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Comment by tetrep | Hacker News Reader

While there is much talk of protest, nobody in a position of power (like those organizing protests in various subreddits) seems to be offering a diaspora option. The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want.

I don't see why the protests would have any meaningful impact on Reddit policy. Look at how pointless Occupy Wall Street was, and now imagine they started out by saying they'd only camp there for a weekend.

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>The protests are extremely time boxed too, so if I were Reddit, it seems like a fair trade. Very short term harm followed by getting exactly what they want

The community leaders aren't just upset about the policy change, but also trying to avoid contending with managing their communities 100% with reddit's inferior first-party moderation tools. It would make sense for the time-gated protests to be followed by a longer tail of deterioriating quality as mods simply quit.

It looks like that's what the /r/music team is planning to do already. They'll be closing the sub indefinitely on June 12, and one of the mods has remarked in a sticky comment on the announcement thread that they've been paying "$5/month to run our own servers to do stuff that reddit can't for the past 7-8 years."

It's remarkable to imagine creating a platform where community members will be so passionate as to work for free and even spend hundreds of dollars of their own money to enable working for you for free. All the more remarkable to see Reddit treating said community this way.

[0]https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/update_rmusi...

Reddit has in the past taken over and reassigned ownership of a sub when the top mod does something too disruptive, like shut the sub down. They did that with r/KotakuInAction.

I assume they'll do the same to r/Music if they just shut it down. The move for them, imo, would be to automatically allow YouTube and Spotify links, and ban news and discussion posts.

Yep, I moderate a sub with ~85k subscribers, and pay $5/month to host a better auto mod than Reddit has built. It does an insane amount of moderator work for us. We will not survive without it, but it would cost a crazy amount with the new API fees.

I will turn it off on the 12th, and we will just suffer without it until we all quit and the sub dies. Oh well.

Mods quitting might be the best possible outcome for Reddit, as then they'd have to solve their moderation problem a way that doesn't just create virtual HOAs...

Some of the communities have announced they will remain dark until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by community.

But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it. I mean, they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that even if you don't work for reddit?

You'd really think so eh? Unfortunately no one wants to pay mods.

> they run communities with millions of views a day, surely there's money to be made out of that

This kills the community.

Or rather, it sets up the possibility of the same thing happening over again on a micro scale: the users (who contribute to the community without being paid) in revolution against the mods.

> Some of the communities have announced they will remain dark until Reddit reverses their decision, so it will vary by community.

If the sub is popular enough Reddit will take it over and appoint new mods. Has happened before and will happen to some of the subs that choose to go dark as well.

> But this is, I think, where money comes into place; I fully expect some of the 'volunteers' for some of the more popular communities have found a way to make money off of it.

Definitely. Every (lead) moderator of a decently popular community is getting kickbacks one way or another. They do it for "free", but the only ones doing it without some compensation are absolute suckers.

I would love to see the evidence you have for the kickbacks claim.

As one example I know someone who moderates the "official" subreddit for a game, which isn't even that popular, and they get all of the DLC/microtransaction cosmetics for that game for free in return.

When you said kickbacks I wasn't expecting the price to be so low.

Protesting corporations is so silly. You're not speaking their language. Corporations only speak Money. You can wave signs around with English written on them, write long protest posts, do these temporary boycotts, and so on, but they won't understand you because you are not speaking their language.

It's like protesting McDonalds for a day and then going back and ordering a Big Mac. The words you say in your language are going unheard, but the words you say in their language: "you buying things for money" are heard loud and clear.

> Corporations only speak Money.

it seems reddit is already struggling with that piece, so gotta do whatever you can.

The protests block access to subreddits, which stops traffic, which means they lose out on money.

As OP points out, most of these protests are time boxed, so Reddit has probably done the math and feels it can easily weather this very temporary loss.

If the protest was "We're shutting down our subreddits indefinitely" they might actually motivate Reddit Corporate to take action.

It's like a worker walkout, except one where employees just take a long-ish lunchbreak to wave signs around, and then go right back to working. What's the point? Aint no corporation gonna care about that.

> As OP points out, most of these protests are time boxed, so Reddit has probably done the math and feels it can easily weather this very temporary loss.

They made this decision before the blackout was planned...

A lot of the ones I've seen have said they're shutting down for _at least_ the two specified days, and a lot of them do use the term "indefinitely". I think that the two-day time span is just to give a starting point, and that as people start getting shut out of subs they like and want to visit they'll be less likely to care about other subs also being unavailable.

Lots are planning an indefinite shutdown until decision reversal. If they have people that moderate exclusively through apps it's a forced shutdown anyway, because the alternative is immediate ban due to being unmoderated.

I’m not defending Reddit’s new exorbitant API fees, but having lived through several Redditor revolts before, I think there is only a very small chance the current uproar persists for more than a few weeks.

I'm not too sure, removing porn and nuking apollo is a pretty big slap in the face and will impact a lot of power users.

I'm convinced that they want to get rid of power users.

My guess is that Reddit Inc.'s vision for Reddit is similar to TikTok. 99% of people mindlessly consuming, with surface-level, vapid comments but no deep discussion.

But many of those same power users are the ones doing all the unpaid work of moderating communities, unlike TikTok which has little need for such users.

Reddit is a discussion board. There will be nothing to consume if there is no discussion.

I am logging off. Hopefully I can maintain the discipline to stay logged off. Next step will be to delete my account. I probably won't as there are some DIY communities where I have really benefited from the feedback of others.

Without power users Reddit dies and something more useful will take its place eventually. The internet is still full of possibilities. There will always be a place for geeks to go and share.

Some subs I'm on are going permanently dark from the 12th onwards and are looking for alternatives like Lemmy.

What's to stop reddit from taking ownership of the subreddits and assigning new mods to them?

This has happened in the past with subreddits with frequent rule breaks, and has even resulting in a reversal of the original viewpoint of the subreddit

Even if the users start posting only black videos on /r/videos, couldn't reddit just remove it from the default subreddit subscriptions and laugh while the protests themselves have been de-platformed?

It's really unclear where this power struggle will end.

Nothing would stop them because Reddit can do what they want with their site.

That said I think moderators should make it permanent and see what happens. Reddit will have to install their own mods to turn them back on, and might even have to pay them, but then again I'm sure there's a long lineup of people willing to moderate any of the bigger subreddits for free if push came to shove.

I'm starting to look for new places to go as well because this feels very reminiscent of what Digg did and their downfall. Going from Digg to Reddit seemingly happened overnight. That might even be a good idea - if an alternative is found moderators should go redirect the subreddit to a reddit replacement. That'll really tie their hands up.

>but then again I'm sure there's a long lineup of people willing to moderate any of the bigger subreddits for free if push came to shove.

I highly doubt that there's a long lineup of people willing to do unfulfilling work for free with little recognition.

>What's to stop reddit from taking ownership of the subreddits and assigning new mods to them?

i'm pretty sure some of the subreddits participating in the blackout have already been warned that this is what will happen if it goes on beyond the planned two-day period.

These protests aren't the final course of action for reddit moderators. This is just a visible way to voice dissatisfaction and raise awareness. These protests come with the implicit threat of escalation if reddit continues with their planned API changes.

What escalation? These mods need Reddit, but Reddit doesn't need them at all. Suppose Reddit banned every single mod today. They'd have a rush of incoming volunteers, and the quality of moderation might actually improve if anything. I'm saying this as someone who is pretty bummed about losing 3rd party apps.

I think you have this quite backwards? Moderating is awful, thankless, unpaid work. Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?

> Why would a mod "need" an awful thankless unpaid job and why would Reddit have a rush of competent, honest, qualified people willing to replace the mods?

It meets some psychological need. That might be a sense of belonging, power, purpose, etc. It's why you don't need to pay mods to do this "awful" work. The reason why Reddit would instantly see a rush of people willing to replace them is because that many people want to be mods, for the same reasons.

Whether they're "competent, honest, or qualified" is another question. It's why I love to see technology automate out the role (e.g. community notes).

I heard that reddit has previously threatened replacing mods for any indefinite blackouts, which would be why a 3 day blackout is being pursued. They will lose a lot of money on these days, it just depends on how much.

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