Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: My Reddit account was banned after adding my subs to the protest

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As you may be aware, there is an upcoming protest[0] on June 12-14 where many subreddits[1] are going private for 48 hours in protest of reddit's API fee increase[2][3], which many expect will lead to the end of all third party apps.

I moderate a few subreddits for a niche hobby, and decided to join the protest. We're fairly small, if non-negligible potatos: altogether, maybe 10k-15k active users on a busy day, but still want to show support.

So, I commented to add the subs to the list[1] and made announcement posts based on the template[4] linked from r/modcoord.

Several minutes later, the site logged me out. I received an email from reddit that said my account had been locked for "suspicious activity" and I would need to reset my password.

The timing seemed curious, but as I was logged in over an Airbnb's wifi, I figured it could be legitimate.

When I logged back in, I saw that all of the posts and comments I've made from this account had been deleted. The password reset requirement is understandable; the fact that the posts and comments were not restored, less so.

Looks like it's finally time to encourage my community to move to another site.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36187705

1. https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet...

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/13xh1e7/an_open_l...

3. https://old.reddit.com/r/evilbuildings/comments/140n3m3/hey_...

4. https://old.reddit.com/r/ProCSS/wiki/api_protest_template

View on HN

This is an exercise in power. It's basically the online version of every labor dispute ever.

In any labor dispute workers test the water to see how much power they weild. They threaten or invoke some sort of action (like a strike.) Management respond with lockouts, terminations and so on. Ultimately there is usually some resolution where both sides understand their co-dependence, but equally understand the limits of their own power.

Reddit is following the playback here. Moderators instigate a "strike" of sorts. They get locked out. Management tests the water to see if they weild actual community power, or are just a small group of malcontents.

It will be interesting to see this play out.

Mods have no real power, because there are any number of volunteers waiting in the wings to take over to be able to wield that same power.

In most subs most care about having that power to silence and punish people they dislike more than to do actual good, IMO.

Exactly. They are not workers, they do it for free.

Even volunteers have power. The question is how much? Often workers (paid or unpaid) believe they are irreplaceable, and start acting that way. It behoves management to find out if that is true. It can also help the relationships a lot if the workers find out its not true.

We're all in relationships with others all the time. I can push my suppliers some, but not too hard. I complain about other suppliers, but in some cases have little power so walk softly.

Reddit moderators believe they have power over API pricing. I guess we'll see who is right.

The majority yes, but some of them are Reddit employees and are paid.

> In most subs most care about having that power to silence and punish people they dislike more than to do actual good, IMO.

I strongly disagree with this.

What you describe isn't most mods, it's just the loudest form of modding. Mods who do the banal tasks well will hardly even be noticeable.

I mod a few subs, in my experience most mods are just kinda boring.

I mod about 10 subs myself, biggest with just over a million subs. I think it's absolutely most mods.

Maybe not on the smaller subs that are truly community orientated, and maybe not on some of the bigger truly well run subs, but on most subs? Sure.

I agree with you, and some mods are actually Reddit employees. I have had an account permanently suspended by a Reddit employee mod, because he could.

It's not true that all mods are volunteers.

As an aside, the paid Reddit mods are likely to be on the side of reddit being profitable and able to pay their salaries, and thus support price hikes.

Especially in an era of layoffs.

I'm speculating here, I have no insight myself.

> because there are any number of volunteers waiting in the wings to take over to be able to wield that same power.

Yes, and that's why the "good" mods have power (against Reddit), because they know not to abuse that modding power.

Bad mods will destroy the spirit of a community in months if not weeks, tanking their utility and usage. Reddit knows that (or did know that at some point).

> Yes, and that's why the "good" mods have power (against Reddit), because they know not to abuse that modding power.

That's not true. Mods abuse power all the time and admins don't give a crap. The good mods are good mods because they're not petty dicks.

Depends on your jurisdiction, what you described sounds like a labour dispute in a very employee hostile place. Where I live it's illegal to fire people who threaten to strike

Except for the most part, Reddit mods aren't employees; they're not even volunteers. They're users and customers of the site. They just happen to be users with access to more features than most.

they're not users nor customers, they're the product that reddit is selling

Lurkers are the product. Moderators are unpaid employees, which is why they are being treated like dogshit, same as any other employee. Reddit staff forgets they don't have much to lose by walking away.

It's as though the cows reject to being slaughtered!

reddit mods are notoriously terrible and have giant egos so honestly im a fan for many of them getting banned

Techicallyvyhry haven't been fired, just sort-of muzzled.

The law has evolved to help balance the relationship between employer and employee. It dictates limits on employer behaviour and also limits on employee behaviour. Usually there is a formal structure (union) to act as the employee representative.

None of which is in play here. There are no employees, just volunteers. There is no union. Yhe action appears to be somewhat arbitrary. Why private groups? Why 48 hours? Has there been any formal discussions to the root dispute? Is there a union for API users? What link us there between API users and moderators?

So yes, the response seems heavy-handed, but the proposed action seems premature. The mods are testing their power and Reddit is responding. And there's no law governing any of this, on either side.

For now, the modcoord subreddit functionally takes on the role of a union. I know that there have been times in the past when moderators were unhappy about the state of tools that Reddit provides for them to moderate. If I remember correctly there was also some kind of spontaneous organisation of moderators that adressed Reddit admins with their collective voice, although I am not sure if any "strike" kind of action was threatened back then.

Unfortunately, until congress passes legislation requiring companies that operate as a place of public discourse to follow certain conventions this will keep happening because technically they own you (or rather they own the words that you say as data).

They have basically reached the monetization phase, where most smart users bail either just before or shortly after. You get the same dynamics with tyrants, only you have more risks and more options available to you in the real.

Straight termination is illegal in most places, but more subtle yet unmistakenable steps can be taken. For instance freezing bonuses and other compensation over performance claims, or "promoting" an active movement leader physically away from the group, cutting budget on projects that directly affect prominent members, or moving them away from the critical projects thus killing their evaluation etc.

Sadly, fighting strikes and unions has probably become an art at this point.

Well sure it's a bit of a game between the employers and the union. Countries with more extensive labour laws will restrict a wider range of unethical behaviour from employers, giving the workforce more clout in negotiations.

>a "strike" of sorts

Why is everyone calling this boycott a "strike?"

The correct term is "industrial action". Its a kind of digital strike (locking out public users) but it's not a strike in terms of labour stoppage. Hence the air quotes.

Because the moderators provide (unpaid) labor for Reddit (or SO, to make the parallel with another post where you are asking the same question).

A boycott implies customers taking their business elsewhere. If this was simply people boycotting reddit there's nothing they can do.

However these are "more than customers" who are foing more than boycott. They are actively "locking the store" so others can't use it. It's not a strike (they're not withholding work) but it's also not a boycott since they are taking actual actions that lock out other customers.

you're describing a strong armed (because enforced) picket

Note that the difference here is much more ridiculous: there is no co dependence because reddit doesn't pay moderators anything.

Therefore management tries to excercise their power over nothing(?) in costs.

Costs can be more than money. Mods are exercising their power. Reddit is responding with their own power. Both sides are just demonstrating they have power.

Both will ultimately recognise the limitations of their power, which may ultimately be a lot more, or possibly a lot less, than they believe.

True. Some mods are an exercise in pettiness

I don't think that's an internally consistent way of looking at the situation.

Additionally I imagine 90% of reddit traffic is in the top subreddits which already have corporate-controlled moderators who don't care about any of this

Social inertia is working okay for Facebook... kinda... let's go with what kinda works, guys!

(Might as well, the alternative is they just pack up their moneytables and get the hell out of our temple...)

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if every moderator from every subreddit who joins this 'protest' finds that their account is removed from moderation privileges and they end up with a banned account.

In no way, shape or form does a moderator "own" a subreddit. They are merely harvesting the land on Reddit's server farm. At the first sign of disagreeable dissent The Reddit Overlords, with a few clicks of the keyboard, can and will remove the protesters from their property. Any appeals will go to /Dev/Null.

I'm genuinely surprised that moderators are putting what little power on the site they have at risk. We all know that most moderators like a good power flex and some genuinely thrive off it yet I don't think they have thought this through. While they think it may be a noble and just cause Reddit won't tolerate a dip in ad revenue and will happily nuke their accounts and hand the subreddit off to someone else who will toe the line in exchange for free janitorial and field plowing duties.

Mods could create temp accounts, mod them to their subs, then use those for the announcements etc. Even without being careful about IPs or email addresses it would make a bigger mess for reddit admins to sort though when banning people.

Absolutely. Yet this is strategy is completely void if an entire subreddit's moderation group is removed and reddit admins installed instead.

Yeah it depends on their goal. If it's to scare individual mods out of participating this would work, if it's to just take over whole subs, then obviously reddit could just do that no problem all over the site.

At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage a high-profile subreddit than deal with the unpredictability of volunteer moderators. That’s ultimately where this is heading.

IMDB tried this at one point and the quality of the moderation plummetted. Same people, they just decided to pay them. It seems to be related to some phsych behavior I’ve read about in behavioral economics. Similar to daycares that add monitary penalties to being late for pickup then have more late parents. It’s like it turns it into a chore somehow adding money into the equation. I’d like to think reddit might know not to fall into this problem, but I suspect you’re right that they will likely just try to pay people thinking it will solve their problems.

Yup, "Operant Conditioning".

The more appropriate study is the one where rewarding children for drawing leads to a decrease in drawing compared to groups that were not promised rewards. What they did for fun and intrinsic rewards becomes less appealing when it becomes about extrinsic rewards.

I'm not sure what the theory is behind the mechanism i.e. why are intrinsic/extrinsic rewards not additive? Why does the extrinsic reward dominate and why is it less effective and less sustainable than intrinsic rewards?

After looking at a bunch of these behavioural experiments that often use money as an easy to implement reward or punishment - I suspect there is something just straight up "funny" about money. It contains some type of hidden resentment and pain. It's bribery to do something distasteful. It's compensation for damage. There is something unfair and insufficient about exchanging it for non-fungible life. There is something about it that poisons the exchanges it is involved in.

They did an experiment with rats recently as well, where the experimenter played hide-and-seek with the rats (with his fingers in a maze of some kind). It turned out the rats were way more engaged versus when they did tasks for a reward.

It’s really fascinating stuff.

I wonder if the principle applies to dogs as well.

>At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage

if this was a profitable and beneficial endeavour it would already work this way. The reason moderation still lies in the community's hands (to whatever degree it does) is because reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users and many tens of thousands of large subreddits and this is not $15/h but millions of dollars in costs per month that is currently being donated by community members to a large for profit company.

It also adds a layer of deniability for reddit - "we didn't do it, that moderator did it" etc. You can see what the response to moderation is on twitter and figure out how valuable not having to deal with it yourself is.

Your solution isn't scalable with profit.

I would love if Reddit actually went and banned most moderators. The resulting meltdown of the website would be deliciously catastrophic.

I don't really see what the risk is. So far as I follow the ultimate threat from the mods is that if reddit makes the proposed changes to the API, they'll stop modding. Given the changes will take a way a lot of the tools larger subs rely on to mod effectively its an unsurprising move.

If reddit wants to step up and moderate the site itself, it's free to, but if it wants volunteers to keep working for free it'll need to play ball with em in some way or another. That or play chicken and see if it wins.

As much as us HNers like to talk about technology, moderation of content is the key to any social media platform being successful. Moderation goes away or drastically changes and the users leave when the site fills with garbage.

Occasionally mods will duck out for a day, on purpose, to let members go nuts with content. That is what would happen without moderators and after a while, all those un-moderated subreddits would become cess pools of bot content and spam with members leaving and traffic will take a giant nose dive.

I'm nearing the 15 year account mark, mod several 1M+ subreddits. I fully expect to lose my account over this.

Before you do this, create a new account for each subreddit through a separate Tor session for each and different email address (or none) then add them as moderators. Gives you a chance that Reddit won't delete these and you'll still have moderation access afterwards

My understanding is that accounts created over Tor are automatically shadowbanned.

Reddit described the Reddit model such that moderators "own" subreddits, just like you "own" your Facebook profile. They're reneging on that. It's as if Facebook is saying it is becoming a telephone directory so it will force every profile to have an accurate picture of your face

Reddit recently started throwing around the term "Anti-evil operations" - this seems par for the course.

It's strange but it appears that Reddit may be astroturfing their own site: https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/140gd1y/b...

I am unable to watch this on my phone.

It says "either you watch this page in the official reddit app or not at all".

It's a screenshot of multiple accounts posting the same thing.

This link is the content of the post: https://i.redd.it/bot-army-in-full-effect-to-downplay-the-ch...

Use old.reddit

That's not an issue with the link, that's the Reddit behaviour for most links to the site in general when accessed over a mobile device.

This would be a weirdly clumsy approach for Reddit to take. I don't know whether they're too ethical to do something like this, but surely they're too competent to do it in such a silly way. Simplest explanation is someone else did it, perhaps to frame Reddit or perhaps for a more boring spambot-related reason.

the CEO admitted to editing a user's comment in a fit of rage

> in a drunken fit of rage.

Why would the CEO even have that ability? Just comes across as unhygienic.

it was a loooong time ago when the CEO was one of the original coders

It was in 2016. Pretty sure he wasn't coding anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

That was an impulsive act (in reaction to people who had been abusing him personally), with no strategy behind it and serving no particular goal. If something like that is done at all, it's not very surprising that it's done in a clumsy way.

Here the allegation is that Reddit is systematically astroturfing itself with the goal of shaping user opinion. But they're choosing to do it in a way that is very easy to detect (the comments are 100% identical, and as a bonus they all come from usernames that are recognisably automatically generated) and apparently completely ineffective (the comments mostly have -1 points, with a maximum of 1). And the only evidence is something that could have been easily done by absolutely anyone.

They are.

We caught "community builders" making disingenuous posts trying to pass reposted/translated content as OC to generate engagement. After getting caught doing so with their admin accounts they tried again using normal users.

They also had the bright idea to spam users via DM using a poorly templated message (verbatim "insert u/USERNAME") to promote localized copies of low-quality subs (the kind of trash you see on r/all).

For anyone wanting further information about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

This is how Reddit started. In the very beginning of the site the founders had a couple of accounts they would use to put content on the site. It's in Reddit's DNA so to speak.

> Unreviewed content

> This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.

Reddit is trying so hard to keep this under control.

It's not even a popular comment? I think this is just normal spambot behavior, picking up a random phrase that's in a hot topic and running with it for a bit.

This is a new sub specifically for this topic. I forget some people literally just read the popular subs...

Honestly, it sounds like a great reason for the world to not care about Reddit.

I hope people start seeing the value in decentralization again.

A reddit style forum seems like it would be relatively easy to decentralize and federate. Any node could host one or more moderated forums, with other nodes caching messages for the users who access the network through those nodes.

Yup, that's what Lemmy does: https://join-lemmy.org/

As with any of these concepts, they will ultimately live and die by their userbase and thus value of the content presented. Having the software itself is only a small part of the battle ahead.

https://join-lemmy.org/instances says there's only 2.6k monthly active users in the entire "lemmyverse". That's not even getting off the starting blocks for even a single niche sub-Reddit.

Getting people to even humour the idea of going elsewhere when there's genuine value in pre-existing content is difficult, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, guides, advice et al, which unfortunately, Reddit is brimming with.

Windows Phone was a pretty good example of the "no users" problem: a solid alternative to iOS and Android, but not much in the way of big apps because of a lack of users, but the lack of users primarily stemmed from a lack of big apps. Chicken-and-egg scenario ad infinitum.

Would it be possible to "replicate" all (or most) existing reddit content to bootstrap a new system?

Not sure if all data is available anywhere? (Common crawl? Those big internet scrapes used to train language models?)

It's certainly possible, but there's no recipient on the other end of any interactions for it. On some Reddit threads, I can chime in years later and ask how x panned out for someone in terms of advice taken, or if they ever found a solution, or what they are now doing after x solution is no longer viable.

Most of the value that I derive from older content is being able to recontextualize it for the present day, especially with extremely niche stuff.

However, user hostility from Reddit itself is likely going to lead to an exodus of power users, just like with Twitter post-acquisition. It might not be huge numbers of people quitting, but they're meaningful users, which are a sad loss community-wise. Especially if you assume that way more people just view a platform than actually post things on it, which is apparently vastly skewed in that way for most platforms; "lurkers".

The whole reddit (posts and comments separately) from 2005-06 until 2022-12 is on this [1] torrent link, it's very easy to download, extract and use the data [2]. I'm writing my thesis about the connection between the reddit post's type and the comment structure, and I've been working with this data, for a few months, it's amazing.

[1] https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87...

[2] https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps

If that thesis is ever publicly available, I would love to read it: me@hammyhavoc.com

Sure, let me get back to you in 1.5 months

Wishing you happy research and writing! Looking forward to it. :- )

Thank you! :)

That's really cool! But a lot happened on Reddit between 2012 and 2023. I think the idea of using old content to bootstrap a new community site won't be feasible unless more recent content can be included.

(I also imagine something like >95% of all Reddit content was produced in-between 2012 and 2023.)

It's from 2005 to 2022, so only this year is missing.

https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter

I stopped posting on Reddit years ago when the whole equity language nonsense popped up and it's been great. It's captured, and is such a toxic and hostile community for any non-mainstream ideas, that it was a breath of fresh air to leave that behind.

In general leaving social media is g odd thing, especially if you're exposed to the negative behaviours that are rife on the larger public forums. I find that many non-mainstream ideas thrive on Reddit in smaller subreddits as it's a central point for people to go and find communities. I also see no equity language, not that I care enough about it to not it. However this might depend upon the definition of "non-mainstream" as for some people that's currently defined as a narrow set of politically driven partisan bigotry & repressive control, ignoring the massive amount of variety that does still exist in our cultures and instead trying to divide the world into us and them.

There's about zero value for most people in Reddit itself, as a software. The value of it is in established communities and serving as a Schelling point for locating those communities. That still exists, and saying "let's just all decide it isn't" doesn't change it. Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.

I said this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957

But what either of us said doesn't negate the sentiment of my original comment.

As with all such sites, the value is in what you don't see: the 99.9% of input that gets silently devnulled as spam. It's terribly hard to automate away in a small-scale decentralised operation.

and most of that is manual labor by mods (speaking from experience, yes, it sometimes it's better, sometimes worse, the UX is constantly horrible though - no notifications to mods, just strange "deleted by reddit" corpses)

Maybe? Don't know. I have a very legacy email account at a past employer. Impossible to go through the inbox, endless spam, I only read it via search. But comparing volumes of that inbox and the spam folder, the spam filter is catching the vast majority of spam. One year I'll figure out a way to estimate the ratio of ham to spam, caught and uncaught, in a way compatible with my attention spam ;)

> Communities and cultural focal points take time and effort to create, and hard to move.

Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking.

Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.

I keep seeing comments like this. “Man, if only people cared about decentralization” or “this proves that centralization is a failure”

As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever.

All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost.

We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.

I addressed this here, eleven hours before your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36192957

It borders on obvious to anybody who frequents HN.

To me the "fediverse" is an ideological answer.

I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever.

I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.

When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.

If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.

> If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.

You could say this current upset is about Reddit management being pressured into censoring more to appeal to advertisers. What you call "controllability" is a double-edged sword.

> When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it [...] or you don't promote it's use [...] - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.

The same argument can be made for the Web as a whole, which despite appearances is still decentralised. When was the last time you heard a lay person say that they weren't interested in a website for their business because only unsavoury types use those?

This is an implementation problem; people will self-host (or rent from Linode or w/e) if that's simple and not too expensive, and they'll take the centralised, ad-funded option if self-hosting is too hard and/or the loss of privacy is deemed the lesser cost. While concern for privacy seems to be on the rise, ideology has never been the deciding factor for the plurality of users.

nah, they will go and use discord instead.

Doesn't Reddit realize they rely on a symbiotic relationship with the community? This ignorant and greedy behavior proofs otherwise.

Besides, IMO an ad-infused API where every Xth post/comment is an ad may be a compromise.

A hot guess: they measured how many users they're able to lose and decided to go with the plan. The remaining part will be enough to run the business for a while, because they're of younger generation that has been conditioned to ads already and they simply don't bother about em or use of any 3rd party alternatives

They think "they may be whining now, but in a year they'll forget anything ever happened and we'll get the promotions for implementing our brilliant plan". It may also be true. Or it may ruin the viability of Reddit as a business, in which case the persons who decided it will fail sideways and move on to receive the same salary somewhere else.

Honestly, I hope they measured something.

However, looking at the app, the moderation decisions, the 'firing', and just about everything that the admins do, I know they haven't measured anything.

I've worked in enough BigCos, startups, middle sized, &c. companies to know that Reddit's management, like literally every other company's management, is just making stuff up on the fly and hoping it works. Because that's all that they have ever done.

They probably measured click-through rates between users using the official app, versus third-party apps.

That's easy to measure.

> A hot guess

Why is this even a guess?

The rumors of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated. I'm shocked at the number of people here who don't understand that Reddit has thousands of SWEs and PMs and Directors now, and they've definitely run the numbers on many outcomes.

Reddit has no viable competition for the service it provides. And it's no longer a space for techies and nerds, Digg v2 is something that happened in the old world. There's a bunch of people using Reddit exclusively on their phones via the first party app, and I'd bet it's approaching majority. Reddit is not going anywhere.

> Reddit has thousands of SWEs and PMs and Directors now,

Reddit has ~1,000 employees total.

Do they though? It's not the first time they've done things like this and nothing really happened.

I don't get their current motivations, either. They're about to cut off their nose to spite their face. This is how social media sites die. See, e.g. Digg.

$X is the fallout from the new Reddit policies w.r.t. third-party apps, and the power struggle with moderators.

$Y is the additional amount of money that Reddit gets from improving their advertising metrics before an IPO.

Reddit is betting that $Y > $X. And they can stop counting $X when the IPO happens.

As far as I can tell, there's just not enough community presence elsewhere, for most communities, except a few places like Discord. And Discord sucks even worse than Reddit, in a lot of ways.

As someone who has dealt with previously free services relying heavily on ads

I would actually take the approach of "API Access is gated by the account paying money".

This is how Spotify did it (only premium users have API access) and the entire issue of paid vs. free becomes "pay for the API surface".

This is probably what will end up happening and ironically is a worse result for third-party apps than the pricing model that’s causing a ruckus.

The proposed model is fatal for them so I'm not sure how anything else could be worse.

Or, they no longer have free 3rd party access but provide a paid tier that allows 3rd party access. Say $10 a month, you have to be logged in but it means you can still use the app of your choice. They can limit the amount of requests to something well above the average person use but low enough that is isn't abused by data scrapping.

It seems like a decent middle ground. But what would I know, I am but the son of a candle maker! I know nothing!

Spotify use similar scheme where only premium users can access spotify API and thus can use 3rd party apps.

Great in theory - without including NSFW content, those prices would never fly though.

Does anyone know if Reddit has actually ever turned a profit?

Because if they have not, it is hard to say what they rely on. And quite possible that they track which subreddits and users are profitable and which are not, and know exactly which people they want on the site and which they do not.

So you may be right that "greedy behavior" is driving their actions, but that might be manifesting in unexpected ways, such as deliberately angering the pieces of the community that don't click ads.

This is just speculation of course - I know nothing about reddit's operations, but it is worth considering that what is good for the users does not match up with what is good for Reddit's business. That will be a problem in the long run, but may drive their short-term actions.

Don't people realize many companies charge for API access?

Yes but have you seen their pricing? 20 million a year will be the API cost for the top (freemium) iOS app.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/reddits-api-pricing-...

They're basically using it to kill 3rd party apps and push their terrible mobile app.

"Looks like it's finally time to encourage my community to move to another site."

where will you go?

cpanel->PHPBB fast install

One does not simply: Ban self hosters

Can cancel culture remove a forum? There are a few examples of yes.

Sure, but not simply.

This situation looks like the perfect opportunity for sandstorm.io to gain some traction as an easy way to self-host chat and forums.

As someone who administered several websites and forums with friends in the 00s: This. Buy some web server space and host your community yourselves.

The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.

I really hope it's not Discord... Discord is screaming to be next to go public and throw everything free out and then you will have to do everything all over again.

Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.

> Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.

Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit.

But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.

Maybe massive online services shouldn't be totally free?

You say forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool, but Something Awful is still going and has always been $10.

I really don't want to be the product anymore. I would gladly pay for a good service with reasonable moderation.

I'm paying for Discord right now, even.

I think its a good question in principle, as it may spark introspection and innovation

In practice in the present its understood that this is an uneconomical idea

Maybe its free APIs that are a zero interest rate phenomenom

am I using discord wrong? I see it as a chat and voice client, reddit has wiki's and posts... I have no idea how to discover old content that has been posted in discord besides searching but that's not really "discovering" in my mind. I can scroll through some top posts of all time in a subreddit to see what it's all about. How do you do that in discord right after joining a server?

There is modern forum software out there, and I for one am not opposed to going back to that model. (I run a forum, and for awhile was a code contributor for one of the modern forum softwares)

Hopefully somewhere federated.

Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone.

Lemmy is great.

https://join-lemmy.org/

What happens when the server op decides they don't want to run it anymore and pulls the plug? Or alternatively, when they decide they want to get involved with this or that.. server ops are dictators.. just because it is on the fediverse (what mastodon uses) doesn't mean they are mature people with contingency plans and codes of conduct.

What happens when YC decides to shut down HN? Or, alternatively, they do $THING you don't like?

Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home.

You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.

Mastodon's account migration implementation has some serious issues. AFAIK you can't migrate without access to the original account, so if that instance shuts down you're out of luck. I think it's also not possible to move past posts to a different instance so if your original one gets in bad hands you cannot get your content off of that.

My problem with Lemmy is that I just can't figure out what happens if server A has a "sub-section" called news, and server B also has an instance called news. Do they get merged into one view? Do both servers now have two different "news" sections? I can't seem to get any solid answers on this and that's why I haven't bothered registering or using it yet.

Communities are namespaced. You'd have news@foo.com and news@bar.com. The local server is an implicit namespace for its own communities, so for local users of foo.com, news@foo.com is presented as simply "news".

I’m building an alternative and I could use a hand: https://flingup.com but I doubt people will jump ship, Stockholm syndrome?

How will you prevent it from becoming another cesspool for bigots? Seems to be the fate for every Reddit alternative, like Voat.

Its already pretty close once you look at some of the top posts on there unfortunately.

> Stockholm syndrome?

No, all the alternatives are just terrible, I can't see myself using your alternative either.

Not bad. I did see a racial slur on the first post I clicked on though (it was a comment)

If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears.

Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized.

I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons.

It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway.

For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.

Instead of Discourse maybe NodeBB or Flarum (both are much lighter than Discourse in my experience)

I think Tildes (https://tildes.net) is great. Invite only for now, but easy enough to get one.

Tildes is way too small, niche, and controlled entirely by its creator. When I first started looking for reddit alternatives, I got an Tildes invite and hung around for a few weeks before asking how one goes about making new subs. They're entirely made by the admin and subject to his discretion, so my request for an aquarium sub and a gun sub were just kind of ignored.

It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.

This is why places like Basement Community could have timed their launch wonderfully.

https://basementcommunity.com/

If they are doing this to a lot of accounts it seems Reddit might have finally found their Digg mistake!

Reddit is very funny in that it's a company that tries to extract as much value from its users as possible, when it's the users who create the vast majority of the value in the first place. Its selfishness and arrogance ~~will be~~ - no - is its downfall. The founders failed the second they decided to make it more for-profit than it needed to be.

Alexis Ohanian's fault for selling out stupid early and throwing the community to the wolves. Worked out for him in the end though.

Reddit has been on a downward spiral for years. I guess they are in a tough spot, because they're trying to monetize it, but the way they are simply ignoring the needs of their users will surely lead to their downfall.

You know what I learned recently about Reddit that I found unimpressive? They have a site-wide ban on posting Telegram links. So as a result, Twitter gets to be the middleman between Reddit and Telegram.

Reddit is partly owned (10%) by Tencent the Chinese WeChat giant.

While it's a little shitty to unilaterally ban them, it's pretty well known that for some reason people frequently post telegram links for illegal activity (drugs, scams, and exchanging CSAM), so I can see why they would do it to cover their own ass.

The sad reality is that as long as the basic memes and cat pictures continue to get served it doesn't really matter to the Reddit audience as a whole and also doesn't affect their bottom line.

Remember that /u/spez (Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman) SECRETLY EDITED USER COMMENTS without leaving any indication of an edit:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031 "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him"

And that's just the crap they've been caught with.

Please don’t let HN become a support forum for reddit. It’s a dying and moulding corpse that you needn’t waste brain cycles worrying about, if I were you I would consider your ejection a blessing.

I see this less of support and more of a news update on how Reddit is countering the protest. It's possible this is just a coincidence, but it is something to be aware of at least.

Reddit is a large social media site and its demise is newsworthy, regardless of its association with HN

> Please don’t let HN become a support forum for reddit

Or PayPal

Or eBay

Or Stripe

(I could keep going but you get the point)

Why did you choose three services that actually matter if you lose access to them without warning?

Because their (former) users come here to complain like we're their personal outrage army.

I like that people do this for important services, because it gives me a clue about what companies I should avoid or abandon.

Sure, but we expect Reddit to treat people badly because that's how it's been for a long time.

It seems quite different for a payment processor to lock you out of an account.

Oh, it's not a request for tech support ala the 'I'm locked out of gmail' posts that come up regularly here.

But I would like for others to know about this, if for no other reason than to add one more bit of motivation for people to create competitor sites.

Personally, I'd especially like to see a non-free but inexpensive offering with a reddit-style interface that caters to niche communities.

Let reddit have the cat videos and memes that litter their front page; that's what they want anyway. There needs to be another place for hobbyist communities.

It's easy enough to stand up a Discourse server, but there's something to be said for the network effects of a single site with a large user base.

Sorry about that - hope Reddit comes around

Unrelated: Does this post break the site for everyone on mobile or just me? It seems to happen with Tell/Ask HN posts sometimes

I am guessing it’s the really long link that’s not being broken up.

This is a golden opportunity for any competitor to release a Reddit clone and heavily market it. They could easily go after mods and community leaders and entice them to bring over their subs and think of a migration path. This could be the moment when Reddit splits in half and once many people move the rest follow.

There are several clones. They all follow the same pattern.

  1) clone Reddit
  2) must attract users because Reddit's value is in the large user base
  3) the only early adopters are the ones who are banned from Reddit
  4) curious 'normies' visit the clone to find it is full of white nationalists
  5) clone dies

e.g. Voat

I dunno. I'm a long time reddit user, but I'm done with it. It's really time to just dig into some self hosted shit with a reasonable ingress like Cloudfront or whatever works and just dump this crap. People still say "and my axe" on reddit. We don't need this siloed internet anymore. mTLS is SUPER easy to implement and in my opinion is the future of the internet. I've got some courseware as well as some simple VMs, containers, helm charts, juju charms and I've got a process for building custom distros with GPU support and clusters inside clusters that can federate with enterprise org level OIDC.

I'm a bit ahead of the curve I think? I don't know. All this talk about the big guys, we are at a tipping point. It's happening now. That's why they are trying to regulate AI IMO. They understand that we are moments away from being able to bridge all of our own resources in a way that isn't siloed.

We can host it all ourselves now. It's fine. The future is going to be weird... but really it's just getting the internet back that got hijacked from us 20ish years ago or whatever.

If you want to try yourself, since I can't recommend my gear because I have to finish the rest of the rollout, KubeSail doesn't get enough attention. Easy to set up on any computer you have laying around, but their gizmo is pretty cool too. I think their app store is neat and I could get my grandma hosting her own K8s cluster to the web with this tutorial.

https://kubesail.com https://codeburst.io/ddclient-c9a6ac1d8f81

Throw Netmaker or an mTLS implementation on top and now you can federate networks, share resources with labels, taints, or tolerations, manage volumes, yadda yadda.

I am sorry for your loss... but you know.... Scrape your subs and host them yourself. Heck, I'm so sick of reddit.... hummm. This could be a good tutorial demo. Mirror a subreddit with periodic syndication on a self hosted reddit clone that shows the old context and creates new with a few commands.

Sure there's still some problems, but it's a far site better than the blockchain web can pull off.

Also, don't try to do cluster to cluster communication with straight wireguard/tailscale. mTLS or Netmaker. They are very easy tools to mess with just with some docker containers too, no cluster needed.

As a private company, Reddit can do whatever they want. You can make your own Reddit if you want to. You are not entitled to a platform if you do not abide by the rules. You don't get to abuse the town square to further your own political causes. Yadda yadda yadda.

In case you’re being serious, the OP didn’t call for government to interfere, but for the community to migrate away from the site. This is about unhappy users boycotting a product to force a reversal of policy. Now, whether they’ll succeed is a different matter entirely…

That's 'just' a collective action problem, solving which is essentially impossible.

Communities have gravity, and its incredibly difficult to escape those gravity wells. Even if the power-users that produce valuable content move somewhere else, the subreddits they used will just link to that content, but keep the discussion on Reddit.

Like I said, different discussion.

But I am skeptical that there’s a critical mass of users necessary for truly reversing Reddit’s plans. With the IPO approaching, I feel like the best they can hope for is a temporary stay of execution.

Is this really a political cause? Seems to me like it's ultimately a conflict over the technologies used in the website, which are less individual political causes and more the average user's concern.

Legally, yes. Morally, no, they can't do what they want. Users have invested time and effort over literally decades to build today's Reddit communities. Therefore, Reddit needs to give good reasons for substantial changes they make if those could be harmful to community health.

The law is enforced top-down whereas morals are enforced bottom-up, so good luck trying to enforce morals with people who think their individuality matters more than anything else.

I think this is a huge stretch. I would have a hard time even calling it immoral if the whole site vanished tomorrow, without reason.

Surely, there is nothing in writing that has been agreed to that Reddit owes anything to the health of communities.

No one could possibly say this about usenet and I don't really see the difference.

Sounds like you copy-pasted a post to multiple subs in rapid succession and got caught in a spam filter...

Doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me, sounds like anti-spam measures doing what they do.

This happened to me. I set my mid sized porn subreddit to private some time ago. Logged in the next day and got a message: "your account has been suspended for violating the rules."

I say fuck them. I don't get anything out of this subreddit, and they get free labour. Subreddits can't exist without moderators and they know that. The reddit staff are just self-destructive idiots.

If you still want to comment in support of the strike, it is really easy to make another account and not get banned for ban evasion, but remember to never hint that you are evading a ban, because you will be banned for hunting it even if they have no other evidence. If you're gonna delete your reddit account anyway then you're welcome to see whether this is true - comment somewhere (on your normal account) about how you got banned for joining the protest and this is your second account and report back what happens.

If you are evading bans and you want to actually use reddit then make sure to store your account state (e.g. subscribed subreddits) outside of your account so you can transfer it to each new account. And get a GDPR dump of each account, which you can do after it's banned.

I think the most important thing at this point is to build a meeting point outside of reddit for all those people.

It doesn't have to be a fully built reddit alternative, but it should discuss how software is governed.

I think that's what it all lies to.

Software is not like other products. Websites are not like other products.

We've let them own us for almost 20 years now.

But we used them for more than that, in china they had post-walls in the street. We used to simply have community boards in real life.

And now those highroads are being jeopardized by companies in their own interest.

Shouldn't we ask ourselves, is it a benefit to humanity, if ours highway communication is being controlled by corporate entities ?

Can't we make an ONG which sole goal is to discuss and exchange on how those highways should be governed ?

This is a chance for humanity to grow but we are turning this into a pile of disaster instead of grouping up.

I do not think any individual at this point should be "in charge" of those high ways.

It should be an opportunity for all of us to join up, and build a governance framework of sort ; and from there create free tools which are not tied to economic narrow sight. Developers of such tools are all around the wrold, and centralization or decentralization is not the problem, it's either an achievement or a nice-to-have thing ; but in most cases, users don't care.

How do we group up, how do we discuss together like we do on HN, but we keep posting "some new alternative" every few week without realizing that if we group up in a simple github organization, we might be the most impactful workforce of the entire web ?

Do we really have to benefit from this ?

Is this all not above us ?

I was thinking last night the only way to properly build a unified community yet not run out of servers/bandwidth is to make a singular messaging system with signed authentication checksums universally distributed and if you want it to remain free and open you have to put your money where your mouth is by everyone buying their own servers and bandwidth.

Not quite Mastodon, more unified singular like Reddit where it is seamless integration and frictionless BUT every user/post is authenticated by a cipher signature and everyone runs their own server pulling down the newest updates every minute.

At most it would be minute behind?

Maybe best comparison is the old FidoNet with the forum backbone, I forget what it was called.

More like usenet? But where there are independent owners of each subforum that can cancel/delete messages officially (of course people can still sift through the deletions unofficially)

Spam is the biggest problem but ultra-fast lightweight message cancelling is the answer to that?

I've been working on a guide on how to use tools that delete your comment history. The idea being that if I leave due to this fiasco, I'm going to shred all my 11 years of content so that Reddit can't monetize it once I'm gone.

Does anyone have experience in this that might be able to help?

I was perm. banned for making a joke about choking out an attacking dog on a video of a guy choking out an attacking dog.

I can see you being banned for that.Try to appeal it, I did a couple of times sincerely apologizing for my actions. My ban wasn't reversed. Mostly read it to keep up with the news and car stuff.

All you did was admit your guilt.

All of my Reddit accounts were banned along with my IP and browser fingerprint after calling out an employee's abuse of shadow banning for simply tagging their username in a comment. The Reddit employee discovered my post 6 months later because I linked to it on my profile and now I have no way to use Reddit without a VPN, and I lost my ability to really consume their service the way I used to.

Reddit just does not respect their users anymore. Their content policy is enforced erratically at the whim of whatever current internal political environment is going on inside their company. I gave this company subscription money for years, purchased hundreds of dollars in rewards, and it absolutely meant nothing because of one employee wanting to cover their tracks.

While I suppose it's possible that this was a conspiracy, I'm a little disappointed that not a single person in that thread is considering the possibility that this was a legitimate reaction to a possible account breach?

OP logged on from (what would appear to reddit as) public wifi and that posted drastic messages. That's a lot like what it would look like if someone had hijacked a mod account. Deleting those posts isn't crazy, especially if the janitor isn't aware of reddit politics and is just doing their job.

Also, not to nitpick, but OP is lying in the title. He clearly wasn't banned, he was temporarily locked out.

Like, don't get me wrong, reddit is being incredibly shitty lately, but probably not for these specific reasons.

You know, I still miss Digg. I wonder what's next.

Working on it

Can you show us?

I also made a digg: http://tentacle.rupy.se (unfortunate name)

Also made a reddit/forum clone: http://talk.binarytask.com

You can probably run a nice lemmy instance on a free oracle cloud vm https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

Sorry to hear this, but I can’t say that I am surprised. I can offer you a new home on the alternative I’m currently building: https://flingup.com

How do you plan on keeping FlingUp from turning into Voat?

By creating a non-profit foundation and running it like Wikimedia does Wikipedia. No ads, tracking etc and no shareholders. This way, it will be alive for as long as the users find it valuable enough to keep donating.

Are you the original creator of Voat?

FlingUp looks great from a functionality and UI perspective, but in five minutes on the site I'm already seeing outright racism and other problems that kept a lot of people off Voat.

Do you intend to address these types of issues?

I haven’t seen much of that yet. But funnily enough, one of the top links for me right now is “Text message that will bring down Biden”, which sounds exactly like something you’d see on r/whitepeopletwitter or similar front-page disinformation subreddits, only from a right-wing instead of left-wing perspective.

Based on its functionality and UI, I'd really like for FlingUp to succeed. It looks like the best reddit alternative that's currently available.

But if it's just going to descend into being another Voat, I'm not going to bother encouraging my communities to switch over. We're all familiar with what invariably happens to forums / social media sites that have no restrictions on what type of speech is allowed.

Lemmy is looking like a viable alternative. According to this[0] page running your own instance is pretty light on resources, and they have an official Ansible playbook install option[1].

And, whereas with FlingUp I have no control over their moderation policies, with Lemmy I can set the moderation policies for the instance and defederate any other instances as needed.

0. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration...

1. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible

Make the subs private for 2 weeks then

Why is this is a surprise? You don't own Reddit. It's not "your" subreddit. You're a free worker (moderator) and you went against the boss (Reddit). Of course they fired you.

You sure the airbnbs website wasnt just ip banned or anything? ive had like 3 accounts perm banned randomly because of accidentally logging into a wifi that was ip banned

Send a message to /r/reddit.com , it's more likely you are caught in the spam filter going awry than a power trip by the mods. They can easily restore you and your posts.

Who owns a community? The individuals who contribute to it, or the organizations that foot the file hosting bill?

How do we move the ownership to where it belongs?

I am so sick of Reddit and would gladly welcome an alternative, or going back to decentralized communities again.

It doesn't matter. Reddit has never had any affect on my life or anyone I know. It never comes up in any conversation I've ever had. If reddit went away today, I'm positive no one walking down the street would notice or care. At least not enough to make them stop their walk.

has this happened to anyone else? because if it's really about the protest, it shouldn't just be one mod targeted

I mean if you say enough things people don’t like here you get comment limited and/or shadowbanned so I don’t see whats the point of complaining here.

Don’t ask me how I know about this…

Can confirm. Don't ask me how I know, either.

But, I can confirm that the worst part of being put in the HN penalty box is that you basically can't get out. I think that's pretty shitty.

Hmm I feel that explains a lot :(

Yeeep. Same thing happened to me. I went from getting lots of vote activity (positive and negative) and responses to… nothing essentially after I made one comment that blew up a few months ago.

It’s pretty damn disappointing. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised tho.

Most of your recent comments are dead, and they don't seem too offensive.

TBF, I was kind of a dick in the one that blew up but not insanely. It was mostly a really political/social topic. So I did the cardinal sin of responding to that sort of topic :)

But.. yeah. Live and learn I guess. It still bothers me that they moderate it like that.

I mean what did you expect?

Just don’t use Reddit.

That's funny a reddit mod being unreasonably banned by other mods. Reddit is just far left propaganda these days.

And then being pointed at as a source of all problems. I'm pretty sure I've heard about something similar that was happening in Slovanian countries not so long ago :D /s

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