Comment by sandoze
2 years ago
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.
The Lemmy homelab community is up to 1.67k subscribers (https://lemmy.ml/c/homelab) so while people may not be joining a specific homelab instance, they are creating accounts somewhere and joining the community.
Having said that, it doesn't seem very active at the moment which isn't a good sign. Granted, I have no idea how active the subreddit is to compare.
>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. T
on the other hand, if you deleted your account and walked you also cannot interact in any polls, unless the polls are off site. So while people are saying "no one left", clearly there is SOME population reflected in how much people here and elsewhere are talking about it.
Disclosure: would be 10 year old power user. Deleted my account 3 years ago, but still inevitably had to lurk in reddit for some communities. I'm just enjoying the fire rising as I inevitably predicted since the 2015 blackout days. Not very happy about the changes given that I used a combination of RES (which at this rate I'll be surprised survives more than 2 years) and anonymous browsing on Infinity to check. The discourse tbh has only gotten more polarizing, even on non-political subs and I wanted a goo d excuse to make a hard stop to reddit. Thank you, Reddit.
BTW: infinity's stance here is to try what Apollo didn't do. Infinity will be paid-only, and if that doesn't stick, it's done. That's basically a kiss of death for how I used Infinity, but best of luck to the devs.
>only 18 people joined it.
I've unsuccessfully been trying to create a Lemmy account for the past three days. The signup button just spins. I've used many different combinations of usernames, email accounts, browsers, origin IPs, Lemmy instances, etc. Maybe God hates me, but more likely I'm not the only one.
Being unwilling to leave does not mean they won't stop using the platform.
The fact they didn't move while the platform was effectively shut down proves that the category bof service isn't even that important to them.
Just review how many people are saying they're better off having not been on Reddit and now have zero intent of returning.
I'm one....
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.
It seems to me a lot of subs also said they were closing for 2 days, but never re-opened. I understand that logic, but because the subreddits have stayed close there is no way for that community to indicate if they support the ongoing protest. There's a big difference between voting 'yes' to closing for 48 hours vs permanently.
TBH, 25% voter turnover for an internet forum is pretty high. Remember that the most participated US elections (which have billions thrown into ad campaigns and is in constant news) top out at 70%.
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).
The ones I was in, asked what to do ON reddit, and I personally saw subreddits vote to go private.
It would depend on the subreddit. r/stoicism (aka r/bro-icism ;) ) seemed very unimpressed and self-involved, and didn't see how the concept of 'virtue' entered into it. r/datingoverfifty overwhelmingly sided with its mods, in part because that subreddit was so actively moderated that women over fifty could post there without getting harassed, and scam artists were quickly run off by the mods. As such, that subreddit had experienced moderation as a positive force and trusted its mods' opinions, and its mods were repeatedly in touch with the subreddit explaining what they wanted to do and why, and asking whether they had user support.
Looks like we saw different experiences, is all I'll say.
1 reply →
It's not "hijacking" if it's the community they curated.
I don't understand what you have to gain from lying about this interaction elsewhere. Why is the truth so impossible for you to bear? The community repeatedly asked (and STILL is asking) in Discord and Reddit for capable moderators to take over. No one has stepped up. It's fine. That's how communities work. You alone do not get to dictate what a group does. I wish you could communicate what your real deal is because it's not the "hijacking" of a community (which isn't even yours???). Perhaps stop trying to make this all about you. How sad.
Not sure why they went the discord route. That's not what some big subs did. For example, /r/nottheonion (definitely not niche) simply pinned a single post with three comments to simulate a poll. 88% (87.3k votes) supported continuing the blackout.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/148w58w/vote_s...
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...
Sounds like a reddit issue. You can't control who votes on a reddit poll. All you need is a reddit account.
Maybe this is a long requested feature that reddit could have implemented... nah. Clearly it's the mods who are selfish.
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."