
The solution to Reddit is a similarly centralized approach managed instead in the style of Wikipedia (not suggesting exactly replicating their governance, rather something generally akin to Wikipedia's not-for-profit direction).
People use Reddit because the alternative is blogspam. When I try to find DIY or home improvement advice, I see the same points repeated without much detail. The articles are intended to push Amazon affiliate links or other services.
I want to see real problems other homeowners are facing and the knowledge many other homeowners have to fix it. That's not something I see on any platform other than Reddit.
Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to find real individuals discussing things via Google. It's all promoted content and blogspam.
A long time ago, Google used to have a filter you could select for "forums". Once that disappeared, we had the "+reddit" hack. Now what? I have no idea.
My recollection is that during the Google+ period, Google changed their indexing and basically destroyed every other forum. Things that were first page results dropped out completely and lost virtually all of their ad revenue.
> My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.
This is clearly the reason in my eyes. I append "reddit" to most of search queries not because reddit always has the best advice/information, but because the alternative is usually wading through page after page of SEO blog spam. Even if I know the information is better found somewhere else, I can usually find that somewhere else from reddit.
Want to compare headphones? Search returns blog spam. Computer components? Blog spam. Software framework or library question? Blog spam. Healthcare / Medicine? 1000 government / hospital websites that all give the same useless information. Nutrition? Blog spam. Every search results is either endless affiliate spam blogs or endless blogs all sharing the same trivial parts about a topic.
It's possible that there is a ton of useful information on the internet, but it's certainly not easy to find. It's amazing to me that Reddit failed to take advantage of their position as quasi internet hub, and seem to just want to be yet another endless content scroller app.
Reddit also largely offers a uniform browsing experience, single starting point, and single log in. The comment tree can be easier to have side conversations in and although subreddit names sometimes fall in this trap, hobby forums had/have all kinds of whacky names which make discovery hard. Reddit primarily lacks the in comment photo display of old style forums.
Everyone uses Reddit because everyone uses Reddit. Most people old enough to remember forums agree that forums were a dramatically better solution, but they're generally dead now (with some exceptions). Discourse is almost entirely Reddit or Facebook these days.
Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information, usually you get a crowd of uninformed but confident people, paginated poorly, with a bunch of dead links. The worst is people who write or distribute code and use forum posts as a substitute for version control. That is still a thing in some niches.
I can't agree that forums is dramatically better. I know/remember the feeling when you opens thread in forum with title that you are interested in just to see 200+ pages of slowly ongoing flamewar and spam.
Why do you think forums died? It wasn't because everyone serendipitously decided to switch to a dramatically worse system.
When Twitter went crazy, there was a clear migration path 'Just use Mastodon'[1]. With Reddit shut down, there's no clear alternative for communities to migrate to.
You say forums are clearly superior? Are you volunteering to operate r/seattle (or whatever community you/I care about), and its 100-500,000 users as a phpbb board? I sure as hell ain't...
[1] I mean, there are problems with that migration path, but they are significantly smaller than migrating a large subreddit to a forum. Reddit, both pre- or post-enshittification is still the path of least resistance for running a community, which is why people who put in the time to run communities use it, over self-hosting. It wasn't 'dramatically worse' for the people that mattered.
Forums still rule for discourse content for some subjects. Some of them are basically grand-fathered in because Google will surface them and their communities started before Reddit. Guitar gear is one of those. There are still half a dozen forums that provide way better discourse than Reddit. I imagine a big part of that is because the users are an older age group.
> I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.
Phpbb-style forums are a mess. Simultaneously too ordered and not ordered enough - you don't get threaded replies, but you do have to put everything in the right topic and the right forum. No notifications that do the right thing.
For years I remember forum makers refusing to offer a "just notify me when someone's replied to my question, otherwise don't bother me" feature on the grounds that it would destroy participation. IMO the main reason Reddit won is that it offered just that.
As a way to create a community "I want to ignore anything that isn't a direct answer to a specific question" is something of an anti-feature.
I've never made lasting connections with people from Reddit/HN for exactly that reason.
I wonder if that's gonna work against the boycott here. If for most people Reddit is more StackOverflow question+answer + TV (mindless background scrolling) than a sticky community/communities, than that will make mass migration that much harder to coordinate and manage.
Using forum you have to scroll via dozens of pages while trying to follow discussion by reading separate comments divided by other comments. With reddit tree structure of comments you can easy and quickly follow discussion and votes helps you understand of significancy of each comments. Same as in HN btw.
As a mod I am getting messages from regular users who are desperate to see posts that have likely troubleshooting answers to problems they are having at work.
Reddit is kind of a critical technical resource for some people and this is really hurting them at least right now.
Yep, I suggested that and I also suggested an IRC channel which I know to have active people that help with the same technical system that the sub does.
I'm not convinced they lose out either. The front page doesn't really feel different than it did before. There are a handful of "Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments" posts, but I'm kinda blind to them the same way I'm blind to ads as I scroll past. Otherwise it just feels like any other day on reddit.
People thought the meltdowns over the various FB redesigns or [x] decisions would hurt FB too (there were many major ones).
Most regular users on Reddit view it through feeds not individual subs. It’s very plausible the bulk won’t even notice, except when other people tell them it’s happening or it makes the news. Eventually others might wonder why they haven’t seen some sub posts recently but it will probably take a month or so.
These are the people clicking ads and using their mobile app.
The top ten things on /r/all is currently two articles about Trump and "Reddit is killing third party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments." from eight different subreddits.
It doesn't work out for everybody. Lots of high quality communities outside of reddit have been invaded by people looking for an alternative and as a result they are now fighting massive traffic spikes, spam or the general reddit hive-mind taking over their discussion.
There is a noticeable uptick of barely concealed white supremacy here in the last 2 days. I would feel confident saying that the way upvotes and downvotes work on a cultural level has changed.
We've had conservatives here forever, but I haven't seen people talk about things like "replacement theory". I think there's been a definite overton window shift towards the right wing.
Yesterday there was a question where someone asked what /. is and there were 20 replies with "slashdot" in reddit style. I haven't seen a straight out of reddit comment thread like that for months.
I've definitely found myself angrier reading hacker news than I have been in the months previous. I haven't figured out if that's more of a "we become what we behold" (https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb) or a real change.
The right-wing bent on HN has been here for at least 5 years, probably longer. I haven't noticed it get worse, just more confident because its been allowed for so long.
You are clearly feeling very righteous, but I think you should temper your righteousness. You might want to consider that while spez may not be the best human, he has had a commendable commitment to free speech. The Reddit platform has been protecting speaking truth to power, and in this case that power is himself. He has the power to shut down anti-spez content on reddit and for the most part has let his platform be leveraged against him.
Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.
When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.
I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.
A bunch of what you said is probably bang on, but I can’t let that “for the most part” slide without mentioning he has literally been caught editing comments that were directed towards him in the past.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...
> he has had a commendable commitment to free speech
Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.
I'm not very sympathetic to crying about loss of free speech from people who do not protect free speech themselves.
Isn't it a bit hypocritical to ban people from r/conservative for not toeing the party line and then complain about that same behavior being applied to themselves?
I considered those actions to be protective of free speech rather than in violation of it.
Parent commenter is talking about (banned) conservative subs, not r/conservative specifically.
And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.
If you want to go back to original sin then reddit should not have gone public and installed the investors as the ultimate power. Steve Huffman was one of the founders
I'll give you that, but I also don't think it was clear at the time that "next quarters profit" culture would destroy everything good.
The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."
Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.
I don't think that was a part of the collective consciousness 10 years ago.
People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later."
So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.
You might be speaking specifically about Reddit and the Q4 profit question, but otherwise I want to point out that the idea that immediate returns in business ultimately destroys good products has been in the cultural consciousness for much longer than 10 years.
This was not something I thought about, understood, or really had conveyed to me until I was in my late 20s and saw it happening first hand with product after product. When I asked "why" the answer was there, but I didn't get the answer until I asked the question. I didn't ask the question until I saw the harm.
So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.
There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".
We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.
Exactly, I see merit in your comment. They are making it some kind of "David vs Goliath" situation where spez is the Goliath but judging by the ease with which these mods were able to close shops and killed traffic to their subs all of a sudden, this now seems more of a "elves vs dwarves" situation where both sides have somewhat roughly balanced powers.
Reddit probably needs a way to monetize their platform, I have no idea how well their finances look.
I think reddit did change for the worse though. Restrictions to speech and opinions, aggression if you deviate from the allegedly correct perspective. The company did revoke their principles of free expression for sleazy advertisers and market "research". Typical corporation.
Of course they need a way to finance their costs, but I think in the long run they shoot themselves in the foot. I believe we will also see age restrictions in the near future and do away with anonymity. Might kill the platform completely though.
Blood sacrifices won't be enough, unless the sacrifice is the company as a whole. Oddly enough, the only time that Reddit managed to unite its userbase for a cause, that cause was against Reddit itself. Users might disagree on the best approach, but practically nobody trusts the company any more, it isn't just the CEO.
That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.
>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.
Reddit is seriously underestimating the impact of users waning in muscle memory launching their app or going on their site. This is going to cost them way more than the $1M per year or so in missed ad revenue from users who wouldn’t user their app without Apollo. The reputational damage alone is huge. Add the angered mods and users. Investors who were considering buying into the IPO see how much power the community has, and can topple the platform, which means they will value the company less.
A prime example of cutting your nose to spite your face.
That's a very dicey prediction to make. It might be dead in the long run but for now, the pent up traffic will all start flowing back to those subs. And who knows, who is to say if the newly installed mods are better or worse than the present ones? Maybe they will just be the same.
Am I missing something - all reddit has to do is one code change to prevent subreddits from getting private or closed.
Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.
Reddit forcing open the subreddits would result in massive backlash from moderators, who are often the main people providing content and enforcing content quality. It would crank the degree to which Reddit is tarnishing its reputation to 11.
A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users who don’t post top-level content or serve as moderators are on the 1% who do.
Maybe. I'm not sure though. Reddit has an organic way to grow it's user engagement. It didn't start out with all of these mods. The general mood/experience on reddit today is much chiller. A lot of the people susceptible to feelings of indignation are gone. I think it's very possible new mods / content contributors will grow organically, conforming to whatever in house tools reddit creates. But who knows, maybe it will go the way of digg.
Reddit already gave their strategy away earlier today when Hoffman wrote:
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.[^1]
It's encouraging to see that some subreddits are responding to the fact that the company is just planning to ignore users.
I bit the bullet yesterday and just called it quits.
I was there for a very long time (before it was even “launched” officially).
So I do it with a heavy heart, but I don't think there’s any way of going back for them now. Its been a downward trend for literally years at this point.
I quit in October and don’t miss it much. A few niche subs but nothing that would ever be on the home page. All this drama has me visiting more than I had over the intervening time which is sort of funny, they’re probably seeing a traffic bump right now from all the publicity but I believe the PR dumpster fire will be the end of their IPO ambitions.
I went through multiple accounts since 2009, first one I closed was due to harassment as a result of posting about the Xbox One (which wasn't released back then)...
reddit always had extremely cringy but popular sides to it (Unidan, Boston Marathon witch hunt) and since the very beginning the decisions of the leadership have felt immature, off and wrong.
Reddit's leadership has always prevented reddit from being a thriving, productive community and their ineptitude has simply reached a boiling point now. For most of the time it felt like sifting through liquid poop to find a gold nugget once a week.
Sure, but you can’t argue that there is no sentimentality lost when you delete such an old account with your canonical username. (albeit title cased like I used to do as an early teen).
Its extremely unlikely I go back because ultimately I will feel like I have less than I did before.
This is what is needed to put pressure on Reddit. A two day protest then returning to normal is a blip in the grand scheme of things. But if they do not change their API pricing, stance on third party apps, etc, then a prolonged blackout could lead to an eventual exodus.
I hope the communities I used to engage in partake in this prolonged blackout.
> A two day protest then returning to normal is a blip in the grand scheme of things.
People keep saying this. It's true of the vast majority of protests. And yet, they keep happening, and I don't think it's because they're completely ineffective.
I'll grant I don't entirely get it either, but here's my theory of how they work: by being a show of unity, protests are an honest signal of power. In any case where the party being protested against is not willing to cause mass civilian casualties, unified rebellion is a genuine threat. It's an even bigger threat in a democracy, or a commercial setting. It's also a signal of willingness to accept costs (not guaranteed honest, but it's still pretty hard to coordinate a bluff in public).
The threat isn't so much the initial strike, as the promise that more will follow unless the opponent agrees to negotiate. Without such a promise, the strike would indeed be ineffective.
Negotiations are typically held during a ceasefire, not while the parties are actively trying to hurt each other.
I agree. In addition to your theory, I think that even if protests are ineffective in the short term, they can be effective in the long term. That is, the media attention given to protests can gradually change people's thinking. But it is a very slow and subtle shift, and impossible to measure. Of course, one might argue that shifts in the zeitgeist were already happening, and protests are just a symptom. Personally I think it goes both ways, they feed into each other.
We can hope that even if the Reddit protests ultimately go nowhere, they will at least have shifted public opinion, if only slightly.
Maybe I'm reading it in a biased manner, but that sure has the feel of "if we wait it out the pigs will get hungry and be back at the trough on Wednesday." I don't think they respect their users, he doesn't understand that's a big part of why people are getting so upset, and he just keeps talking. Lol.
What gave you that idea? The fact that spez (the ceo) was head-mod for /r/jailbait? Or was it spez firing the AMA mod that had -massive- community engagement? Or was it spez bullying one of the top reddit-app developers (Christian, Apollo reddit-app developer)?
Reddit /obviously/ respects each and every user, the app developers, the subreddit mods, and it shows! /s
Jeez, now he was the head mod of r/jailbait? This game of telephone is ridiculous.
There’s no need to slander the guy with false information. Reddit used to allow the moderators of a subreddit to automatically make someone a moderator of that subreddit. Then, as things like people being added as an r/jailbait mod against their wishes became widespread, Reddit changed to an invite system which required a user to accept an invite to be a moderator.
Spez was not an actual moderator of r/jailbait, he was added against his wishes. Please don’t spread harmful lies about the guy, there’s enough true things about him to criticize.
You forgot ‘stealth edited the posts of other users by editing the database directly’ in his list of crimes, don’t forget that along with the firing of the AMA person and lying about the Apollo dev. Those things are all based in reality.
I disagree on the 'lying about the Apollo dev'. The Apollo dev definitely said 'I can make it real easy for you', 'Apollo can quiet down' 'you cut me a check for $10m' then he tried to backtrack when pushed on clarification for a 3rd time. Yes - there was an apology by the Reddit rep as far as misinterpreting but he did say what he was accused of saying.
Spinning it to the dev saying he was referring to Apollo as a "noisy API user" was really suspect, imo. I've never heard a heavy API user being called "noisy" and why even mention a number for a buy out multiple times? The "mostly joking" was a cop out as well. Is it a joke or not? Because when he was asked for clarification, he clarified $10m and 6 months again.
I really do not read the Apollo dev anywhere close to what you do. I read it has him writing that to make a point, not that it was actually a serious offer. I have no idea why you would think anything like that would be a serious offer. Or why a serious offer would be made in public like that.
Moderation is a hierarchy and the CEO is the head of a company.
A CEO moderator is THE HEAD moderator.
Your attempt to quibble over meaning instead of acknowledging that the most powerful position in the company took on a powerful position of moderation…
… for /r/jailbait …
There’s no amount of spin you can put on this to make what I said any less correct or damning.
You know, I'm beginning to think that Reddit really doesn't need to do anything. It might be best from a PR perspective to let these mods kill their subreddits. People will be chomping at the bit to start their own replacement subreddits.
This is what occurred to me upon hitting my first private subreddit screen; if I was an aspiring mod, now would be a good opportunity to found a new subreddit, though I have no idea how you'd draw traffic/attention to it. The other ploy would be to see about getting the admins to turn an existing sub over to you; I suppose they could say it's been abandoned or something to that effect.
... until they just take over the moderation of their largest communities and this whole thing ends. I mean what's so magical about the moderation of something like r/videos other than the mods being free labor for Reddit?
I think you underestimate the value of that free labor.
Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.
> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).
That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.
> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))
While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.
It's content generated by users, and it's the source of the content that matters, not the source of the moderation.
There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them.
> Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.
Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make. That's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place. Losing all that free labour is absolutely the last thing they want at this juncture.
But even ignoring that, suppose all >15M subreddit suddenly get salaried mods. Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it? Or would they just wait around and keep working until their subreddit is also "siezed" by Reddit inc.
Is there any example of a community which successfully runs on mixed salaried/volunteer moderator labour in such a way?
> Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make, that's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place.
I'm sure there'd be plenty of volunteers who already manage several of the big 20M+ subs that didn't go dark. We're only talking about 6 subs, and they aren't that complex.
> Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it?
They don't matter nearly as much. The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.
Again we're only talking about 6 subs. Not even double digits. There's already groups of subs that mod many, many large subreddits.
You're assuming that if Reddit decides to "fire" all mods of the top subreddits, there would be dozens of (suitable) people happily waiting to take their place. I don't think that's remotely the case.
> The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.
Reddit wouldn't exactly be Reddit if you reduce it to only /r/aww and five of the other most mainstream subreddits. If that's what you think will happen... Well I don't exactly disagree with you, but Reddit would be a very different product at that point.
But then they’d get banned and lose all that Reddit karma and their very important badges
And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?
there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.
Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.
The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.
Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.
Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.
Content spam is way easier to manage especially automatically and I don't mean with LLMs, just current tools.
The only reason why it's working right now is because the mods in charge of these subs are upset, and a few mods can shutdown a 30m+ sub. I suspect the number of users on r/aww that care _that much_ to get their account banned for spam.
If it was just users being upset (which would be the case if reddit reclaims them) I just don't think there's enough upset people for there to be an impact like that.
Just earlier this month Reddit started having issues with follower spam -- something that was specifically a problem because it bypassed volunteer mod control and Reddit was doing a shit job taking care of it. There were tons of threads about how to turn off those notifications.
Just yesterday Musk was lamenting about how bad the bot situation on Twitter has gotten recently.
And none of that even gets into keeping content on topic for a community, just straight up spam.
r/aww is literally just cute animals. Most of the others are just memes/reposts of their respective topic.
There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge.
I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.
There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
I'm betting all subreddits soon turn into /r/eyeblech (gore/death/dismemberment gifs). Not necessarily illegal, but definitely not what you're looking for when you go to /r/awww
But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.
And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.
I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.
But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(
If one of Reddits big goals in all this is to sell actually useful information on a broad variety of topics for training LLMs (I think they’ve basically said as much), then I’m not sure that only being able to prop up a few meme and cute animal subreddits is that much of a win.
It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.
can you name a single from r/aww ? Could you even tell if they reopened it with new mods? People are not that passionate about mods from a sub about cute animals.
Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.
Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them
I suspect if Reddit starts replacing those mods outright you could see other mods leaving, it might work out for Reddit but it's a dangerous game. Also, which mods get removed, and would they be banned completely? The big subreddits have lots of mods, many who just help with small stuff and from my understanding do so over a lot of the large subreddits, so the actual details here of who stays, who's leaving what subreddits, etc. probably get murky pretty fast. (And that's besides the fact that the new mods would have little idea how things were currently run, unless some of the existing mods help them).
The selling point of Reddit, though, is not that r/popular is the greatest list of links ever created. The selling point is that you can tailor your links perfectly to your tastes, right? Good luck to them.
I had no idea futurology was that big. I remember years ago when it used to be a singularity/life-extension/transhumanist subreddit, and then it got brigaded by climate change activists, to the point that most of the articles on the front page were about clean energy, rising sea levels, and recycling. Also a lot of doomer types actually bemoaning life extension outright, because of the usual nonsense about "where will we put ALL THE PEOPLE" and "Drump will live FOREVER." I stopped checking it out years ago, but it serves as a case study of how entryists co-opt and destroy online communities.
lol good luck getting to the singularity when food scarcity hits riot levels and the coasts are flooding. The future we get is the future we deserve, not the one we fantasize about.
> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.
Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is?
>Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?
Let me know if my math is wrong: it means that 5 people are on the moderation team of 18.4 subs. The 500 top subs often have mod teams from 20 to 50 people.
Bringing up that stat doesn't seem really relevant.
I'm saying it probably doesn't take much man power to moderate these subreddits as you might think. Bring in a team of 5-10 full time workers would probably be enough, tbh.
I don't see how they'd have difficulties replacing the mods. Even if it's hard to find replacements within the Reddit community there are lots of blue checks on Twitter who'd probably be thrilled to take over Reddit moderation and might even pay Reddit for the privilege.
I don’t know why you are downvoted. Reddit did annonce to some moderators that AI moderation was coming this year and I heard that some already have access for testing. I also heard that it works pretty well to automate many actions, though it still requires some humans.
Paying .kids for the large subreddits won't cost that much.
However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)
I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be automated moderation, if they're not already. Enough flags on a post? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.
> Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.
I'm a mod at a 150k+ user subreddit. AI can probably handle removing objectionable content, but I spend most of my time on other areas that are much less susceptible to automation.
• Removing requests when there are recent similar posts. We've found that users disengage when the same requests are posted every week.
• Hosting AMAs. An AI isn't going to know who we should invite or whether they'll be a good fit for our subreddit.
• Detecting and banning people deceptively promoting their own products. This is incredibly common and often quite difficult.
Exact duplicates are already automatically removed by bots.
We remove request posts that lack detail or when there have been several similar active posts within the year. This strikes a balance between allowing every post only once and swamping the subreddit with nearly identical requests. We removed about 75% of the posts reported for this category last month, the remaining 25% either didn't have previous similar requests or had enough to detail to stay up. Many cases are ambiguous and resolved by majority vote.
AMAs don't happen spontaneously in major subs. As with everything else, there's a lot of admin work that goes on behind the scenes. We mostly invite people for AMAs; under 10% of this year's 10+ AMAs were requested by the participant. Someone has to email them, answer their questions, schedule a time, explain how to post, join them in a chat channel, etc.
Deceptive promotion is rarely flagged on our sub. We got ~450 reports last month and none of them were for promotion. Promotion posts are quite rare; they're against our rules and most people don't even try. What we regularly see are comments from users recommending their own products. Some cases are obvious, e.g. new accounts frequently recommending a book without ratings that was released yesterday. Many are much harder to identify; we regularly search user profiles and the Internet to confirm an identity. One person we banned last year had been covertly recommending their book for months. It took numerous searches and several weeks to remove all their promotion comments.
Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.
I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.
Do you think users will continue to report posts if they see that reporting too often will cause them to be shadowbanned?
Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?
For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.
I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be botted, if they're not already. Enough flags on an account? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new accounts in an hour.
The big subs have figured out an extensive set up of bots and moderation guidelines, while investing their own time, all for free. Reddit’s mod tooling is extremely abysmal, that’s part of the protest. (Only 3P devs have bothered building more advanced tools.) A new mod will not have the expertise or careful set up from the previous mods.
Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry, particularly on a sub like Music or Videos. Finding a replacement mod team without specific agendas is going to be hard. Only the most power tripping or ideologically driven will want the position as paying mods seems out of the question given Reddit’s stance.
Inexperienced mods will also be unable to handle the torrent of spam and low effort posts and comments the big sub attract.
It’s not impossible to punish the dissident mods but having a functional replacement on short notice is impossible.
Agreed. To me the most interesting part is what is going to happen to the large community specific subreddits, i.e the sports subreddits like r/soccer, r/music, r/movies, r/anime, etc. Those mod teams are generally very good and dedicate a lot of time to make the subreddit feel like a home for people who are interested in that community. Those will be the hardest mod teams to replace as opposed to large front page subreddits like r/pics or the smaller subreddits. Those subreddits are the middle ground of large enough to have constant abuse/spam but require domain specific knowledge so not anyone can be a good mod.
People underestimate how much goes into moderating a community. You can train the bots to remove posts based on age of account, or karma. But to respond and remove racist trash in comments or just spam takes a lot of time. Especially for large communities, the time spent can become a full time job (in terms of hours).
And when you have to insert paid moderators, the cost to moderate all of the huge communities will blow up Reddit’s internal budget.
It’s easier said than done. Just ask FB or Google (with YouTube), they have difficulty moderating their own platforms and they have billions of dollars at their disposal.
Hmm I wonder if one could just run comments through an LLM and have it classify for things they want to block, then moderate automatically based on that. Probably more accurate and less expensive than hiring people for it.
If they do, whatever thrown together group of reddit appointed substitutes get the task of trying to moderate all of reddit at once is likely going to be drowning very badly
And you can expect people engaged with the protest to take full advantage of this if it happens, making the problem that much worse
If you simply reopen without any of the current mods, the site will be overrun
I’ve got my entire neighborhood teed up to go and spread rumors that spez likes to do weird things to porcupines the second the moderation walls go down.
Reddit is already complaining about being unprofitable, having to actually pay moderators to do the work community members are doing for free would make their situation even worse.
Trying to milk 3rd-party developers with excessively high API fees while expecting the community to provide all the value for their site free of charge was a very short-sighted move.
Impassioned people with domain experience, in many cases.
/r/videos, sure, that's got its own culture, history, known reposts, moderation style needs, etc. It will take some work to for a group of communications majors to figure out how to moderate it.
But /r/PLC, where I hung out frequently? You need reasonably intelligent electrical engineers to discern spammy press releases from interesting news! We don't work cheap, except when we work for free. Elite athletics, weird hobby niches, professional forums, on and on...Reddit's long tail, where much of the value was, relies on domain experts who were also good communicators. Those are hard people to find.
Stackexchange, love it or hate it, has the same thing going. Are you going to hire a pilot to mod the aviation stack, or a post-doc to moderate mathematics?
Should voting by itself sort the good and bad content? So if the community knows things naturally the spam should fall down and good content be on top?
Is that the case? Wouldn't the mods by definition be the most passionate people about reddit, and therefore the sort of people who would most likely be upset about the recent changes? And therefore anyone who would potentially do the job of mod likely to also be upset by the changes?
If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption that these people can be easily replaced for granted.
Moderation of the subreddit matters a lot less than sitting on a common keyword. It’s not like r/real_trueToyotaFans2 is going to see a ton of traffic even if it’s the best moderated sub in the world.
Domain-squatting on a couple dozen important keywords and brand names in 2005 is the powermod secret to success, not that they’re just that great at their job that they rose to the top on merit.
There are quite a few subs that prove this - really, really badly moderated but sitting on super, super valuable real estate. And Reddit doesn’t really have a mechanism for handling this unless the mod is outright posting gore or something - they got their first in 2005, that’s the end of it.
They're getting away with this because there really is no serious competitor for reddit.
When people actually start migrating away from reddit and post/comment volume is significantly down, you'll see reddit suddenly be a lot more willing to engage with the community.
One possible outcome is that the pie shrinks. If Reddit hurts the user experience and drives away creators and mods, some people will leave with no alternative and simply spend less time on the Internet.
In my case, I've replaced my Reddit time ~50% with HN and ~50% with... something else, like doing work.
You’re right due to the network effects Reddit currently enjoys.
Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed using tildes.net lately. I know everyone is jumping on Lemmy and federation, which is great in practice but Tildes feels more accessible to me and for that reason may have more potential to actually capture a user base.
Same here if possible. I’ve checked out both Lemmy and tildes over the last week and I’ve quite enjoyed the discussion quality on tildes that bit more.
All the Freebies on the Internet of the past 20 years be it email, search, chat, news/content, video, streaming, social etc have been funded by Ads.
The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy.
Theses changes, what's happening at twitter, the tech layoffs, govt regulations and fines, are all signs using Freebies for Attention Capture are not going to endlessly scale.
This may prompt Reddit to push ahead on their threat to take over key subs that stay dark by replacing the moderators with their own. Of course, Reddit can't afford to scale that to very many popular subs as modding those is extremely labor intensive.
Worse for Reddit, dumping long-time community moderators en masse would be crossing a Rubicon that could tip Reddit into a death spiral of low-effort moderation reducing content quality and engagement which will feed back on itself. The mods going dark for longer may in fact be hoping to goad Reddit into responding with such self-destructive stupidity.
I'm really not sure the big subs would suffer all that much. Many of them are already modded by a clique of mods and are large enough that there's not really any community to be had there anyway. It would be pretty terrible for the small communities that were reddit's most valuable part
Defamation for starters. See Neibich v. Reddit and Berger v. Reddit. So far section 230 has shielded them from much of these but the law has been targeted over the last couple years. So far the Supreme Court hasn’t addressed questions on the scope of section 230. I’m guessing the thinking goes if section 230 scope is narrowed and moderators are on the company payroll that could move them from a content provider (not liable) to more of a newspaper publishing articles (liable).
That’s been the part of this blackout that has hurt the most, honestly. I’ve been on Reddit for longer than a decade and all but entirely shut out the front page subs like Videos, InterestingAF, etc. I wouldn’t miss those if they disappeared tomorrow.
Instead, I’m in far smaller niche and location-relevant subs. I didn’t realize what cutting off my city subreddit would do for my sense of connection to my city. I didn’t realize how shit general search results are for questions about hobbies.
It’s really made me question if can allow one entity to serve as such an important conduit to my interests again.
Sports subreddits are a notable exception imo. While they might get a bit silly, r/cfb, r/nba, etc. are so much better than Twitter or any other public forum that losing them would be pretty awful.
I only follow motorsports so the only sports subs I'm on are motogp, v8supercars and formula1.
The F1 subreddit (over a million subs)is one of the absolute worst places on the internet for any kind of discussion. It's totally dominated by The Hive Mind, dissenting opinions are absolutely unwelcome and the top posts on every single post are low-effort jokes, usually jokes that have been told a thousand times before. It's awful.
MotoGP (250k+ subs) is better, but still suffers from similar problems.
V8Supercars is quiet, but the discussion is of a far higher quality.
Subreddits generally undergo twinkdeath between 100k and 1m users. Once enough people know about the sub they tell all their snoo friends and pretty soon it’s just a hivemind and memes and funny quips. Watched it happen to a lot of tech subs.
The exception is subs that lean heavily into over-the-top curation which is also its own special kind of groupthink hell imo.
/r/formula1 is really hit or miss. I wouldn't say it's as horrible as you make it out to be, but the pervasive groupthink of the sport as a whole (whoever is on top needs to be knocked down a peg, Liberty Media sucks, whatever) is certainly strong there.
Reddit would be better with better moderation. Would be great if there was a clever way (machine learning?) to identify and remove all low effort posts and reposts. Would also be better if there was a clever way to detect and ban karma whores and users who just post crap to build karma and sell the account.
So this means spez is just gonna suspend and institute his own mods, right?
Blackout isn't enough, don't let them scab the VOLUNTEER mods - don't cross the picket line - better yet, delete your account after using a tool to scrub your account's history. Delete isn't enough, you need to replace it with junk.
If you're going to lurk, make sure you're blocking first party ads.
Expect more sealed off content. Thanks to ai scrapers more companies will want to close their apis or charge a fee. Heck even openai, the main leech want to prevent others from “training” their bots against their ai that has been trained on other people’s work, bandwidth and ip. Mods closing subreddits are just a symptom.
Yeah I remember back in the day people stealing credit card data used to claim there is nothing to be done against them. Then warez kids on irc claiming no one can or should stop piracy. Things will eventually balance out, dont worry too much.
To the people who've been in this situation, what would you do in Huffman's shoes? From my fairly naïve perspective it looks like he's doing a pretty poor job managing this crisis but am I overestimating the trouble he's in?
At some point he'll either be forced to back down or replace the mods of the big subs with people willing to cross the picket line, I don't see why he doesn't just pull the plaster off now either way rather than drag this out bleeding credibility all the while?
I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers.
What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers?
- Reddit would get many more premium subscribers
- App developers would be able to avoid managing subscription fee’s themselves and continue as before
- Users of the official Reddit app would not be affected
- Users of third party apps would have to pay for Reddit Premium - but maybe at a discount
I've gotta tell you - in 6-12 months nobody will even care anymore - and Reddit will still be used en masse like before.
Talking with regular non-techy people who use reddit regularly - nobody outside our bubble even knows about or cares about the whole API fiasco. Most people I've talked with shrug and say they'll just use the official app if that's what it all means. The others asked if they can just pay and use the same 3rd party app in the future.
Reddit has been, and is filled with drama. These public news pieces make the community appear extremely naïve, to a fault. When people hear some of these apps had tens, or hundreds of thousands of users that circumvented ad revenue for reddit - they mostly do not have sympathy for the 3rd party app developers.
Just being realistic. I like reddit as much as the next guy, and agree the leadership is terrible (reddit has a long history of terrible leadership).
Yes, the people who read the news stories are definitely going to feel a lot of sympathy for the Reddit shareholders who have been denied their rightful ad revenue. They are definitely (mmph) the victims (snort) in all of this. Won't somebody think of the dividends???
What broke Digg is exactly what will break Reddit. The 90:9:1 rule applies just as heavily to Reddit as it does to everything that came before it, including Digg. If you made a Venn diagram of Reddit power users to those affected by the shuttering of popular apps, the overlap would be immense, and I'd be willing to put money on it being the case too.
If you drive the power users away, nobody is sharing content or engaging in the comments regularly enough for the 9% of casual commenters to stay engaged and they leave - then the 90% goes because there's nothing at all for them to lurk around.
I think the issue with this is that the bigger third party apps (Apollo) actually host their own backend which talks to reddit on behalf of the apps so they can quickly deploy fixes. I tried to find the reddit thread about it I remember reading to confirm, but uhh... the blackout exists.
I'd take a step back, apologize for the Apollo stunt, delay the API pricing by a few months to improve the first party app and, since reddit ultimately does want to kill 3rd parties, offer to buy out the tools and popular apps at some reasonable price (or maybe offer to contract them for whatever changes may be needed to make the tools official).
I think being honest about their goal would've reduced a lot of the backlash. The issue is that they're claiming to be working with the community when it's blatantly obvious that they aren't.
Ideally they'd just go to more reasonable/free API pricing though.
I have had a thought like this as well - the Apollo guy obviously does not make a rich man's salary off his app.
The way he's described things, it seems like he could've done this or that hail mary thing, a quick gofundme round maybe, to see if the Apollo users wanted to get behind the app in order to keep it by providing the six-month cushion that Reddit will not, and see if they can work out a new, still-equitable pricing scheme. My guess is that as an app with a huge userbase and reputation, he probably could have pivoted this into better income, even. But it also looks to me like he's just taken a sober look at things and realized that the nature of the game has changed and he doesn't want to play.
People on here keep saying the mods are deluded, but I think the mods are something much more powerful: disillusioned.
Don't get in bed with venture capital, focus on sustainability and technical continuity rather than continuous growth, and be community driven instead of profit driven.
An organization needs to make enough money to live, but it doesn't need quarterly RoI and growth. That is a demand of a public market. Reddit got greedy and sold out.
It's time to start building new communities outside reddit. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to happen.
> To the people who've been in this situation, what would you do in Huffman's shoes?
- Extend the 30 day to apply the pricing to 6 months (at least) to let people figure it out their stuff ;
- Give some leverage for the _existing_ 3 party apps that contributed to reddit till this point on the form of a smaller price;
GME / BBBY is able to raise money from a mountain of APEs by basically giving the crowd what they want.
Reddit needs more funding to turn into a profitable company. They also need these 3rd party apps and other such features (that they're cutting because they don't make enough profits yet).
Just be honest with the world. Reddit needs money, please support the IPO, lets see how much money is raised and where it can go. Promise to use the money to buy out Apollo or something.
I've been off of reddit for 2 days now, and am willing to stay off idefinitely. TBH I'm probably happier and more productive without it. I just need to find something to read in the bathroom instead...
That awkward moment you realize Reddit is in a better position to win this war because people like us just want to have a digital place to spend time, not fight a war.
Truth be told I don't care much about all of this, I just want my subs back or replaced so I can mindlessly scroll them. Wasn't using a third party app, but if I was I'd probably feel unhappy for a week before I simply switch and don't think back.
I've been actively avoiding Reddit during this protest and I just signed up to a Lemmy instance. The UI isn't great but the communities are already pretty hopping. I need to subscribe to a few more things but it seems to handle the fix for now.
I'm never using Reddit's awful app -- it's just not how I like to use Reddit. I'm an old.reddit.com kind of person.
The point is for any that is like you my guess is there are 2 more like me. Or 20, or 200. Never checked how much people use 3rd party apps vs. total users.
Honest question, what is so bad about the Reddit app that you would give up browsing the content you like?
I experience little ads, and if I would be annoyed by it I would probably find ways to get rid of it (pi-hole style). I'm OK with how the app displays comments, I can fold them etc. Don't need much more.
I've been using 3rd party apps for over 15 years -- I used Alien Blue on iOS when I had an iPhone and I bought Relay for Reddit on Android over 10 years ago. I use old.reddit.com and always have (back when it was just reddit.com).
How do I find and read that content that I like? It's a very different (and, for me, worse) experience in their official reddit app and on the non-old Reddit.com.
If I'm going to adjust to a different and worse way of browsing content, I might as well just go to a different site entirely. It's similar to how Microsoft keeps adding user-hostile features and degrading the UI on Windows every year. Most users will stay (I do) but a few more will move to Linux or Mac OS. I fully understand where you are coming from -- for you nothing has been lost. For me, it's a significant change for the worse.
But in this case the alternative is not MacOS or Ubuntu, but a distro nobody has ever heard of. Third-party app users may be the more die-hard/advanced user group - and the minority - but I wonder how many of them are willing to switch to a small distro which might not have the content or might have an even shittier app experience.
If there are no alternatives, which today there aren't to the best of my knowledge, my guess is Reddit will win this stalemate. Sure, people will leave but not nearly as many as the leaders of the strike would like to think. At least, not for long.
There hasn't been a strong need for alternatives so there was little motivation to make one (or improve the ones that exist). I think that's going to be changing now.
I don't expect a rapid fall of Reddit or Twitter but rather a slow decline. It's not unprecedented.
That's the risk they take, indeed. Also the risk for anyone who migrates as chances are the alternative is not profitable either. In the end, to sustain the offering party needs to be profitable or at least break even.
Reddit went from 700 employees to 2000 employees because they took VC money and have to grow grow grow. I'm sure one could make a sustainable business out of Reddit but nobody wants just a sustainable business.
The cycle will repeat for sure -- it's been repeating for over 20 years now.
>Honest question, what is so bad about the Reddit app that you would give up browsing the content you like?
I don't appreciate being lied to, treated like less than garbage? And I'm certainly not going to keep contributing to a platform that does that to me? Especially when this stuff is only going to get worse as they "march towards profitability"?
I gotta log off. I don't know if ppl here are young, naive, or if it's just the usual inability to remember anything from more than a few years ago, or the short-sightedness of not seeing where this is going. Catch ya on Digg.
People are there of all types, no matter their age.
My take is feeling offended is a choice. Personally, I just let it slide off and continue my life. Life's to short to get offended by these things. But we are different and that's fine.
I'm not offended, I just don't really see a reason to build community or amass knowledge on platforms that demonstrate they no longer give a hot toot about the community that made them.
I would agree with you were this drama not consistently hitting the frontpage on Reddit. If the users who wouldn't turn back aren't a majority, they are still a significant fraction. That's not good news for the IPO Reddit is hoping for.
From what I have gathered sofar, Spez was thinking win-win : raise the API price, if they pay, fantastic, fresh money hose. If they don’t: apps get killed (we are here) and people flock to our official offerings and we gain eyeballs.
Ofcourse this protest was probably not on his timeline. Let’s hope it kills all traction it had.
I have never used a third party app. I've used compact mode (i), old, new and their first-party app on Android. The information density on their first-party app is so low as to be painful. Then there are ads that feel like a run-by assault. Somehow they're now competing with _LinkedIn_ for how painful they can make being curious and attempting to connect with others.
If the first-part app is all there is, it's easier just to go somewhere else.
I have been a member of r/NASCAR for nearly a decade, and it's been a great place to gather with NASCAR fans outside of the stereotypical Facebook/Twitter crowd. Niche (ish?) sport/hobby/interest subs like that are going to suffer the most from reddit's potential downfall, as there isn't another viable, easily-accessible place for members of those communities to gather online.
I've never been a big reddit user but I increased my usage as Twitter devolved into what it is now, but now I'm going to have to find something else. I'll most likely start paying for Apple News for general/current event stuff, stick with HN for tech, but I no longer have a "turn off your brain and just decompress with some funny/random crap" outlet.
Bummer, I'm sure it was floated, and probably shot down for some stupid non-sensical reason, but I would have insta-paid something in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a year for a personal access token that I could plug into an app like Apollo and continue using Reddit via API.
They could have required Reddit Premium to use third party apps or something of the sort. Or injected ads into third party apps via the API. Or forced third party apps through a verification process to get an API key not unlike Google's Oauth process and monetize it differently for training use cases, etc.
How does / will Reddit make money? Selling ads? Harvesting data? Monthly subscriptions? Some combination of all three? I have difficulty imagining why anybody would pay a fee to join a bbs no matter how fancy it is. Might be just me as a cheap old codger. Now, they can use ai to generate posts and dispense with moderators and even posters I guess.
I think this question is far more interesting than the blackout drama. It seems Reddit hasn't made a cent of profit in 15 years. That's absurd even by SV standards.
Is it incompetence? Not a priority because the focus was always on growth? Or just difficult/impossible as nobody wants to pay for anything and block ads?
I don't know the answer, but the answer matters. Both in this strike and the Stackoverflow strike many people are dropping claims that the company only cares about money. Those claims make little sense to me when the companies is making a loss.
You could have very valid reasons to strike, but you're striking against a company in financial trouble, facing an existential AI threat, and an advertiser pullback.
Like so many other startup darlings, probably has a matching 9 figure AWS bill from their over-engineered ball of yarn that nobody has bothered doing any cost/performance optimization on.
They sell ads, but now they also charge for API requests. Unlike most forums, a significant amount of Reddit interactions happen via the API. They have all the best communities on the internet, but their software is HORRIBLE, so the community has created all kinds of popular 3rd party clients, tools, and bots for engaging the community without having to use the god-awful Reddit software.
Reddit does have Reddit premium which is a monthly subscription but they won't even allow users who purchase that to use third party apps. That would be a sensible middle ground.
This is what the protest should have been from the start. The biggest mistake that any of the participating subs made was setting an end date. u/spez and the rest of the reddit admin need to be sweating, wondering when their site will return to normal.
I once, after four years of acting as sole line of defense against a destructively stupid but politically influential "colleague," I gave warnings then gave notice.
I ended up jumping to another department where I watched him bring in an expensive vendor to implement a replacement for a system I had been using, and then watched corrupt files start appearing in the production files. I was there just long enough to hear about his quiet exit from the company.
Someone else needs to quietly exit from the company if they hope to get this out of the grease fire. At this point, we'll all see what happens pretty quickly I think, but this looks to me like a ship with a thousand leaks and a drunk captain who won't come out of his cabin because people yell at him about problems that are not his when he does.
There's two problems with this: first, the new mods have a good chance of being just as bad as the old mods. Second, the new subs will not be able to use the good subreddit names and will be harder to find. The latter is core problem: discoverability. If it was possible to just found a new sub and have it show up just as clearly when you search for subs related to a particular topic, then if the mods turn out to be terrible there's not many problems in just starting a new sub. But as long as only one subreddit can have a particular name you can't solve that problem
Hopefully the whole thing implodes and we go back to specific message boards.
HN would hardly be better if random people mostly interested in cooking or martial arts were putting in their two cents here.
I really can't think of any subject that is better on Reddit than it was on an old message forum that was killed off by these giant platforms.
Compare any subreddit about psytrance or trance music to the corpse of forum.isratrance.com.
It isn't even close. The forum owner is also self interested to not be labeled oppressive. I can't think of any old forum I was ever on that had problems of oppressive moderation.
That isratrance forum of course though doesn't scale to a few hundred million people and early investors getting rich.
This is where they could really come in. Automatically forward anyone who tries to access old one to new one. And they could even migrate the content already there.
Win-Win. New community gets the boost they deserve and old one gets to stay dark.
i feel like mod oppression isn't much an issue outside of the free speech absolutism rhetoric that plagues places like twitter. and tbh most of the people screeching about this aren't spending much time on reddit to begin with.
Well, no, mods on Reddit aren't democratic in the slightest, it's a basic dictatorship where the topmost mod has all the power. And in a dictatorship the best you can hope for is a BDFL, but BDFLs arise when a community starts small (and thus doesn't attract malevolent dictators) and congeals around someone benevolent. You can't take a large community and appoint a new dictator, because it will overwhelmingly attract exactly the type of person who shouldn't be the dictator. In practice, this will likely result in more malevolent dictators, not fewer.
This will be good for reddit. Maybe they will manage to get rid of that group of moderators, and new subs will replace them. Reddit will find new mods and the renovation will be good for their audience
But first they have to make it easy for users to find alternative subreddits. Currently it s not even possible, their search sucks
To make this work, the protest needs one additional ingredient: create a Reddit clone and move the subreddits there while the blackout lasts. This will increase the pressure 10x. By a Reddit clone I mean something pixel-perfect (except the branding) because users hate changes.
I think it'd be better to create an open-source platform to power one "subreddit" that can be hosted and deployed by the mods.
Then the content can be exported from reddit into each of those platforms.
The instances could be federated. Reddit users could redeem their account across the federated network by proving they control the same account on reddit (either send a message to a bot on reddit, or by generating a one-time password then posting its hash to reddit)
I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode.
Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don't think any for-profit company makes such promises.
If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rules as they see fit. I am not sure why reddit decided to nix the 3rd party apps but my gut feeling is, this is a financially motivated move. And if it is so, can you blame them?
I wish someone could explain me why everyone is in an huge uproar today.
If they had made prudent allowances for uses of the API other than 3rd party frontends, this likely would have been a much smaller deal.
Moderators(who are doing tons of free work to make reddit a tolerable place) use API based tools to help them moderate. If reddit is going to make their (volunteer!) job harder, why shouldn't they just pack up and leave?
The official reddit app reportedly does not make adequate accommodations for some disabled users, but dedicated third party developers did. They later said that they would give exemptions for accessibility use cases, but stipulated that they could not charge for their service. Some people the perceived this as: "we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it."
Then there is the disingenuous interactions with the Apollo developer.
All-in-all, people think that reddit is acting in bad faith.
()Allowances ? You mean don't ask them for more money, even though those apps are making money. How is this a good business idea? I mean for Reddit.
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()Moderators are not forced to work for free. If they do, they are doing this willingly and if they choose to quit, nobody is blaming them.
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()If original reddit app doesn't make accommodations for handicapped people, it is neither the duty of the 3rd party apps to provide them nor to enforce them. It is just a fringe angle reddit opponents are bringing forward. It is not why this ordeal got so out of proportion.
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()... we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it. ...
Although it may not be the wisest idea, the owners of the walled garden can say this and it is up to those non-compensated moderators to stay or leave. It has nothing to do with the 3rd party apps
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(*)After all, is said and done, reddit wants more money out of the pot. So does the 3rd party app developers. It is like a Mexican standoff. And I can guarantee you, first party to blink will not be reddit.
There's a surface-level and deeper-level answer here.
Surface-level: the API price hikes are at a glance meant to force out third-party Reddit interfaces. To speculate, this is aimed to funnel users to Reddit's official application. I can say that because the mobile website is getting crippled over time to "encourage" users to use the app.
Deeper-level: it is reflective of Reddit corporate's attitudes towards its users. They are gearing for an IPO, so they want to tell investors that they will be profitable (read: milk its users, monetize everything, remove convenient features if it will mean profits, etc.)
This story sounds similar. Just yesterday I read about enshitification[0] form a HN post. What is most interesting is how Reddit has ripped a page or two from Musk's twitter playbook for enshitification.
The deeper issue is the C-suite being unresponsive to users wants and needs. Reddits comments are a goldmine for LLMs, hiking the price on the API is to cash in on data greedy AI. 3rd party apps are just a pawn. Yes it is reddit's site, but the product is the community, and the community knows it.
People are mad because instead of being open and honest about their play, reddit tried sneak it it in. They are trying to give Reddit shareholders their win while everyone else loses.
The two biggest issues I've heard brought up (other than the fact that apps like Apollo just work better than the official app and don't have ads) is that moderation tools are dependent upon third-party apps, and third-party apps are more accessible for people with disabilities than the official reddit app.
I remember several controversies with Netflix and the New York times which resulted in public outcry and people leaving, or at least proclaiming it in mass on social media. But then it died down and both are still quite popular.
Pushshift but even that is constantly down. It was offline since last month with API changes. Spez claimed they’ll fix it for approved mods only so the casual user is likely out of luck.
If I remember correctly, Pushshift was actually banned by Reddit. Last I read, they were renegotiating API usage terms. I remember seeing one of the devs asking when it would be reapproved.
Probably a very _very_ controversial and unpopular opinion - though I welcome any insight or opinions from others.
Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO. They're fully within their rights to change how people access their website, how people interact with it, and limit who has access to the data on the website.
When I clicked on a reddit result on Google to find some information, only to find it has been closed down in protest after trying to find something on Google, I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company (granted, I guess they do have some power as Reddit is relying on these unpaid moderators to do Reddits job.)
I highly, highly doubt that Reddit will change their tune - they might lower the API costs, they might capitulate in some capacity in some regards to accessibility, but they'll still work towards an IPO and will harm their website as a result.
Their CEO is a scumbag and both their paid and unpaid moderators/admins have strong biases in any subreddits that aren't niche hobbies and meant for wider audiences. Great for those who wish to follow the echo chambers, but not so great for others who don't _really_ have alternatives.
I'll be happy if Reddit disappears off the planet, but I fear what will replace it will be even more restrictive - the internet needs decentralization of social media and communication.
> Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators
Sure. Technically they are within their rights to do that.
Would it be good for them to do so? Probably not. It'll piss off their user base. As others have mentioned, it'll open themselves to lawsuits due to content moderation. It'll cost them a lot to pay people to moderate these communities, which they currently get for free.
> I would expect them to [seize the subreddits] if they're gearing up for an IPO
See above. This would make them less profitable and most likely negatively affect said IPO.
> ... I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company.
It's not self-ordained. They're doing what they are allowed to do with these subreddits, at least until Reddit takes away their moderator access.
> When I clicked on a reddit result on Google to find some information, only to find it has been closed down in protest after trying to find something on Google, I was frustrated
There are two solutions to this: google's cached pages and archive.org.
> Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO.
Reddit's sob story is that they are still unprofitable. They can't afford to hire moderators for the seized subreddits.
I know it's probably not for everyone, but I started using Mastodon last week in response to this, and I've had a very positive experience with it. I'm never going back to Reddit.
Reddit showed up for info a lot that after all these years I subscribed as an old bastard op from the 90's. Now I regret it months later with this. Let them migrate I say.
Considering spez has shown before he doesn’t really care for Reddit’s rules that are applied to the rable and he can do what he wants (like editing others posts), I fully expect the permanently blacked out subs to have new ownership and become public again before too long.
I’m happy that 90% of the subs I sub to joined the blackout.
But some subs like r/comics are strangely boot licky despite how community engaged the mod team seemed to be. Automatically removing requests about the blackout and not even entertaining the discussion.
Perhaps spez thinks he can replace all the free labor Reddit gets for posts and mods with an AI? The larger subs clearly have a large enough corpus to have a defined voice.
The next step after that would be an AI to generate the replies, worn out jokes, and repost complaints.
What's next? Degrading the front page experience like a few years ago over I forgot what drama. I think ultimately this will blow over but I'm curious how far motivated actors can break/cripple the platform, at least in terms of valuation.
Apparently they're demoting head jannies and removing powerjannies from the big subs.
I called this in another comment. Spez won't let this continue - and he gets the nice second-order result of not having to deal with people like Merari
From a technical perspective, there's no reason they couldn't. God help me, part of me wants to see what would happen next if they did. There would certainly be some positive consequences to doing so (more of that sweet, sweet traffic, and establishing once and for all who is the daddy) but also some huge negative ones: for one thing, some already angry moderators would likely quit, and for another it would basically destroy any shred of remaining good will or feeling of community. It would be a slap in the face. They can still walk back their API pricing changes, they can even hope this bad press blows over, but I don't know if they could salvage their reputation if they just exerted autocratic control over their community-based platform. If moderators don't feel like they're in charge of their own subreddits, that they're just fungible, unpaid workers, they'd probably realize they're being used and go away.
I don't think so. Digg was a vote driven news feed one day and a commercial feed the next. It was like visiting a totally different website in terms of content. Reddit was sitting there with the "old" format, so it wasn't too shocking to see everyone migrate.
This isn't a drastic change and there aren't any competitors that are offering anything better (ignoring the benefits of something decentralized).
Anybody, just give something to read or look at that is not reddit,but had new mildly interesting content often. I'll remove Reddit and never look back...
This really depends on what you like. Different people might use instead: HN, imgur, Bored Panda, laughingsquid, fark, tiktok, atlasobscura, or something from yesterday's "reddit alternatives" thread [1]; and I'm sure there are more.
Is it hard to find volunteer moderators who wouldn't block off access to sub reddits? I also doubt the number is as high as 20k. As long as the top mod aligns with Reddit, the other moderators can do nothing.
They'd have to remove the moderators or they could just delete everything with automoderator (some subs already went read only or "long time members only" instead of private), and then if they remove them who will replace the moderators in the subreddits are doing things like running community competitions, themed topics, etc.
Stuff like r/aww and r/videos would probably survive if it was just the Reddit employees removing offensive stuff that gets upvoted high, but it will kill the long tail where the moderators are less garbage removers and more community organisers. Maybe just the generic mindless feed is enough for Reddit to be a successful business, but it's not what most people think of Reddit as, and it's not clear why such a rump reddit would be able to take users off of Tiktok etc.
If they asked random sub users who wants to be a mod - they'll get more free moderators within a heartbeat.
At some point, Reddit will just force all subs to be open again, and any mods that try to delete the sub or do no moderation will just get banned or whatever.
It's pretty hard to fight against the corp using the corp's own platform.
Sure, they’d get plenty or people who would want to get moderator rights. How many of those would actually put in the hours ? And how would you know before you hand over the sub?
Not only that, it would create a revolt among the moderators who were still left so you’d have to do this for all subs at once. Tens of thousands of people.
They absolutely will, but I wouldn't expect those mods to actually be good mods. I've been in multiple subreddits where a new mod would be assigned because the current ones stopped being active and they'd wreck the subreddit. All posts require approval, sub topic changed, any criticism of the changes met with a permanent ban, etc.
For a company wanting to go public, having users banned from some of the most popular subs, the same subs that rely on said users to publish content, Reddit may as well have shot itself in the foot.
When the corp has relied on the good graces of users and mods to effectively run the site, both by providing the content AND moderating the content, any change to that status quo is going to be met with open hostility from the top 1% contributors.
Finding a warm body isn't hard, but finding a competent moderator is.
The current moderators spend an insane amount of time on their communities, and they are very proud of the environment they have built up over the time. They are barely able to keep up with all the automation tools they currently have available.
The new moderators would not have this dedication, would not have the tools, and would have to immediately deal with an absolute deluge of some of the worst content imaginable just because the community will view them as scabs.
When all the dedicated people leave, only garbage remains. Who would want to be in charge of a pile of garbage?
the irony of it all is borderline unbelievable. reddit's justification for this is that they don't want to continue providing profit for smaller corporations for free. this from reddit, a website that could not possibly make a profit without the work moderators do for free
how were those moderators chosen the first time around? what's to prevent them from repeating that selection process? it might take a bit of work but the circumstances seem to merit at least that much.
No, it just happens in the sub as a normal thread - the mods make a post saying they're looking for more mods, people respond. Some subs do the voting offsite, sometimes the mods just pick someone to add.
Good, I do hope they remain closed indefinitely. Nothing is stopping people from creating a /nba2 sub-reddit or something in order to get rid of this power-hungry mods. It was hilarious how the /nba users congregated on /denvernuggets/ in order to make a game thread last night.
That's great news. I'm always cheering for the little guy. I love capitalism but I also love people flexing on people that try to abuse their customers.
Technically, they're flexing on the unpaid labour they've based their business plans on, which is an order of magnitude or two stupider.
Also, is it capitalism you love, or is it free markets and independent business? Cause capitalism is just when someone sits on their ass and collects dividends while other people work.
> I left Reddit back when they decided they don’t care about free speech and banned nonewnormal.
What happened to this new normal btw? Everything has reverted to pre-pandemic life here as it seems. Wasn't the expectation that we're going to have to live suppressed for all time?
Those who follow absurd conspiracy theories, like the theory that mask mandates would never go away and that it was somehow solely a power play by government leaders, cause massive damage to society. And it's true that most never re-evaluate how their incorrect beliefs came to be before getting sucked into another conspiracy/grift.
You seem to be reducing the issue to someone feeling superior to another.
This would be them saying that they've won the battle.
And it's quite possible that some of the left-wing political response to shelter-in-place orders and mask mandates, namely deciding to end them as policy, is because of right-wing (and some left-wing) pushback. I just don't know how much. Though I think it was stupid as hell the way they ended both social distancing and mask mandates back in July of 2021, when infection rates were still higher than when the mandates began.
Said pushback didn't really happen in the UK - polling data in favour of lockdowns was insanely popular. It still broadly stopped both before the US did.
- regular people get a break from their echo chambers
- VOLUNTEER mods get a break
- journalists get their news article
The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users data via comments and posts. I said this in another post but the existing CEO needs to get replaced. Maybe throw in a few other C—level executives to serve as additional blood sacrifices.
Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.