I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy until everything else had been killed off, then they went hard on piracy.
That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.
Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.
Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.
See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for?
God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.
On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.
I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial.
Building and running a software company is not free.
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform.
Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.
I'm not saying you are wrong. But the point you are missing, in my opinion, is that the people using the API and third party apps are the power users. It's simple, you start using a site/tool/game so much, you learn the addon/plugins/whatever for it and start using it, tale as old as computing.
Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back.
But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ?
It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO.
The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show.
PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation.
Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.
> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value".
Is it wrong to claim that, though?
Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.
I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?
All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?
There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.
This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data.
Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit.
You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs.
None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people.
Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.
Reddit's revenue per user is utterly trash compared to every other social media site. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to want to close the gap.
> I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value.
There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table.
Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort.
I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.
First, that is certainly an interesting way to bring up the anti-mod wedge the pro-Reddit-admin side are trying to push. Divide and conquer, right?
Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one.
This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.
> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."
So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.
It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.
> Every subreddit is just a click away from moving
Are they?
I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere.
The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there.
Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.
> Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it.
As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.
>That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it.
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power
That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.
Yes, the original claim is wildly ahistorical. I seriously think that one of Microsoft's key innovations that made it successful was the idea that software should be paid for, not shared, and this should be enforced by law.
When I look for reddit alternatives... the ironic thing is that I can't find any that seem to me comparable and offer even as much API as reddit does currently! (If you know of some, happy to hear suggestions).
Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there.
Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest.
But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out?
It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here
Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?
>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.
But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.
Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).
>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.
If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that.
Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).
Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).
If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.
> I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
"Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.
>I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform
Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else.
Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.
Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them?
The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.
Reddit and its communities (comprised of users and mods) are in a symbiotic relationship.
Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other.
I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.
I'm all in favor of big subreddits protesting. What I don't like is that very small, slow subreddits are also protesting when doing so is likely to be fatal. Each of these small communities barely came about in the first place, and subs that get ten posts and fifty comments a day aren't going to recover after being shut down for a month.
It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.
It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.
The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years.
The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.
Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)
That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.
That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:
Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":
<quote>
Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.
TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.
And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.
(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)
Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.
Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.
That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.
I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.
This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.
And in this case, that one person happens to be me.
I'm trying really hard to like Lemmy, but whenever I'm reading through posts on "active", "hot", etc. it will initially load with the correct content. But then, I get about 10 seconds before the entire list frantically reflows and fills with brand new posts from all over the place. Extraordinarily annoying. I get that creating a new post is itself "activity" which is probably why it does that, I don't think posts of that nature meet the description of "hot".
I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.
This has to be a bug, right? I experience the same thing and just wrote it off as broken, deciding to try again in a few days when they figure things out.
The current sorting algo is sorta not great. An instance i'm on that forked, and then unforked recently is dealing with this right now. We had our own react frontend with really nice custom themes, but in order to federate we had to go back to the main codebase.
It's not great but it will hopefully improve. A lot of growing pains but overall its a really exciting time.
I think these instances that serve a "family" of topics has a great chance of shining within fediverse. I'm rooting for programming.dev to bring together the programming community.
I think the communities would benefit from becoming smaller. I avoided any large subreddits because the noise ratio was awful. The smaller ones were much better.
The trick is to both (1) promote equivalent communitie to existing Reddits - let them know there are alternaives to being a serf -- and (2) start posting on there. Be the change you want to see!
The federated future for social is coming, albeit slowly in fits and starts. What is nice is that many of the communities on these two are shared because it is the fediverse.
edit: Nevermind Safari works. 1Blocker blocks comments with the "Block Comments" ruleset. Usually it is supposed to hide comments where they are not the primary focus. So some rule should probably be adapted for Lemmy instances to work.
An instance is a server. Server administrators set the policy for creating new user accounts and new communities. This is the equivalent of a Reddit admin.
Since it's part of the Fediverse, a user on one instance/server can subscribe to a community on any federated instance, and make posts/comments/etc. You don't need a separate account on every instance.
Communities are typically moderated by the user(s) who created them, much like moderators of a specific subreddit.
Can someone explain why all of these federated services are so left-wing? Don't these people have enough of the normie internet catering to them already?
Left leaning people are more open to new experiences and thus are often early technology adopters just like they are often early social practice early adopters.
In Lemmy's case, it may be because the creators were banned from the left wing Reddit communities for genocide denial and promoting neonazi literature. It's a textbook case of horseshoe theory, and I won't go near that service with a 10 foot stick. By all accounts they seem to be awful people.
"We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to
take a break from moderating, or decide that you don't want to be a mod anymore. But active
communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to
keep these spaces active.
Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.
Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these
spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.
If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."
I hate to say it. From a PR move this is a well crafted email. I can support and relate to the argument. If the moderators are so crucial to the subreddit that they’re in charge of, their loss (and possible movement to another platform) will reflect that as community members also move on. That’s the real protest. Instead closing subs felt a lot like burning down your own house.
If you read a bit deeper with the context of how reddit has operated:
>Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.
No, subreddits always belonged to mods, and users complaining about power modding has fallen on deaf ears.They never cared about moderator antics outside of a few specific instances across 15 years.
>Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.
This makes it sound like moderators are voted in, or hired. No, it's literally a factor of who has been a moderator the longest. Without admin intervention or the user deleting their account, the head mod of r/pics would be some 16YO inactive account. If they came back they can boot off everyone. Sure Admins would fix it, but why does a mod have that power if they are merely "stewards"?
their tools don't reflect their words.
>Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Yes, and taking away 3rd party apps definitely definitely helps that reliance. Making the mobile website an unusable ad to the app helps that reliance. I'm sure one day old reddit will be gone and RES will be non-functional and they will send a similar message.
>Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here.
And that comes to today's topic: is some small subreddit really worth threatening? I've heard other subs as small as 20 subs getting this message. There is no real "community", and I'm guessing such a move will simply make a small sub unmoderated, and then banned as part of the global rules. Why does Reddit care about such small guppies?
This is one of the most important points IMO that does not seem to be on people's minds. Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.
I am happy this API drama has run the gamut and is now tackling what has always been the true issue head-on: anonymous, first-come first-serve moderators of user communities. I have been on reddit for 15 years. These users have the loudest voice, have historically placed more importance on themselves than there actually is, and have an unhealthy amount of power over the content.
If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean. It's super frustrating to be banned or silenced from a sub because one of the mods didn't like what you said. Here I am, one of thousands of like-minded users wanting to participate in a sub about some topic, but my ability to do so is totally at the whim of this anonymous person who is just another user like me but doesn't have to answer to anyone.
We see time and time again that this power gets into the head of many moderators and they begin to exert personal control over the community. Mod drama on reddit is a taint. "But not all mods are like that." Yes they are, on long timescales. Generalization is useful. Many commenters, here included, miss the big picture. APIs/tools/UI will come and go. Reddit has a large cultural moat and that is a fact. Nitpicking details is petty.
In the context of an upcoming potential IPO, it makes sense for reddit to do the following:
Standardize the subreddits, the rules and terms of use, and consolidate control. Make the reddit experience predictable, not wildly variant at the whims of a handful of mods who control a vastly disproportionate amount of subreddits and content. Replacing mods with AI filters is a prime use case.
I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance. Every time I start typing a word on the subreddit search, like 5 different variations of a nsfw sub for that word come up. It's frankly gross. An idea floating around is to jettison the nsfw subs into a separate business that can compete with OF. This is a fine idea.
spez gets a lot of shit for what he says, but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them. I don't see any mods or supporters of this 'protest' posting with their name and face. Tells you all you need to know.
This whole situation has been a giant rugpull from under users' feet. Users shouldn't have to worry about Reddit's IPO. They signed on to a platform with expectations that there was some autonomy with administering individual forums. That they could use their third party client. This all makes sense if all you care about is money and ignore what reddit was for the past 15 years.
This isn't about just moderators. There are a lot of people that are moving on simply because of the implication of having to use Reddit's own app. It's not out of spite like you seem to be painting this as, it's because Reddit has historically made terrible software and have relied on the very same people that gives them most of their value to even make "their" content browsable.
And no, spez isn't the only person putting his name next to his arguments - the Apollo developer he defamed also was.
>Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.
Then why did reddit make modding hierarchies based on who has been the moderator the longest? They've had a half dozen issues where this happened and provided no changes to help alleviate this supposed antipattern.
>If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean.
yea. And I think we both know what happened. You appeal to admins and admins do nothing. I'm sure some people can retrieve admin messages that say something to the tune of "it's the mod's community they can do what they want. Make your own".
So yea, I find it hypocritical and manupulative when suddenly the admins care about "community and belonging". You didn't care until it bit you in the ass. Again. This isn't the first time and at this point it's their fault they didn't change the rules in time for this.
>I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance.
I look to it forward to Tumblr 2.0 as well. No faster way to kill a site that relied on porn to drive traffic than to suddenly take it away. They want to ride that easy train until it becomes difficult, and then drop it and expect everything to go on as planned. I don't think it matters how you feel about porn here, this is just a nasty tactic.
>but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them.
He's going public and being paid some X million dollars. Mods aren't.
So... why have the feature of "Public, Restricted, Private" if you punish people for using a feature you all put in place? If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
What all this seems like is a bad psy-op campaign to force people to do the settings the admins want, and make it "feel" its the moderators doing it. Similar how Twitter forces you to remove bad content rather than just auto-do it
This is leftpad all over again: the intersection of publicly accessible namespaces, control over those namespaces, and what people in charge of the namespace are allowed to do by the platform when their protest actions are seen as harmful by the platform.
There's a 3-way social contract between the platform (Reddit/npm), the nominal person in charge (mods/module authors) and the users. If the person in charge does something that is sufficiently disruptive to users', or platforms interests, the platform will step in. We can argue about where the line is, but beyond that point, platform intervention is inevitable.
Edit: Thought experiment: would it have been acceptable had the author of leftpad put up a poll for downloaders to vote before taking the module down in protest?
> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
I can understand the sentiment, however users of Reddit employ private subreddits for a variety of reasons. Top of the list is in order to facilitate safe discussions, secure from prying eyes. For Reddit Inc it is a benefit, since it encourages moderator groups and communities to remain within the platform. e.g.
> r/ArmyofScience
> A private community for the comment moderators of /r/science to organize and discussion moderation of the subreddit.
If such private communities were forced open, it would require moderator groups, or those other private communities, to join the exodus to other platforms.
There are also some more personal collections on the site, without a doubt. Switching those to public would constitute a huge violation the trust which users have placed in Reddit and only further erode the company's image within communities that make their home on the site as well as with the public at large.
Lastly, there are over 3 million subreddits in existence [0], so even changing this manually would be a sizeable task.
People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.
> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins). Would that make you happy?
> People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community. And we could institute rules as we see fit. If the system allowed it, we could do it.
That was obviously just propaganda and a blatant lie.
> If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.
The fuck? Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board? Just wow.
>The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins).
historically speaking, some subs have gone private short term simply to control some crazy amounts of spam or harassment. And there's many more instances where subs went restricted for a while. So this isn't the only feature of privating communities.
>not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
No tools are ever designed for use in protest, so this is a circular argument. That's part of what a protest is.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips was recently talking about how people have telling him he should kill the forum which is just a cost sink and just fully embrace the subreddit for years and he has adamantly refused for exactly this reason. Your entire community survives at the whim of increasingly toddler-ish CEOs.
We’ve come along way from running our own web rings and PHPBBs. The internet was our audience but then we put it in the hands of companies looking to profit off our niche communities and now we’re having a leopards ate our face moment.
My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move. Moderators got what they signed up for and once a community was created and they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest. In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation should have walked instead of sticking around to watch Rome burn.
...except communities overwhelmingly supported protesting reddit's policies. You've bought into the provably wrong propaganda reddit is putting out about admins going rogue.
Just upthread someone pointed out that after the Homelab subreddit set up a Lemmy instance, only 18 people joined it. I think this undermines the idea that Reddit communities care about this.
What we know is that people who spoke up about this care about it. People who voted in a handful of subreddit-run polls care. But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. They'll just ... remain silent, and wait for the storm to blow over. Which seems to be what the majority of Reddit users are doing.
Disclosure: I'm a 12+ year Reddit "power" user, and I don't care about the API changes. I didn't vote in any supposed polls on the changes. My perspective no doubt affects my understanding of this issue.
Maybe some did but the support is vastly overblown. r/nba did a poll (never stickied it) and 8,000 people voted. 72% in favor of privating the subredddit. On a random Thursday afternoon it has 33,000 people online. And the polls were posted in r/modcoord.
There were communities on Reddit that did a poll in Discord on whether or not they should go private. Given the where and who the audience was, what voices do you think were ‘overwhelming’ representative?
In the end it was a way for many moderators to hijack a community and transfer it to their next pet social space (Discord seems to be the current favorite).
That "overwhelming support" was likely brigaded by Discord as well as other subs, linked below.
Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.
Admins are employees of reddit.com. I think you're talking about moderators, who are the volunteer petty tyrants that have always been the worst thing about reddit, and they are the ones "going rogue".
>My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move
the inevitable move, maybe. The only move (for profits), yes. But they are executing this absolutely horribly. Reddit has never been an overly formal site, and I guess that is built into the culture of the admins as well.
>they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest
Historically speaking, they never did. We have seen mods run a sub to the ground several times and the result was users jumping ship to a new community.
So while inevitable, it is inherently hypocritical for Reddit to suddenly care now as if they ever cared about users.
Communication is everything. Their "move" isn't even the main point of contention, it's the horrifically mismanaged communication from CEO to the public.
No reassurance, no de-escalation, no reasonable transparency of the decision making process. Just dictator moves, lack of communication in general except for a few emotion-driven jabs.
Here's a template the Reddit CEO can use to immediately put a stop to this chaos:
"Hi Reddit, this is the CEO. I admit it, I didn't handle this well. Some of our recent decisions have not been met well by our users. There are great points being made, and I've decided to take this into consideration. Let's start over."
Look. This is always going to happen with user-generated content ("UGC") sites where the users who create the content don't own the platform. The owners will always reach a point of trying to extract as much value as possible from those users. Personal subreddits? Well they don't provide value (to the owners). We're long past the point of subsidizing users to grow Reddit. Now it's just value extraction.
And it happens to every UGC site and people are still somehow surprised. It's the most Lucy and the football thing I've ever seen.
This is why Wikipedia being owned by a foundation rather than a private venture-backed company is so important. Same for ICANN not being a for-profit company (remember how private equity tried to steal the .org registry [1]?).
I think this title is a bit sensationalized. They're going after subreddits who have gone dark for the protest. That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of it. In my mind that would mean there is something they're doing specifically because they're individual personal subreddits. Like "You can't have a subreddit with one poster" kind of deal and banning them because they're not active enough or something.
In this case I understand it can be read as "Reddit aren't just going after big closed subs anymore" but the title, to me, doesn't make that obvious enough. I clicked it thinking "Oh no now people can't even have their own subs?!" when in reality it's just that one of the blackout holdouts is getting called on still holding out with the ~~new~~ not-new rule that they have stated they're going to start applying.
> That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of
no, there's a concept in reddit called a "personal subreddit". You know how you can click a user and it will show you the most recent comments? e.g. /u/chankstein38 would be your comment history.
Well, in 2017/8 or something, You can choose to convert this into your own subreddit. Complete with followers, votes, and user comments on "your sub". Never understood the idea given reddit's semi-anonymous nature, but I guess OnlyFans models benefited a lot from it.
I think we're talking about a distinction in a different spot. My distinction was that rather than "They're shutting down personal subreddits" this post was more "Reddit is even coming for mods who blackout their personal subreddits"
I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!
I think we're talking about a distinction in a different spot. My distinction was that rather than "They're shutting down personal subreddits" this post was more "Reddit is even coming for mods who blackout their personal subreddits"
I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!
Clearly not otherwise that wouldn't be a feature. The issue is that there is no official stance. Any actual stance would be an admission of madness in the approach - "No taking your sub private to protest Reddit platform changes" wouldn't go down well even though that's what it is. They're trying again and again to keep things quiet, even though they keep running into the Streisand effect, something Reddit should be acutely familiar with already. There is also that saying that trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is insanity.
This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.
It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.
It wasn't private before, it was made private in protest. I think they are just automatically messaging mods of subreddits that were public before the protests and are now private.
My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.
Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.
And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.
In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.
As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:
One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.
Based on comments I've seen, they didn't even try that hard - they're just automatically messaging mods of all private subreddits. People with subs that have been private for years are receiving messages.
> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.
Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.
I have an old sub-reddit I haven't used in years back from when they allowed you to use a CNAME to point a sub-reddit and get a custom "front-page" where I would share links I found interesting.
I got the same modmail message, even though I barely have 20 subscribers to that sub-reddit and it has been private since they dropped CNAME for a sub-reddit support.
The message seems to be that if they don't keep moderating exactly how they were before this api decision that they'll get the boot. Not the official message of course, they are saying one thing and then doing another at almost every step of this drama.
The official stand of Reddit is you are not even allowed to sit passively as a mod. Here is how rule 4 worded
"...This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting."
Intentional sabotage is the only option left at this point.
This is an approach many are taking, and Reddit is still removing moderators for it.
The fact that Reddit is taking drastic action against users who aren't breaking any rules is a pretty strong sign that Reddit's leadership has gone off the deep end.
I don't think that you could ever use a feature "in bad faith" from a service provider POV, and get away with it on a moral ground alone. Forget official stance, reddit is a host, if they don't like something, they'll make it go away, as it's their platform at the end of the day. And such is the state on every private platform. It's nice until the host wants it to be.
I'm guessing this is an automated message that was sent to all the subs that went from public to private in recent days. And there's no easy way for it to tell whether a given subreddit is "personal".
Among other points, I'd raised the issue of distinguishing personal subreddits years ago in a post to which a Reddit admin responded directly and pledged that they'd honour my request in that regard:
Seems like it; I have a personal subreddit the same as my username that I flip between private and restricted to post music videos I grab with an iOS shortcut (can't post video on private subs) and the same landed in that accounts inbox (2) days ago.
My other private subreddit for Wikipedia/github links has never flipped/flopped and it didn't get the same message.
Its pretty funny that Huffman did all this to try to juice IPO price by ~10% and probably will end up dropping IPO price by 40% vs if he had done nothing.
I wonder what shareholders think of his 'leadership'.
I would estimate 10+% of reddit has deleted their accounts, but most importantly, that 10% skews significantly toward 'power user'. Quality of content is already dropping apparently.
Not all investors will recognize that nuance, but 'reddit in chaos' was national news.
This is lame. The poster made a good point. If it’s not your platform, then you don’t own it.
so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.
Yeah, the fundamental problem here is social medias ought to be a protocol, not a platform.
Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.
This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.
Reddit is the only platform that makes sense as a protocol.
The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.
Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.
You are correct. Any content created on someone else's site isn't yours - Youtube, Facebook, HN, etc. Even Gmail. We are making a tradeoff for reach, access, performance, etc.
This just isn't true. The content is legally yours, Reddit only has a license to it so they can display it on their site. Just like a record label though, Reddit has economies of scale and can do more with your content than you can, creating a power imbalance.
How so? Reddit pays for the infrastructure and software, why would anyone expect they own their own subreddit? Are people really expecting Reddit to operate at a loss? If you want to own it, pay for it.
Noob Question: Given AI is reducing the cost of creating technology. Isn't making reddit access API based the antithesis of the direction where the future of online communities is?
The future I presume is: As computation gets less expensive, content creation and storage is democratized and managing that platform eventually becomes easier with AI tech this walled garden approach is bound to fall. Its just a matter of time yeah?
Eh, you should never let computers (including AI) make decisions or manage. You can't blame it or hold it accountable. You can't appeal to it or ask it why it did what it did.
Confirmed: I'm Chris from Airwindows (small open source audio software dev) and am the sole mod for r/airwindows, which is a dead sub. People interact with me elsewhere, for a while I had a ITTT posting new plugin releases to the sub, then I stopped. I took the sub private largely because as the only user I wanted to endorse the striking Redditors taking much larger subreddits offline. There's no real impact to this.
I got this in mod-mail:
"Hi everyone,
We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.
Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.
If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."
I responded with the following, and have heard nothing further:
"Understood. Note that airwindows is my intellectual property and I control the website and the youtube channel which is my primary mode of engaging with Airwindows users. As such, and since there are no legitimate users trying to re-open the subreddit, it's an interesting test case. I await whatever further information you care to share with me :)"
There was also another subreddit where I was the sole user, called r/homesoil (a Minecraft mod me and my brother made). I believe that had been taken private long before, and I haven't received mod mail over it. Looks like it's strictly punitive, directed toward anyone aligning with the striking redditors no matter how small they are.
I was asked by another redditor, "Do you have a TM on the name? Could you sue Reddit to take it down b/c they should not have a forum named with your trademark?"
I responded, "Oh no, I created the subreddit. Not only that, people are allowed to create fansites so the mere concept of a subreddit that's solely my business name without me associated with it, is not itself a problem. For instance, there's at least one Facebook group using the name that's not me, and nobody is confused.
The test case (which may never happen, fair warning as this is kinda telegraphing their exposure if it did) would be the use of such a subreddit to try and convince people I represented stuff I don't represent.
In other words, the activity I DON'T want to see is: kicking me off my own subreddit, installing some other person as a mod, who then uses that subreddit to imply I support Reddit's position and leadership.
And in the absence of really impressive pro bono representation, my counter would not be trying to sue Reddit over that, but exposing the situation in a Youtube video, most likely as an aside in a video that's otherwise intended for a product release that would see a lot of attention. For instance, I'm doing reverb effects where the tone quality is tailored to work similarly to Bricasti hardware reverbs, which cost over $4000. There will be people paying close attention to my efforts there, so a mention of the Reddit situation would get outsider attention that wouldn't go to a video solely about Reddit."
That's what I'm interested in watching for. Not so much if control of the subreddit with my company name is wrested from me (might be a Wikipedia-like situation, where that isn't necessarily an issue) but if they're looking to do that for the purpose of misrepresenting my positions and establishing an endorsement where one doesn't exist. Right now, my sub going private is a statement of how I feel about the situation. If that changes, it changes, but if it represents me it'll be private, and sitting on that subreddit name.
I have nothing useful to add here except to say that I use your audio plugins regularly and greatly appreciate the work you do! Your active, well-considered stance here is also admirable.
For those interested in HN's approach to moderating the Reddit-topic "tsunami" (and yes, it really is and has been), dang and I discuss this in part in another thread here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312>
As usual, dang is reasoned, articulate, and fair. I have a better understanding of HN's policies and actions, even if I disagree in part on how this is being conducted.
I'm told (via email) that it was largely the flameware detector which adjusted this particular post's page ranking.
Maybe the solution isn't a blackout, but a spam-out. Instead trying to go private indefinitely, the subreddits should just implement automatic moderation policies designed to suppress valuable content and pass through low-value content (that doesn't violate content policies). For instance: automatically kill any post that gets too many upvotes, allow certain tired and overdone memes but block any new memes. That would kill the value of the community to Reddit Inc. but be much harder for the admins to automatically detect and counter.
One of the ... more interesting ... suggestions I'd seen on the Fediverse responding to my thread there was to start creating ... and immediately setting private ... large numbers of subreddits.
A DoS / DDoS attack on finding human mods for those subs, after a fashion.
Sad to see Reddit news is still relevant, as it indicates the site still has users. With alternatives growing and the motivation for so many to leave, I'm not sure I have much sympathy for those who just won't leave at this point. They're basically just volunteering to prop up an organization that by all rights should die.
I've seen the same story play out time and time again. Alternatives never gain any meaningful traction to overtake what they are trying to replace. In the off chance they do gain traction, they will eventually become the very thing that they sought to replace because they need to monetize to pay for the infrastructure.
Tech is basically a giant pump and dump industry. Create an app, pump it up with free access, then try to cash out to investors or monetize...which inevitably kills the product.
The internet worked best pre-2010 where people ran small niche communities on their own because they enjoyed the hobby, not because they wanted to make money.
The /u/myusername feature didn't exist ten years ago when I created /r/dredmorbius.
Having a specific subreddit affords the ability to:
- Curate the content presented. It's not everything I've ever posted to Reddit, it's a specific set of interests. Visiting via the "old" view shows those topics, visible at the Internet Archive presently: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredm...>
- Style the subreddit, as noted.
- Provides other subreddit-specific features including the Wiki (which I'd made heavy use of), moderation tools, and the like.
In fact they did not, because I have two subs for which I was the only mod and user. The one that had been long closed and private got no attention, only the other dead sub where I'd closed it quite recently in solidarity. There's no functional difference between the two, and no benefit to anyone to force the one to be reopened and not the other.
I can confirm. /r/MKaTS is a longstanding private sub of mine. No modmail (yet).
There's also /r/MKaTH, affiliated with the former but public. I'd taken that private and added a solidarity note. So far, no modmail, though it has far fewer members than /r/dredmorbius.
There will always be people who just want to show up in a space and act like an asshole, then cry "censorship" when they are asked to leave.
I kind of want moderators on Reddit to stop moderating just to show how quickly it would kill the platform. Popular subreddits would be overrun with bots and hate speech within a week. Then the real user exodus would begin, meanwhile Reddit has to try and convince their remaining advertisers that bots and racists are worth advertising to.
Reddit is kind of a special case because the same moderators stayed there forever and have evolved to extreme uniculture. Also they are (obviously) coordinated now and reddit has never given users any recourse. It's not like the moderation in other places.
I used to sub to r/politics and r/news before the 2016 election. Both subs changed dramatically during that time. I left both of them, not because I'm against the new makeup of the content, but because the content that is there is now narrowed into a laser focus. If the mods aren't responsible for that, I don't know what is.
https://lemmy.world and https://kbin.social are federated alternatives to reddit. Many of the same communities exist there and there is robust debate. I like the kbin UI better, but Lemmy seems to work better.
Is the problem with LinkedIn entirely the site design patterns? I think a lot of it is the insufferable nature of modern corporate career ladder climbing and self-promotion as a means of self-preservation and advancement in that space.
LinkedIn initially was very much a place where the ethos was something like this:
LinkedIn is a place for professionals to interact with other like minded professionals about the trials, tribulations and successes of work
Unfortunately, it morphed into what is basically a job hunting platform with social media behaviors as your gateway to getting a job, rather than just applying for a job.
This change is what leads to all the self promotion, the "always positive always on" hype posts, the corporate media campaigns etc. Not to mention every friend request got loaded with "is this random person trying to get me to recommend them for a job?" type thing.
The organic lets talk about work authentically with others in the profession type stuff is minimized and in some cases I think its gone completely.
To be honest, if it wasn't for the fact that it really is the only place to reach recruiters and hiring managers directly, I wouldn't be on LinkedIn anymore at all. It has otherwise lost all career value to me
https://communities.win has been around since reddit banned The_Donald. But it allows right wing views, so probably not what 95% of HN is interested in.
I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy until everything else had been killed off, then they went hard on piracy.
That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.
Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.
Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.
See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for?
God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.
Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com
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On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.
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> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV
I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.
The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.
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I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial.
Building and running a software company is not free.
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I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.
Here's an example of a community:
https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending
Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform.
Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.
"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."
At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.
I'm not saying you are wrong. But the point you are missing, in my opinion, is that the people using the API and third party apps are the power users. It's simple, you start using a site/tool/game so much, you learn the addon/plugins/whatever for it and start using it, tale as old as computing.
Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back.
But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ?
It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO.
The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show.
PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation.
Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.
> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value".
Is it wrong to claim that, though?
Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.
I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?
All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?
There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.
This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data.
Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit.
You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs.
None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.
Reddit won't open any source because that would make apparent how badly made their products are.
The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....
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https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctoro...
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."
- Cory Doctorow
I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people.
Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.
Reddit's revenue per user is utterly trash compared to every other social media site. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to want to close the gap.
> I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value.
There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table.
Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort.
I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.
What is a reasonable amount?
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First, that is certainly an interesting way to bring up the anti-mod wedge the pro-Reddit-admin side are trying to push. Divide and conquer, right?
Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one.
This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.
See this on pushshift and apps that used it like the camas search tool:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...
> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."
So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.
I wrote about this exact phenomenon yesterday. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.
It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.
> Every subreddit is just a click away from moving
Are they?
I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere.
The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there.
Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.
Reddit's /r/piracy has completely moved to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy after Reddit de-modded the top mod.
And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy.
So, there's 1 for you.
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r/StarTrek and r/DaystromInstitute partially moved to startrek.website
> Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it.
As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.
>That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it.
This is a universal truth.
I don’t really see the need for a video, if they say they need to apps to do moderation, IMO take their word for it.
> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power
That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.
> I think of how MS ... turned a blind eye toward piracy until
1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Yes, the original claim is wildly ahistorical. I seriously think that one of Microsoft's key innovations that made it successful was the idea that software should be paid for, not shared, and this should be enforced by law.
When I look for reddit alternatives... the ironic thing is that I can't find any that seem to me comparable and offer even as much API as reddit does currently! (If you know of some, happy to hear suggestions).
Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there.
Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest.
But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out?
It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)
> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here
Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?
>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.
Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.
But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.
Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).
>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.
If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that.
Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).
Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).
If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.
> I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.
"Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.
>I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.
This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform
Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else.
Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.
This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
third party apps serve far fewer ads, or no ads, and offer functionality that neither the website nor the official app support.
life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.
Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them?
The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.
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Reddit and its communities (comprised of users and mods) are in a symbiotic relationship.
Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other.
I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.
I'm all in favor of big subreddits protesting. What I don't like is that very small, slow subreddits are also protesting when doing so is likely to be fatal. Each of these small communities barely came about in the first place, and subs that get ten posts and fifty comments a day aren't going to recover after being shut down for a month.
It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.
Didn't Ms have a pretty lax stance on piracy in the last decade or so?
Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc..
Or are you referring to the '80s?
> I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy
I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently
That is not what Microsoft did at all.
Some sub reddits voted on this, so we can't blame the moderators in all cases.
I disagree that someone gets to add my voice to a protest need on a vote.
It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.
The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years.
The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.
Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)
That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.
Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>
That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:
Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":
<quote>
Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.
TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.
And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.
(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)
Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.
Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.
That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.
I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.
</quote>
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>
Links:
1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.
And in this case, that one person happens to be me.
Excellent take
https://lemmy.ml OR https://lemmy.world and https://kbin.social and are quite nice. Been posting there myself and it is great.
Lemmy is having some stability issues across its instances because of this growth curve: https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/693866c7-8f65-4046-8781-58aee70...
I'm trying really hard to like Lemmy, but whenever I'm reading through posts on "active", "hot", etc. it will initially load with the correct content. But then, I get about 10 seconds before the entire list frantically reflows and fills with brand new posts from all over the place. Extraordinarily annoying. I get that creating a new post is itself "activity" which is probably why it does that, I don't think posts of that nature meet the description of "hot".
Maybe I just need to be going by Top->Day
This is a bug, and should be fixed in the next version. It happens in Top Day too sometimes.
A simple trick is to browse page 0 instead of page 1, by editing the URL.
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Apparently they’re removing it.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1357
I also had trouble with Lemmy's UI and made a different frontend for myself. Here's some screenshots.
1. https://postimg.cc/PPRMGw7k
2. https://postimg.cc/mcNMrzmk
3. https://postimg.cc/7CVG4vLT
I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.
This has to be a bug, right? I experience the same thing and just wrote it off as broken, deciding to try again in a few days when they figure things out.
The current sorting algo is sorta not great. An instance i'm on that forked, and then unforked recently is dealing with this right now. We had our own react frontend with really nice custom themes, but in order to federate we had to go back to the main codebase.
It's not great but it will hopefully improve. A lot of growing pains but overall its a really exciting time.
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I believe hot is currently bugged, I use recent comments as sorting and I find that nice.
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I've been sorting by "new comments" -- which brings us squarely back to the "bump old threads" style phpbb forums. Which I suppose is okay.
I look at the subscribed communities I am part of. I find that just looking at all communities a little overwhelming.
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A really nice instance that might be interesting to people here is http://programming.dev
I think these instances that serve a "family" of topics has a great chance of shining within fediverse. I'm rooting for programming.dev to bring together the programming community.
I am unavailable to sign up on lemmy.world; the websocket connection closes and reconnects, no error, any ideas?
It seems to be down right now. It grew 50% from yesterday to today, so... well, growing pains.
edit: it's back up.
It's tough to read as a lurker. The page keeps scrolling around and re-rendering. I think the "realtime" promise is pretty misguided.
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What browser/OS? Maybe try a different combination.
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I am going to try and use lemmy, but it's tough giving up old content in Reddit.
I guess we can start posting old content.
Moving entire communities there is going to be challenging
I think the communities would benefit from becoming smaller. I avoided any large subreddits because the noise ratio was awful. The smaller ones were much better.
The trick is to both (1) promote equivalent communitie to existing Reddits - let them know there are alternaives to being a serf -- and (2) start posting on there. Be the change you want to see!
The federated future for social is coming, albeit slowly in fits and starts. What is nice is that many of the communities on these two are shared because it is the fediverse.
EDIT: Downvoted why?
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I don't really think anybody expects that to happen. As long as a large enough number of people move, it can succeed.
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~~Doesn't support Safari.~~
edit: Nevermind Safari works. 1Blocker blocks comments with the "Block Comments" ruleset. Usually it is supposed to hide comments where they are not the primary focus. So some rule should probably be adapted for Lemmy instances to work.
edit2: Reported it to 1Blocker.
Which one? I use Lemmy.world from Safari successfully.
Feature, not a bug.
I would sign up for lemmy but it requires an email
Did you manage to sign up for reddit without one?
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What are the differences? Who runs these instances? Is there any moderation, or is it just the messy wild west?
An instance is a server. Server administrators set the policy for creating new user accounts and new communities. This is the equivalent of a Reddit admin.
Since it's part of the Fediverse, a user on one instance/server can subscribe to a community on any federated instance, and make posts/comments/etc. You don't need a separate account on every instance.
Communities are typically moderated by the user(s) who created them, much like moderators of a specific subreddit.
Can someone explain why all of these federated services are so left-wing? Don't these people have enough of the normie internet catering to them already?
Left leaning people are more open to new experiences and thus are often early technology adopters just like they are often early social practice early adopters.
Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...
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In Lemmy's case, it may be because the creators were banned from the left wing Reddit communities for genocide denial and promoting neonazi literature. It's a textbook case of horseshoe theory, and I won't go near that service with a 10 foot stick. By all accounts they seem to be awful people.
OCR of the notice screenshot:
"We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don't want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.
Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.
If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."
I hate to say it. From a PR move this is a well crafted email. I can support and relate to the argument. If the moderators are so crucial to the subreddit that they’re in charge of, their loss (and possible movement to another platform) will reflect that as community members also move on. That’s the real protest. Instead closing subs felt a lot like burning down your own house.
It's a basic "divide et impera" - the first thing you do to break a strike is trying to delegitimize the leadership's mandate.
Sure, the PR of people who never browsed reddit
If you read a bit deeper with the context of how reddit has operated:
>Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.
No, subreddits always belonged to mods, and users complaining about power modding has fallen on deaf ears.They never cared about moderator antics outside of a few specific instances across 15 years.
>Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.
This makes it sound like moderators are voted in, or hired. No, it's literally a factor of who has been a moderator the longest. Without admin intervention or the user deleting their account, the head mod of r/pics would be some 16YO inactive account. If they came back they can boot off everyone. Sure Admins would fix it, but why does a mod have that power if they are merely "stewards"?
their tools don't reflect their words.
>Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Yes, and taking away 3rd party apps definitely definitely helps that reliance. Making the mobile website an unusable ad to the app helps that reliance. I'm sure one day old reddit will be gone and RES will be non-functional and they will send a similar message.
>Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here.
And that comes to today's topic: is some small subreddit really worth threatening? I've heard other subs as small as 20 subs getting this message. There is no real "community", and I'm guessing such a move will simply make a small sub unmoderated, and then banned as part of the global rules. Why does Reddit care about such small guppies?
This is one of the most important points IMO that does not seem to be on people's minds. Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.
I am happy this API drama has run the gamut and is now tackling what has always been the true issue head-on: anonymous, first-come first-serve moderators of user communities. I have been on reddit for 15 years. These users have the loudest voice, have historically placed more importance on themselves than there actually is, and have an unhealthy amount of power over the content.
If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean. It's super frustrating to be banned or silenced from a sub because one of the mods didn't like what you said. Here I am, one of thousands of like-minded users wanting to participate in a sub about some topic, but my ability to do so is totally at the whim of this anonymous person who is just another user like me but doesn't have to answer to anyone.
We see time and time again that this power gets into the head of many moderators and they begin to exert personal control over the community. Mod drama on reddit is a taint. "But not all mods are like that." Yes they are, on long timescales. Generalization is useful. Many commenters, here included, miss the big picture. APIs/tools/UI will come and go. Reddit has a large cultural moat and that is a fact. Nitpicking details is petty.
In the context of an upcoming potential IPO, it makes sense for reddit to do the following:
Standardize the subreddits, the rules and terms of use, and consolidate control. Make the reddit experience predictable, not wildly variant at the whims of a handful of mods who control a vastly disproportionate amount of subreddits and content. Replacing mods with AI filters is a prime use case.
I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance. Every time I start typing a word on the subreddit search, like 5 different variations of a nsfw sub for that word come up. It's frankly gross. An idea floating around is to jettison the nsfw subs into a separate business that can compete with OF. This is a fine idea.
spez gets a lot of shit for what he says, but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them. I don't see any mods or supporters of this 'protest' posting with their name and face. Tells you all you need to know.
This whole situation has been a giant rugpull from under users' feet. Users shouldn't have to worry about Reddit's IPO. They signed on to a platform with expectations that there was some autonomy with administering individual forums. That they could use their third party client. This all makes sense if all you care about is money and ignore what reddit was for the past 15 years.
This isn't about just moderators. There are a lot of people that are moving on simply because of the implication of having to use Reddit's own app. It's not out of spite like you seem to be painting this as, it's because Reddit has historically made terrible software and have relied on the very same people that gives them most of their value to even make "their" content browsable.
And no, spez isn't the only person putting his name next to his arguments - the Apollo developer he defamed also was.
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>Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.
Then why did reddit make modding hierarchies based on who has been the moderator the longest? They've had a half dozen issues where this happened and provided no changes to help alleviate this supposed antipattern.
>If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean.
yea. And I think we both know what happened. You appeal to admins and admins do nothing. I'm sure some people can retrieve admin messages that say something to the tune of "it's the mod's community they can do what they want. Make your own".
So yea, I find it hypocritical and manupulative when suddenly the admins care about "community and belonging". You didn't care until it bit you in the ass. Again. This isn't the first time and at this point it's their fault they didn't change the rules in time for this.
>I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance.
I look to it forward to Tumblr 2.0 as well. No faster way to kill a site that relied on porn to drive traffic than to suddenly take it away. They want to ride that easy train until it becomes difficult, and then drop it and expect everything to go on as planned. I don't think it matters how you feel about porn here, this is just a nasty tactic.
>but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them.
He's going public and being paid some X million dollars. Mods aren't.
So... why have the feature of "Public, Restricted, Private" if you punish people for using a feature you all put in place? If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
What all this seems like is a bad psy-op campaign to force people to do the settings the admins want, and make it "feel" its the moderators doing it. Similar how Twitter forces you to remove bad content rather than just auto-do it
This is leftpad all over again: the intersection of publicly accessible namespaces, control over those namespaces, and what people in charge of the namespace are allowed to do by the platform when their protest actions are seen as harmful by the platform.
There's a 3-way social contract between the platform (Reddit/npm), the nominal person in charge (mods/module authors) and the users. If the person in charge does something that is sufficiently disruptive to users', or platforms interests, the platform will step in. We can argue about where the line is, but beyond that point, platform intervention is inevitable.
Edit: Thought experiment: would it have been acceptable had the author of leftpad put up a poll for downloaders to vote before taking the module down in protest?
There's a huge difference between taking down an entertainment source and taking down software build pipelines across the world.
> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
I can understand the sentiment, however users of Reddit employ private subreddits for a variety of reasons. Top of the list is in order to facilitate safe discussions, secure from prying eyes. For Reddit Inc it is a benefit, since it encourages moderator groups and communities to remain within the platform. e.g.
> r/ArmyofScience
> A private community for the comment moderators of /r/science to organize and discussion moderation of the subreddit.
If such private communities were forced open, it would require moderator groups, or those other private communities, to join the exodus to other platforms.
There are also some more personal collections on the site, without a doubt. Switching those to public would constitute a huge violation the trust which users have placed in Reddit and only further erode the company's image within communities that make their home on the site as well as with the public at large.
Lastly, there are over 3 million subreddits in existence [0], so even changing this manually would be a sizeable task.
[0] https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/
People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.
> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.
The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins). Would that make you happy?
> People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community. And we could institute rules as we see fit. If the system allowed it, we could do it.
That was obviously just propaganda and a blatant lie.
> If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.
The fuck? Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board? Just wow.
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>The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins).
historically speaking, some subs have gone private short term simply to control some crazy amounts of spam or harassment. And there's many more instances where subs went restricted for a while. So this isn't the only feature of privating communities.
>not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.
No tools are ever designed for use in protest, so this is a circular argument. That's part of what a protest is.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips was recently talking about how people have telling him he should kill the forum which is just a cost sink and just fully embrace the subreddit for years and he has adamantly refused for exactly this reason. Your entire community survives at the whim of increasingly toddler-ish CEOs.
I mean, businesses depend on each other all the time. So depending and not depending both make sense. Different risks though.
We’ve come along way from running our own web rings and PHPBBs. The internet was our audience but then we put it in the hands of companies looking to profit off our niche communities and now we’re having a leopards ate our face moment.
My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move. Moderators got what they signed up for and once a community was created and they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest. In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation should have walked instead of sticking around to watch Rome burn.
...except communities overwhelmingly supported protesting reddit's policies. You've bought into the provably wrong propaganda reddit is putting out about admins going rogue.
Just upthread someone pointed out that after the Homelab subreddit set up a Lemmy instance, only 18 people joined it. I think this undermines the idea that Reddit communities care about this.
What we know is that people who spoke up about this care about it. People who voted in a handful of subreddit-run polls care. But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. They'll just ... remain silent, and wait for the storm to blow over. Which seems to be what the majority of Reddit users are doing.
Disclosure: I'm a 12+ year Reddit "power" user, and I don't care about the API changes. I didn't vote in any supposed polls on the changes. My perspective no doubt affects my understanding of this issue.
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Maybe some did but the support is vastly overblown. r/nba did a poll (never stickied it) and 8,000 people voted. 72% in favor of privating the subredddit. On a random Thursday afternoon it has 33,000 people online. And the polls were posted in r/modcoord.
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There were communities on Reddit that did a poll in Discord on whether or not they should go private. Given the where and who the audience was, what voices do you think were ‘overwhelming’ representative?
In the end it was a way for many moderators to hijack a community and transfer it to their next pet social space (Discord seems to be the current favorite).
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That "overwhelming support" was likely brigaded by Discord as well as other subs, linked below.
Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14ae739/this_...
https://preview.redd.it/qty5883w6h6b1.png?auto=webp&v=enable...
https://preview.redd.it/c7o7zce1tb6b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...
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Admins going rogue?
Admins are employees of reddit.com. I think you're talking about moderators, who are the volunteer petty tyrants that have always been the worst thing about reddit, and they are the ones "going rogue".
>My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move
the inevitable move, maybe. The only move (for profits), yes. But they are executing this absolutely horribly. Reddit has never been an overly formal site, and I guess that is built into the culture of the admins as well.
>they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest
Historically speaking, they never did. We have seen mods run a sub to the ground several times and the result was users jumping ship to a new community.
So while inevitable, it is inherently hypocritical for Reddit to suddenly care now as if they ever cared about users.
I think Reddit are pretty much right in this whole thing.
> In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation
But they've completely mishandled it. A prime example of that was a AMA where ~10 questions got answered.
Communication is everything. Their "move" isn't even the main point of contention, it's the horrifically mismanaged communication from CEO to the public.
No reassurance, no de-escalation, no reasonable transparency of the decision making process. Just dictator moves, lack of communication in general except for a few emotion-driven jabs.
Here's a template the Reddit CEO can use to immediately put a stop to this chaos:
"Hi Reddit, this is the CEO. I admit it, I didn't handle this well. Some of our recent decisions have not been met well by our users. There are great points being made, and I've decided to take this into consideration. Let's start over."
Is anyone surprised at this point?
Look. This is always going to happen with user-generated content ("UGC") sites where the users who create the content don't own the platform. The owners will always reach a point of trying to extract as much value as possible from those users. Personal subreddits? Well they don't provide value (to the owners). We're long past the point of subsidizing users to grow Reddit. Now it's just value extraction.
And it happens to every UGC site and people are still somehow surprised. It's the most Lucy and the football thing I've ever seen.
This is why Wikipedia being owned by a foundation rather than a private venture-backed company is so important. Same for ICANN not being a for-profit company (remember how private equity tried to steal the .org registry [1]?).
[1]: https://gizmodo.com/private-equity-firm-trying-to-take-over-...
I think this title is a bit sensationalized. They're going after subreddits who have gone dark for the protest. That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of it. In my mind that would mean there is something they're doing specifically because they're individual personal subreddits. Like "You can't have a subreddit with one poster" kind of deal and banning them because they're not active enough or something.
In this case I understand it can be read as "Reddit aren't just going after big closed subs anymore" but the title, to me, doesn't make that obvious enough. I clicked it thinking "Oh no now people can't even have their own subs?!" when in reality it's just that one of the blackout holdouts is getting called on still holding out with the ~~new~~ not-new rule that they have stated they're going to start applying.
> That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of
no, there's a concept in reddit called a "personal subreddit". You know how you can click a user and it will show you the most recent comments? e.g. /u/chankstein38 would be your comment history.
Well, in 2017/8 or something, You can choose to convert this into your own subreddit. Complete with followers, votes, and user comments on "your sub". Never understood the idea given reddit's semi-anonymous nature, but I guess OnlyFans models benefited a lot from it.
This sub is literally the user's sub.
I think we're talking about a distinction in a different spot. My distinction was that rather than "They're shutting down personal subreddits" this post was more "Reddit is even coming for mods who blackout their personal subreddits"
I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!
No, this is literally an individual personal subreddit.
I think we're talking about a distinction in a different spot. My distinction was that rather than "They're shutting down personal subreddits" this post was more "Reddit is even coming for mods who blackout their personal subreddits"
I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!
So… are you not allowed to have private subreddits any more? Is this their official stance?
Clearly not otherwise that wouldn't be a feature. The issue is that there is no official stance. Any actual stance would be an admission of madness in the approach - "No taking your sub private to protest Reddit platform changes" wouldn't go down well even though that's what it is. They're trying again and again to keep things quiet, even though they keep running into the Streisand effect, something Reddit should be acutely familiar with already. There is also that saying that trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is insanity.
This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.
It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.
It wasn't private before, it was made private in protest. I think they are just automatically messaging mods of subreddits that were public before the protests and are now private.
My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.
> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.
Alternative explanation: Users may not just roll over when the platforms they've invested countless hours into start abusing them.
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Moderators of always-private subs, such as test or personal subs, have also received these messages.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14faqrt/is_redd...
Same for always-NSFW.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fjbtt/our_subre...
Note that "private" has two meanings here.
Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.
And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.
In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.
As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>
One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
(I'm OP in the event it's not obvious.)
Based on comments I've seen, they didn't even try that hard - they're just automatically messaging mods of all private subreddits. People with subs that have been private for years are receiving messages.
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> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.
Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.
Is there a social media platform people don't have a weird relationship with?
I have an old sub-reddit I haven't used in years back from when they allowed you to use a CNAME to point a sub-reddit and get a custom "front-page" where I would share links I found interesting.
I got the same modmail message, even though I barely have 20 subscribers to that sub-reddit and it has been private since they dropped CNAME for a sub-reddit support.
Seems like it. Maybe Reddit mods should just open their communities but just stop moderating..
The message seems to be that if they don't keep moderating exactly how they were before this api decision that they'll get the boot. Not the official message of course, they are saying one thing and then doing another at almost every step of this drama.
The official stand of Reddit is you are not even allowed to sit passively as a mod. Here is how rule 4 worded
"...This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting."
Intentional sabotage is the only option left at this point.
This is an approach many are taking, and Reddit is still removing moderators for it.
The fact that Reddit is taking drastic action against users who aren't breaking any rules is a pretty strong sign that Reddit's leadership has gone off the deep end.
Some have have started moderating more actively, with a new rule that all posts have to be John Oliver
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/20/how-john-...
unmoderated communities quickly get deleted.
I don't think that you could ever use a feature "in bad faith" from a service provider POV, and get away with it on a moral ground alone. Forget official stance, reddit is a host, if they don't like something, they'll make it go away, as it's their platform at the end of the day. And such is the state on every private platform. It's nice until the host wants it to be.
I'm guessing this is an automated message that was sent to all the subs that went from public to private in recent days. And there's no easy way for it to tell whether a given subreddit is "personal".
Among other points, I'd raised the issue of distinguishing personal subreddits years ago in a post to which a Reddit admin responded directly and pledged that they'd honour my request in that regard:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>
(OP, FYI)
Seems like it; I have a personal subreddit the same as my username that I flip between private and restricted to post music videos I grab with an iOS shortcut (can't post video on private subs) and the same landed in that accounts inbox (2) days ago.
My other private subreddit for Wikipedia/github links has never flipped/flopped and it didn't get the same message.
I havent received that message and have a personal sub
Its pretty funny that Huffman did all this to try to juice IPO price by ~10% and probably will end up dropping IPO price by 40% vs if he had done nothing.
I wonder what shareholders think of his 'leadership'.
I wouldn't assume this would drop IPO price. If it winds up making reddit more profitable, that is.
I would estimate 10+% of reddit has deleted their accounts, but most importantly, that 10% skews significantly toward 'power user'. Quality of content is already dropping apparently.
Not all investors will recognize that nuance, but 'reddit in chaos' was national news.
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"I must do something. This is something. I will do it."
This is lame. The poster made a good point. If it’s not your platform, then you don’t own it.
so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.
this is a problem.
Yeah, the fundamental problem here is social medias ought to be a protocol, not a platform.
Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.
This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.
Reddit is the only platform that makes sense as a protocol.
The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.
Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.
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You are correct. Any content created on someone else's site isn't yours - Youtube, Facebook, HN, etc. Even Gmail. We are making a tradeoff for reach, access, performance, etc.
Is that true? I don't know about the other services, but YouTube has this to say in their terms of service:
> You retain ownership rights in your Content.
https://www.youtube.com/t/terms
This is completely, utterly incorrect. From Reddit's own terms:
> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ...
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement/
This just isn't true. The content is legally yours, Reddit only has a license to it so they can display it on their site. Just like a record label though, Reddit has economies of scale and can do more with your content than you can, creating a power imbalance.
> this is a problem.
How so? Reddit pays for the infrastructure and software, why would anyone expect they own their own subreddit? Are people really expecting Reddit to operate at a loss? If you want to own it, pay for it.
The kind of unpleasant moderation jobs they expect people to do requires those people to feel some kind of ownership over the space they are creating.
If they want the job done a particular way, they need to pay for it.
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They own the ad network running on those communities. They own the traffic. But why in the world are they interested in owning the community itself?
Noob Question: Given AI is reducing the cost of creating technology. Isn't making reddit access API based the antithesis of the direction where the future of online communities is?
The future I presume is: As computation gets less expensive, content creation and storage is democratized and managing that platform eventually becomes easier with AI tech this walled garden approach is bound to fall. Its just a matter of time yeah?
Eh, you should never let computers (including AI) make decisions or manage. You can't blame it or hold it accountable. You can't appeal to it or ask it why it did what it did.
In other words this just seems short sighted on reddit's part.
Confirmed: I'm Chris from Airwindows (small open source audio software dev) and am the sole mod for r/airwindows, which is a dead sub. People interact with me elsewhere, for a while I had a ITTT posting new plugin releases to the sub, then I stopped. I took the sub private largely because as the only user I wanted to endorse the striking Redditors taking much larger subreddits offline. There's no real impact to this.
I got this in mod-mail:
"Hi everyone,
We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.
Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.
If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."
I responded with the following, and have heard nothing further:
"Understood. Note that airwindows is my intellectual property and I control the website and the youtube channel which is my primary mode of engaging with Airwindows users. As such, and since there are no legitimate users trying to re-open the subreddit, it's an interesting test case. I await whatever further information you care to share with me :)"
There was also another subreddit where I was the sole user, called r/homesoil (a Minecraft mod me and my brother made). I believe that had been taken private long before, and I haven't received mod mail over it. Looks like it's strictly punitive, directed toward anyone aligning with the striking redditors no matter how small they are.
I was asked by another redditor, "Do you have a TM on the name? Could you sue Reddit to take it down b/c they should not have a forum named with your trademark?"
I responded, "Oh no, I created the subreddit. Not only that, people are allowed to create fansites so the mere concept of a subreddit that's solely my business name without me associated with it, is not itself a problem. For instance, there's at least one Facebook group using the name that's not me, and nobody is confused.
The test case (which may never happen, fair warning as this is kinda telegraphing their exposure if it did) would be the use of such a subreddit to try and convince people I represented stuff I don't represent.
In other words, the activity I DON'T want to see is: kicking me off my own subreddit, installing some other person as a mod, who then uses that subreddit to imply I support Reddit's position and leadership.
And in the absence of really impressive pro bono representation, my counter would not be trying to sue Reddit over that, but exposing the situation in a Youtube video, most likely as an aside in a video that's otherwise intended for a product release that would see a lot of attention. For instance, I'm doing reverb effects where the tone quality is tailored to work similarly to Bricasti hardware reverbs, which cost over $4000. There will be people paying close attention to my efforts there, so a mention of the Reddit situation would get outsider attention that wouldn't go to a video solely about Reddit."
That's what I'm interested in watching for. Not so much if control of the subreddit with my company name is wrested from me (might be a Wikipedia-like situation, where that isn't necessarily an issue) but if they're looking to do that for the purpose of misrepresenting my positions and establishing an endorsement where one doesn't exist. Right now, my sub going private is a statement of how I feel about the situation. If that changes, it changes, but if it represents me it'll be private, and sitting on that subreddit name.
I have nothing useful to add here except to say that I use your audio plugins regularly and greatly appreciate the work you do! Your active, well-considered stance here is also admirable.
For those interested in HN's approach to moderating the Reddit-topic "tsunami" (and yes, it really is and has been), dang and I discuss this in part in another thread here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312>
As usual, dang is reasoned, articulate, and fair. I have a better understanding of HN's policies and actions, even if I disagree in part on how this is being conducted.
I'm told (via email) that it was largely the flameware detector which adjusted this particular post's page ranking.
I have been using Reddit for like 13 years and I didn't know personal subreddits were even a thing...
Maybe the solution isn't a blackout, but a spam-out. Instead trying to go private indefinitely, the subreddits should just implement automatic moderation policies designed to suppress valuable content and pass through low-value content (that doesn't violate content policies). For instance: automatically kill any post that gets too many upvotes, allow certain tired and overdone memes but block any new memes. That would kill the value of the community to Reddit Inc. but be much harder for the admins to automatically detect and counter.
One of the ... more interesting ... suggestions I'd seen on the Fediverse responding to my thread there was to start creating ... and immediately setting private ... large numbers of subreddits.
A DoS / DDoS attack on finding human mods for those subs, after a fashion.
Sad to see Reddit news is still relevant, as it indicates the site still has users. With alternatives growing and the motivation for so many to leave, I'm not sure I have much sympathy for those who just won't leave at this point. They're basically just volunteering to prop up an organization that by all rights should die.
I've seen the same story play out time and time again. Alternatives never gain any meaningful traction to overtake what they are trying to replace. In the off chance they do gain traction, they will eventually become the very thing that they sought to replace because they need to monetize to pay for the infrastructure.
Tech is basically a giant pump and dump industry. Create an app, pump it up with free access, then try to cash out to investors or monetize...which inevitably kills the product.
The internet worked best pre-2010 where people ran small niche communities on their own because they enjoyed the hobby, not because they wanted to make money.
Of all the worlds problems, this is not a difficult problem.
Make a free alternative that handles massive load/scale and run it how you want.
How is this feature different from just posting to /u/myusername? Maybe this is just a cleanup of duplicate features?
The /u/myusername feature didn't exist ten years ago when I created /r/dredmorbius.
Having a specific subreddit affords the ability to:
- Curate the content presented. It's not everything I've ever posted to Reddit, it's a specific set of interests. Visiting via the "old" view shows those topics, visible at the Internet Archive presently: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredm...>
- Style the subreddit, as noted.
- Provides other subreddit-specific features including the Wiki (which I'd made heavy use of), moderation tools, and the like.
TL;DR: It's different in many ways.
Consider r/redditseppuku
I made and later closed a tiny sub before this whole kerfuffle. I haven't received any flack from Reddit yet.
I mod several subreddits, a mix of public and private.
Some have received the notice, some haven't, yet, as of last check.
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In fact they did not, because I have two subs for which I was the only mod and user. The one that had been long closed and private got no attention, only the other dead sub where I'd closed it quite recently in solidarity. There's no functional difference between the two, and no benefit to anyone to force the one to be reopened and not the other.
I can confirm. /r/MKaTS is a longstanding private sub of mine. No modmail (yet).
There's also /r/MKaTH, affiliated with the former but public. I'd taken that private and added a solidarity note. So far, no modmail, though it has far fewer members than /r/dredmorbius.
(OP, FYI.)
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> And they should reign in the moderators, their abuses have angered way too many users.
Moderators are always going to be hated by some segment unfortunately.
There will always be people who just want to show up in a space and act like an asshole, then cry "censorship" when they are asked to leave.
I kind of want moderators on Reddit to stop moderating just to show how quickly it would kill the platform. Popular subreddits would be overrun with bots and hate speech within a week. Then the real user exodus would begin, meanwhile Reddit has to try and convince their remaining advertisers that bots and racists are worth advertising to.
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Reddit is kind of a special case because the same moderators stayed there forever and have evolved to extreme uniculture. Also they are (obviously) coordinated now and reddit has never given users any recourse. It's not like the moderation in other places.
But without them Reddit would be worse.
I used to sub to r/politics and r/news before the 2016 election. Both subs changed dramatically during that time. I left both of them, not because I'm against the new makeup of the content, but because the content that is there is now narrowed into a laser focus. If the mods aren't responsible for that, I don't know what is.
Couldn't we have a Reddit alternative? (I also want a LinkedIn alternative)
https://lemmy.world and https://kbin.social are federated alternatives to reddit. Many of the same communities exist there and there is robust debate. I like the kbin UI better, but Lemmy seems to work better.
Trying to sign up for lemmy.world for a week without success. But happy on https://lemmy.one. It doesn't have downvotes, which for me is a big plus!
Is the problem with LinkedIn entirely the site design patterns? I think a lot of it is the insufferable nature of modern corporate career ladder climbing and self-promotion as a means of self-preservation and advancement in that space.
LinkedIn initially was very much a place where the ethos was something like this:
LinkedIn is a place for professionals to interact with other like minded professionals about the trials, tribulations and successes of work
Unfortunately, it morphed into what is basically a job hunting platform with social media behaviors as your gateway to getting a job, rather than just applying for a job.
This change is what leads to all the self promotion, the "always positive always on" hype posts, the corporate media campaigns etc. Not to mention every friend request got loaded with "is this random person trying to get me to recommend them for a job?" type thing.
The organic lets talk about work authentically with others in the profession type stuff is minimized and in some cases I think its gone completely.
To be honest, if it wasn't for the fact that it really is the only place to reach recruiters and hiring managers directly, I wouldn't be on LinkedIn anymore at all. It has otherwise lost all career value to me
You're on one, and the original code is available at http://arclanguage.org/install
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Seems to be the way of many companies.
read.cv is interesting: https://read.cv/explore
eli5?
Absolutely. Pay someone to spin it up.
https://communities.win has been around since reddit banned The_Donald. But it allows right wing views, so probably not what 95% of HN is interested in.