[HN Gopher] Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to exten...
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout
indefinitely
Author : edsimpson
Score : 307 points
Date : 2023-06-13 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| borner791 wrote:
| I really wonder if it would be better to go the other way.
|
| Mods take a break, and just let the bots shit allover the
| content.
|
| It takes like 20mn of un-moderated internet before it's all ads
| and spam... Reddit is basically reddit because of the carefully
| curated posts.
| jtode wrote:
| 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.
| kojeovo wrote:
| Guess people will just flock to /r/awww and other clones
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Does this actually affect subscribers to sub-reddits?
|
| If this is extended indefinitely I would expect competing sub-
| reddits to form.
| _____-___ wrote:
| 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.
| activiation wrote:
| I unsubscrided from a few subs that weren't doing the blackout
| redmerchant2 wrote:
| 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.
| bastijn wrote:
| I'm reading new ones that aren't doing the blackout. Need for
| content didn't change.
| activiation wrote:
| I browse new posts on HN instead
| EA-3167 wrote:
| That awkward moment when you (Spez) calls a bluff only to realize
| it was no bluff.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| That awkward moment when spez removes the downvote functions on
| his profile.
|
| Gotta make that profile shine for VCs!?
| prox wrote:
| Spez seems like the latest outed manchild amongst CEOs.
| bastijn wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| bastijn wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| bastijn wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| bastijn wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| >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.
| bastijn wrote:
| 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.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| 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.
| bastijn wrote:
| OK, misread the tone of your previous comment.
| zamalek wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| 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.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It remains to be seen who blinks first.
| koolba wrote:
| 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.
| activiation wrote:
| Reddit might be fine if it could get rid of its cancer (/u/spez)
| jprd wrote:
| Good.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| /r/therewasanattempt is still rattling its sword of racism
| against whites. They can't afford to take time off.
| [deleted]
| johnny99k wrote:
| The mods have virtually no control over the situation. Reddit can
| change their passwords and just have employee moderators from now
| on.
|
| If I was running Reddit, this is what I would be planning right
| now.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Good, who wants to use Reddit without RIF anyways.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| Reddit is perfectly usable on the browser with old.reddit.com
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| 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
| mrandish wrote:
| 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.
| heyparkerj wrote:
| Did Reddit actually make that threat or was that just a fearful
| suspicion from the userbase?
| ranger207 wrote:
| 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
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Replacing a few mods that moderate _many_ large communities
| with paid mods is ripping the door wide open to lawsuits
| post-it wrote:
| What damages would who experience?
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Uh. I'm not really following this. But are people moving to other
| services?
|
| If you're just going dark Reddit will know you'll eventually cave
| in.
|
| Blackouts feel like you're saying "we love you so please change".
|
| I'd be happy to see people use other services. I'd appreciate the
| decentralisation.
| malermeister wrote:
| Lemmy and kbin seem to be where people are going. They're both
| federated and are compatible with each other.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Reddit would be infinitely better without any subreddits bigger
| than about 100k subscribers.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Subscribe to the subreddits you enjoy (regardless of size) and
| ignore the rest. You are not forced to view content from the
| big subs.
| epmatsw wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
|
| "Better than twitter" is a low bar to clear.
| snuxoll wrote:
| /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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| So what does user 100001 do?
| krasin wrote:
| I think that OP talks on the logarithm scale. 100k vs 1M is a
| big difference in quality of content and discussion. 1M vs
| 10M is even more so.
| zucked wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway53255 wrote:
| [flagged]
| gumballindie wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tedivm wrote:
| Removing the APIs, or gatekeeping them, will do absolutely
| nothing to prevent the publicly exposed data from being
| collected.
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| Agreed, writing a scraper is simply worth the cost to get the
| training data.
| gumballindie wrote:
| 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.
| malermeister wrote:
| Piracy still hasn't been stopped, fwiw
| asciii wrote:
| I deleted Apollo and blocked all reddit in general.
|
| It was a nice discovery tool and formula1 subreddit was great
| (memes and all) but I think spez really screwed it up.
| Hunter_Barrett wrote:
| 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.
| SecurityMinded wrote:
| 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.
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| 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.
| Hunter_Barrett wrote:
| 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.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| > If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready
| to see them change the rules as they see fit.
|
| And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk
| home.
| esotericimpl wrote:
| [dead]
| molave wrote:
| 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.)
| searine wrote:
| 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.
| mike741 wrote:
| can someone explain why Reddit staff doesn't just forcibly reopen
| these subs and perma-ban their moderators?
| themagician wrote:
| Great opportunity for people to create derivative subreddits
| without oppressive mods.
| kibwen wrote:
| What makes you think that new mods would be any less oppressive
| than old mods?
| seydor wrote:
| Its statistically more likely than not replacing them.
|
| In democratic places they replace people for a reason
| itairal wrote:
| 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.
| themagician wrote:
| I wish.
|
| I 100% agree. Not just Reddit, but Facebook too. The days of
| phpBB and vBulletin are sadly over though.
|
| And while I know it's still around, it's not the same--I miss
| slashdot.
| seydor wrote:
| Reddit makes it extremely hard for people to find
| alternative/small subreddits.
| ranger207 wrote:
| 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
| themagician wrote:
| You're right about the first part.
|
| For the second part--they should free up the names of mods
| protesting. Fun chaos, unpredictable outcome. I support.
| distrill wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| mostly because they have been banned tbh
| miyuru wrote:
| Reddit will be in some trouble when Google traffic begins to
| drop.
| jleyank wrote:
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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.
| deely3 wrote:
| > Reddit earned a $456.38 million in revenue in 2021 from ads
| and premium user subscriptions.
|
| Im curious about spending..
| snuxoll wrote:
| 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.
| Prickle wrote:
| Reddit hired like crazy during covid. They went from 700
| globally (600 in the USA) to 2000 employees.
|
| There are likely costs associated with this.
| rgbrenner wrote:
| They do all of those things plus selling 'coins'.. and generate
| $500-600m/year from it.
| manishsharan wrote:
| If some people are willing to pay $8 for Twitter,they will
| happily pay more for Reddit.
| kokanee wrote:
| 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.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| on a side note: the current ceo steven huffman founded reddit
| together with aaron swartz ... sad irony.
| gsatic wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| mainly because google+FB gobbled up the whole of advertising
|
| AFAIK historically the % of GDP spent on advertising was more
| or less constant so it s not like advertisers bailed
| Zamiel_Snawley wrote:
| Honestly, if they were just screwing developers of third party
| frontends, people probably wouldn't have cared that much.
|
| They are also screwing their moderators who use API-based
| tools, and people who need accessibility accommodations that
| reddit does not provide.
|
| Not to mention the scummy behavior towards the Apollo
| developer.
| paul_funyun wrote:
| Strip current moderation of subreddit ownership if they stay
| private, easy solution. Most users don't care about moderators or
| niche API issues.
| Hunter_Barrett wrote:
| 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.
| milkytron wrote:
| 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.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's even about that anymore. They were so
| antagonistic towards the issues it turned everyone off to the
| leadership.
|
| I think a replacement of spaz would be the only thing that
| could move the needle at this point.
| nielsbot wrote:
| This is explicitly what their CEO said. Many subreddits said
| they'd return on wednesday.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > ...I don't think they respect their users...
|
| 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
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _that sure has the feel of "if we wait it out the pigs
| will get hungry and be back at the trough on Wednesday."_
|
| And he's probably correct. Mark Zuckerberg once called
| Facebook users "dumb fucks" but plenty of people still use
| Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
|
| The addicts will return to the drug.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| They've lost me, I deleted my accounts and blocked the
| domain.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > 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).
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| I tried to sign up for lemmy. I quit trying and lost interest at
| like click/step 7 or 8.
| glonq wrote:
| 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...
| sdfghswe wrote:
| ELI5: Why can't reddit just unblackout whatever subs they want?
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Small subs wouldn't matter, big subs would stink.
| lisasays wrote:
| So is Reddit content being (usefully) archived anywhere, and if
| so, where?
|
| By "useful" I mean in an easily searchable / navigable / quickly
| rendering form (not via the Wayback Machine).
| redmerchant2 wrote:
| 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.
| Prickle wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| In ChatGPT's memory
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| To the people who've been in this situation, what would you do in
| Huffman's shoes? From my fairly naive 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?
| dybber wrote:
| I haven't been in a situation like this.
|
| 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
| larperdoodle wrote:
| 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.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Apollo's backend just handles push notifications, the app
| talks directly to Reddit for 99.9% of its functionality.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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 naive, 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).
| jtode wrote:
| 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???
| predictabl3 wrote:
| -- Kevin Rose, circa Aug 2010.
| snuxoll wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| jtode wrote:
| 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.
| darknessmonk wrote:
| > 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;
| ranger207 wrote:
| Haven't been in this situation, but from previous reddit
| outrages his best course is "do nothing and everyone will
| forget about this in like a month"
| [deleted]
| dragontamer wrote:
| Is it too late to meme-stock this?
|
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| marcrosoft wrote:
| I deleted my decade old account. Can digg come back?
| autokad wrote:
| I wonder if this will become similar to what happened with
| digg.com
| donmcronald wrote:
| 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).
| smileysteve wrote:
| I was getting tired of being pestered with "Install Our App"
| or the new slower javascript interface, so I started using
| RedReader
|
| It's a whole different interface
| activiation wrote:
| Hope so... Wonder what would be next though.
| theobromananda wrote:
| Federated sites like lemmy and mastodon.
| bastard_op wrote:
| 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.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| 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.
| neals wrote:
| 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...
| thih9 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789
| kart23 wrote:
| 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.
| pkju62dqmx wrote:
| 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.
| imchillyb wrote:
| I'd love an invite.
|
| If you have one available, please consider throwing me a
| tildes.net invite.
|
| Thanks m8.
| DougEiffel wrote:
| If they send one to you, would you consider sending one to
| me?
| hughgrunt wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| endisneigh wrote:
| What's stopping Reddit from enabling all the subs?
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| the fallout from doing so.
| agilob wrote:
| I stop moderating it completely :)
| 8note wrote:
| Or teach the spam filter to spam regular content and allow
| spam content
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| Nothing. But then who's going to moderate them ? It's not like
| they can simply hire 20k people to take over.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| Having people do the (absolutely necessary) moderation for
| free.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| 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.
| crote wrote:
| 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?
| katbyte wrote:
| > If they asked random sub users who wants to be a mod -
| they'll get more free moderators within a heartbeat.
|
| no, because it is actual work to be a mod. work you don't
| get paid or rewarded for.
|
| i'd say no without hesitation.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| 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.
|
| It would be an absolute disaster for Reddit.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| mtklein wrote:
| 14 or 15 year Reddit user, mostly as a lurker -- I strongly
| support this. Reddit is a community, and a community is its
| people.
| mike741 wrote:
| but its people aren't allowed in? doesn't this prove reddit is
| not its people but rather a small group of moderators?
| scohesc wrote:
| 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.
| redundantly wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway106382 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/scullionw/reddit-scrubber
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Reddit is free to tweak their monitization any way they like. I
| am curious how this will turn out, when we look back on this a
| year from now.
|
| This is an opportunity for new moderators to start new
| subreddits. Conversely Reddit management may back down.
| ThomW wrote:
| ... 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?
| Eldt wrote:
| Moderation can make or break a subreddit
| paulmd wrote:
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| 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
| moffkalast wrote:
| Mods of anarchychess basically let people have free reign
| during the first day, no moderation. It went exactly as one
| would expect.
| civilitty wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| redmerchant2 wrote:
| 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry
|
| Everything made sense except this part.
|
| Power goes to everyone's head.
| katbyte wrote:
| lol no it doesn't. most sure, but not everyone.
|
| imho it affects people who didn't seek/don't want power
| differently from those who went looking for it.
| redmerchant2 wrote:
| I have no doubt, my point is the mods of r/music don't have
| a specific leaning that they'd try to manipulate.
|
| Most of the mods of bigger subs have been doing it for
| years and it's just a quirky hobby/obligation.
|
| Obviously the super mods are in the pocket of the admins,
| and political subs are very controlling.
|
| But appointing a new round of mods for a sub with millions
| of subscribers will attract the most bottom barrel power
| hungry people.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > attract the most bottom barrel power hungry people
|
| Fair
| tguedes wrote:
| 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.
| erellsworth wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed?
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-
| mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does (
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-
| facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator
| mods.
|
| "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.
| SS 230(c)(1)).
|
| That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they
| aren't allowed to moderate at all.
| titusjohnson wrote:
| > "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. SS 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
|
| Here's a couple cases drawing the difference:
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-
| inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230
| for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it
| themselves
|
| BUT
|
| https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-
| communicat... - Lycos _is_ protected against defamation
| claims on their own message boards
| jd24 wrote:
| there was a stat "92 of the most 500 popular subreddits are
| moderated by the same 5 people"; unpaid people at that
|
| i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be
| their last resort though
| simlevesque wrote:
| 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.
| linuxftw wrote:
| 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.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| We're in the "this is how blockchain can solve this" era of
| the AI bubble.
| linuxftw wrote:
| It seems to me a very trivial problem to classify a post
| as on topic or not with today's AI capabilities.
| jfghi wrote:
| Even if this was feasible, how much would it cost and how
| long would it take to successfully roll out?
| gunchie wrote:
| Reddit are already using AI for first-line moderation on
| their site-wide reports. It only reaches a human if there's
| an appeal.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| 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.
| linuxftw wrote:
| 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.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| 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?
| linuxftw wrote:
| I think the vast majority of Reddit's userbase, normies,
| won't know the difference and won't care. It will
| literally be an invisible change.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| Will it, though?
|
| 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.
| skilled wrote:
| Too easily gamed and not reliable. And if people find out
| you are using AI for modding, they will find a way to mess
| with it.
|
| A human has discernment. An AI is looking at cute colors at
| a wall but doesn't actually know which one is red or blue.
| frankreyes wrote:
| Section 230. Reddit is in the fence
| thewataccount wrote:
| I support the blackouts but
|
| > 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.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| 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).
| jtode wrote:
| 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.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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?
| thewataccount wrote:
| > 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.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| The assumption is that those communities would just go back
| to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure
| that's a good assumption.
| thewataccount wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| > r/aww is literally just cute animals.
|
| 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?
| paulmd wrote:
| In six months the average front page-sub user won't be
| aware there was ever a social contract broken. Look, cute
| puppies.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| 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
| thewataccount wrote:
| I appreciate the current mod's efforts.
|
| And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs.
|
| 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 :(
| 634636346 wrote:
| > futurology(18m),
|
| 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.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| 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.
| lumenwrites wrote:
| If that happens, wouldn't the next obvious thought for the
| "rebelling" users be "spam and troll these subreddits as
| much as humanly posssible"?
|
| And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing
| the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.
| thewataccount wrote:
| 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.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| How have you come to that conclusion?
|
| 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.
| paulmd wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| 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)
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| Just use Chat-GPT. The future of moderation. What could go
| wrong?
| frankreyes wrote:
| Skynet.gif
| muttantt wrote:
| AI will replace the mods.
| moskie wrote:
| AI will replace the users, too.
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| Ah yes, because LLMs are so reliable at understanding
| nuance and social context.
| Quikinterp wrote:
| Human reddit moderators already can't do that from my
| experience
| asah wrote:
| +1 - I've been a mod on a large sub, and it's serious
| business.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > 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?
| timdev2 wrote:
| > Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields
| Reddit from liability as-is?
|
| It does. (And 230 isn't part of the DMCA, it's the only
| surviving bit of the CDA).
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| That would work for implementation. No chance a single
| policy would work for users
| blibble wrote:
| if they takeover a few of the higher value subs the majority
| of moderators will likely fall into line
| ht85 wrote:
| Looking forward to watch reddit corporate approved mods
| trying to deal with the platform. Lmao
| bdw5204 wrote:
| 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.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Users could very easily make any sub effectively unmoddable
| if replacements are brought in. It wouldn't even take very
| many people.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| > other than the mods being free labor for Reddit
|
| Is this not the answer to your question? Reddit can't afford to
| pay people to do this job. They rely on impassioned people to
| volunteer.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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?
| tomstockmail wrote:
| And they're not doing it, so they will be replaced. There's
| always someone willing to step up.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| 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.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| >And therefore anyone who would potentially do the job of
| mod likely to also be upset by the changes?
|
| Not if they get a chance to be in charge. Also many don't
| actually care about the changes despite what the mod
| blackout is asking people.
|
| >If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption
| that these people can be easily replaced for granted.
|
| Well this posts article tone makes it sound like they
| expect the mods to get bored. Which most will. And like I
| said, they are replaceable.
| snuxoll wrote:
| 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.
| bennylava wrote:
| [flagged]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Is there some alternative reddits? I don't care about this stupid
| protest and I'm sure many users as well.
| mike741 wrote:
| Aren't you on an alternative right now?
| Animats wrote:
| That's a good question. If you want a discussion group, and you
| don't need Reddit for discovery, where to go?
| dirtyid wrote:
| 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.
| Whatarethese wrote:
| This is what will force Reddits hand to either backtrack or
| remove those mods and place their own. Which the ladder would no
| doubt be worse.
| 312c wrote:
| How is a company that is not profitable according to the CEO
| going to hire 20,000 people to replace the volunteer
| moderators?
| eipie10 wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| 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.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| 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.
| jtode wrote:
| 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.
| xyst wrote:
| 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.
| hn2017 wrote:
| [dead]
| SirMaster wrote:
| I don't think that's the only losers.
|
| 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.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Has there been any suggestion to update messages to suggest
| using the internet archive to see old posts?
| dirtyid wrote:
| Shopping for a phone plan last few days have been pretty
| annoying.
| Animats wrote:
| "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your
| chains! Let the ruling classes tremble!"
|
| Barron's reports that Reddit's potential IPO is now in
| trouble.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/reddit-stock-ipo-
| revolt-6e8...
| depereo wrote:
| 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_.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I deleted my 8yo account. It was right after someone
| downvoted me because pointed out something that broke with
| their opinion.
|
| That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle
| jerks. Why was I part of any of that??
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| 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.
| basq wrote:
| 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.
| housemusicfan wrote:
| > It was right after someone downvoted me because pointed
| out something that broke with their opinion.
|
| It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place
| operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty
| well.
|
| Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the
| beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the
| right model for moderation.
| tester457 wrote:
| I've never used Slashdot, how is the moderation model
| superior?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| I just logged out of my account everywhere, and turned off
| "remember me".
|
| It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively,
| almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing
| "reddit.com".
|
| Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!
| bombcar wrote:
| Replace re (enter) with ne (enter) and hang out in new.
| Hehe
| jrnichols wrote:
| 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.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| 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.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| 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.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| 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.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Thanks, i just did it too since you made it easier to know
| how
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > The only loser here is the corporation side.
|
| 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Are we using the same website? Reddit is devoid of any decent
| content right now, on account of the blackout.
| lom wrote:
| Completely disagree, my homepage is almost empty.
|
| I was looking at tents earlier and wanted to see reddit
| reviews but literally every single link was private. Reddit
| has to be noticing this.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| a certain reddit-astroturfing restaurant with a big campaign
| launching, must be less than pleased.
| jrnichols wrote:
| > journalists get their news article
|
| well, except for Buzzfeed, who seems to exist solely to repost
| Reddit threads with GIFs.
| [deleted]
| tiffanyg wrote:
| Agreed - good.
|
| Huffman / Reddit Inc. have misread this repeatedly. Just saw
| he's reportedly assured staff it will "blow over" and "hasn't
| hurt revenue".
|
| Wrong move.
|
| Completely avoidable PR disaster, and until the ego(s) driving
| all of this step back, they'll just keep making the situation
| worse.
|
| I will be extending my blackout on the site indefinitely.
|
| Just one of the dumbest PR / corporate comms debacles I've
| seen. Almost as though the Reddit execs saw what Twitter is
| doing and said "hold my beer".
| __loam wrote:
| If they forcibly replace mods, Reddit is dead.
| pyeri wrote:
| 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.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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_.
| asveikau wrote:
| 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 informed 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.
| deely3 wrote:
| 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.
| czx4f4bd wrote:
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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).
| lmm wrote:
| > 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.
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| kesslern wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| 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.
| deely3 wrote:
| 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.
| jwagenet wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| Maybe AI scabs?
| rurp wrote:
| > 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It already happened
| ssl232 wrote:
| 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.
| blarghyblarg wrote:
| I don't know... I've been on there on and off all day, and
| it's honestly better today than it has been for a long,
| long time.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| 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.
| __loam wrote:
| 8000 subs went dark.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Reading comprehension is a dying skill.
| fineIllregister wrote:
| 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.
|
| source: https://reddark.untone.uk/
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Well they've already started doing it
| deadso wrote:
| Which subreddits?
| [deleted]
| 3np wrote:
| source?
| [deleted]
| a2tech wrote:
| Probably wherever they're getting all the accounts that are
| astroturfing and regurgitating all the same points on HN
| and other sites.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| 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).
| rcarr wrote:
| You say this, but it's only a matter of time until we get
| AI moderation.
| tyg13 wrote:
| 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.
| jrnichols wrote:
| > 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.
| __loam wrote:
| 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.
| rcarr wrote:
| 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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.
| Yardsale420 wrote:
| I wonder if they will still make the AI sign an NDA so it
| can't talk about the PTSD it has from work.
|
| Because they make all their content mods sign one that
| also absolves them of all responsibility.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| 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.
| Yardsale420 wrote:
| 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...
| shapefrog wrote:
| > he has had a commendable commitment to free speech
|
| and a love of r/jailbait
| killingtime74 wrote:
| 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
| hayst4ck wrote:
| 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.
| jaredhallen wrote:
| But next quarter's profit always destroys everything
| good. Why should this have been expected to turn out any
| differently?
| pyeri wrote:
| 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.
| s1k3s wrote:
| 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.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Do you have any examples?
| malermeister wrote:
| lemmy.world
| s1k3s wrote:
| HN
| juujian wrote:
| 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.
|
| [^1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-
| internal-...
| RivieraKid wrote:
| 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.
| hmsimha wrote:
| 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)
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/JhsPQnI
| eep_social wrote:
| 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.
| nl_jaded wrote:
| Honestly, good on you, enjoy a healthier life :]
| slicktux wrote:
| I'm all for this but what's to keep Reddit from manning the
| subreddits themselves??
| meepmorp wrote:
| The same thing that was stopping them before, that's a lot of
| work. Plus, it was free before, so they'd need to spend some
| money doing it themselves.
| malermeister wrote:
| the new moderators would also be seen as scabs by the
| communities they are supposed to be moderating. I can't see
| that going well.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Probably depends on the sub, but yeah, lots of potential
| for it to go wrong
| mike741 wrote:
| 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.
| meepmorp wrote:
| The person who makes the subreddit is the head mod; they
| can add others. Some subs do voting, or solicit nominations
| for new mods.
| mike741 wrote:
| thanks. is the nomination and voting a built in reddit
| feature? if so, this sounds like a good time to use it.
| meepmorp wrote:
| 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.
| mike741 wrote:
| oh wow. that seems like the sort of critical feature
| reddit should have built in.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| [flagged]
| _Microft wrote:
| _> 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?
| 100011_100001 wrote:
| Shhh....
|
| Conspiracy theorists just move to a new conspiracy, they
| never go back and evaluate how they got swindled the first
| time.
| b59831 wrote:
| The important part is you feel superior.
| sidfthec wrote:
| What do you mean?
|
| 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.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| 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.
| Timon3 wrote:
| It is also possible that their pushback made stronger
| mandates necessary and thus prolonged the whole thing.
| Without data it's all speculation.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
|
| These campaigns achieved nothing.
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