Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark
reddark.netlify.app
reddark.netlify.app
With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut everything down for a week (I don't blame them, but that's a failure mode we had not considered). This caused us to go dark completely without an easy way to reach the users to tell them what was going on.
When power came back traffic was where it was before within 20 minutes, and the next day we even had a surge in traffic that we didn't ever pass again. If you really want to see an effect I would suggest a period somewhere between two weeks and a month backed up by a threat to do it for three months if they don't recant. That would have some serious teeth in it and threatens to completely derail any IPO plans they might have.
Anything less and you're just showing that it is reddit that is the boss, not you. A good rule for a community is that if it isn't your domain, database and server it isn't really your community.
I don't think the direct losses of the 48 outage will be what matters here.
Rumors are that Reddit wants to IPO later this year. This blackout will put the spotlight on two issues: - Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community, especially the moderators who provide an essential service for free. - Reddit is out of touch with its own community, and keeps pissing off the very people their existence depends upon.
If I were planning to invest in Reddit, this would make me think twice.
This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community you don't actually own the community.
So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving).
Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".
Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).
Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.
It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.
It goes by the "last activity" timestamp of your creator/modlist, so even if you are actively moderating your subreddit (like attending to the mod queue), your subreddit can still get taken over if you aren't posting.
The system is so, so stupid.
* If you search the takeover requests subreddit you could even see that we weren't even stealing the subreddit from the original owners who did all the work to grow the subreddit, but rather from other takeover bots.
If those mods were anywhere near serious about this they should just roll their own reddit and attempt to migrate their communities. I'm pretty sure that would elicit an immediate response from reddit but that would be a much harder fire to put out than this one.
Are they? Assuming they all go dark for 48 hours, then come back online, and business continues as usual... wouldn't that somewhat prove that Reddit doesn't have to worry too much? What if certain subreddits go dark for extended amounts of times, multiple weeks, maybe even a month. And then new copycat subreddits pop up, what do you think will happen?
Reddit will be fine, the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know, it's the powerusers and moderators that care a lot.
(FWIW, I absolutely think the protests are justified and Reddit's pricing is insane, but I'm cynical and don't see them being affected by this all that much)
If they enable the subreddits without moderation, they'll die very soon. They really need moderation and users often don't realise how much crap they're protected from until it's too late.
For the most part, nothing. The new subreddits will likely be ghost towns.
The idea that this action can’t possibly hurt Reddit I keep seeing is amazing to me. It absolutely will hurt Reddit. Even if it’s not an existential blow. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is. Simply saying it can absorb all this like it’s nothing is myopic.
And FWIW, I’m glad most people aren’t as cynical as you, and willing to attempt to change things.
I could see them doing this for the most popular subreddits like r/videos, but if you start doing this for even medium sized subreddits it’s going to have even more severe consequences.
People aren’t stupid, and they aren’t as docile as you think.
These theoretical questions to me are the equivalent of “Why didn’t the US just kill every person they encountered in Vietnam that was a male of fighting age instead of fighting against an insurgency?
Well, they could have. They had the ability to. And it probably would have resulted in a different outcome. But it would had some pretty severe consequences.
I doubt that. But it's fine to disagree about such things, the mods are actually showing reddit that they are a risk factor themselves and you can bet that counter insurgency planning is underway. The 'vocal minority' is a minority. I don't think reddit would be above killing of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) accounts that they consider to be trouble makers (whether or not that is true is something else).
People have a very short attention span and a very low level of commitment if they're not directly impacted. Remember the outrage about Musk on Twitter? It's all but died down. Or the various attempts to create some alt-right social networks.
People don't have an obvious other place to go, and the majority of the community of /r/whatever will just go to /r/whatever-else.
I am keeping my account, because I might need it to promote my business (it still has utility in that area and I am pragmatic, I am not going to not do something that could help my business for ideological reasons), but I will no longer be using it on a daily basis or contributing comments/posts unless they back away from this.
However, all users aren't the same. While I did not moderate any subreddits, I contributed substantially to several small ones in the way of posts, upvotes and thoughtful content. That's the stuff that really brings value to Reddit - it's the long tail. And even if the percentages are right, if the 5-10% that leave are some of the most valuable users of the site it will have a HUGE effect.
There are things about Reddit that are not widely known - the often thrown around stat of a small number of accounts moderating a huge number of subreddits is the tip of the iceberg. There's also a subreddit that you only get invited to if you have over 100k comment karma, called the Century Club. That's been around for a long time. Reddit knows it needs power users, not lurkers that add no value but advertisement impressions.
If they are trying to pivot to just become a site where you can infinite scroll memes and focus on the big subreddits, then they're directly positioning themselves to compete with Facebook and TikTok which seems pretty bad strategically IMO. It definitely doesn't bode well for the next decade of Reddit.
...
ok
> I am keeping my account, because I might need it to promote my business (it still has utility in that area and I am pragmatic
ok, so you're not leaving. Everybody else will be just as pragmatic and the rest won't care. Realize that you just pretty much proved the point of everybody here that believes that this likely will have very little impact. If you were principled you would leave.
I think it's disingenuous to say that someone who only posts to Twitter twice a year, to announce that they are on tour but does not browse Twitter regularly or use it aside from that is an active Twitter user.
>Everybody else will be just as pragmatic
My intention is to only utilize my account to promote my business on subreddits I think are relevant, whereas before I commented regularly several times a week. If everybody makes a similar change, Reddit would lose a lot of commentors.
>If you were principled you would leave.
The multiple threads you and I are going at it in all boil down to the same basic thing: what each of us thinks will be the result of Reddit's changes to allowing API access. What subreddit moderators will do, what Reddit as a company will do in response, how users as a whole will respond, etc...
At this point, I think we have both fleshed out what we think is going to happen in multiple ways and it's clear we disagree so further discussion on that front is pointless.
I will say that I don't feel I have been making an argument that people will (or should) leave on principle. Or that I myself am leaving on principle. I am choosing to leave Reddit because I don't want to use their terrible web application or mobile application.
If that changes, and I'm able to use Apollo again then my stance will change. Because I am pragmatic. I don't think there's going to be some Mastidon alternative that pops up. I think convincing Reddit to change course is the best path forward than trying to get an alternative going.
All I can say is that subreddits are built on the idea of autonomy - it's not just that they have their own mods. It's that this is a semi autonomous community. If you look at a lot of the subreddits that decided to go dark, their moderation held polls/voting about it and asked for community input.
Reddit admins are there as a safeguard - in the case of a subreddit doing something illegal or so unsavory it poses a larger threat to the site.
In the past over the last 10 years, this model has mostly worked. Even the subreddit r/the_donald, during the lead up to it being banned the moderators there described having discussions with the administration about what they would have to do to avoid being banned. Just because Reddit has always had the ability to be more forceful doesn't mean they've exercised it.
The action people keep suggesting here - a hand wave and all of a sudden these subreddits are "nationalized" (for lack of a better term) like a South American dictator taking over an oil company would completely shatter the trust that has been built, and it would have a lot of effects on the site. Just like when the South American country starts nationalizing companies. Capital flees.
They might not even be visible right away, and it probably wouldn't result in Reddit itself closing down but I am confident it would ultimately harm Reddit substantially (as opposed to many of the comments in this thread claiming it would have no adverse effect.)
Using Twitter as an example when the acquisition isn't even a year old isn't valid, in my opinion. Talk to me in 2 years.
On the illusion of autonomy.
> Using Twitter as an example when the acquisition isn't even a year old isn't valid, in my opinion. Talk to me in 2 years.
Then why join this debate in the first place?
This is the part that your side doesn't get - having power to do something and not using it doesn't mean you're giving off an "illusion".
Everybody who runs a subreddit is fully aware that Reddit admins have the power to shut them down if necessary, but the precedent that has been set is that there would be a lot of communication or they'd have to be doing something flagrantly illegal for that to happen.
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand conceptually - because it's how the international community works. Countries generally get sanctioned, not invaded.
Yes, it's not a perfect system. Yes, countries like the United States stage coups and regime changes, but it is better than the old way of invading and trying to rule a country like they're a colony.
>Then why join this debate in the first place?
Because the goalpost I keep seeing put in place to frame this discussion is that if Reddit doesn't immediately collapse after shutting down third party apps, then all the protests made no difference and clearly nothing has changed. My point is that it might take multiple years before we see how hollowed out the site has truly become. And it might still be a very popular website from a traffic perspective, but I believe it will have lost the core "engine" that makes it work.
Also I have a lot of work to do that I don't want to do and commenting on here is a way that I procrastinate but I think this is probably a safe assumption for most people spending their morning commenting here.
Whether or not you believe that the moderators are what makes reddit or that the users do so is only a subtle shift but it makes all the difference. If moderators flex their power they will stop being moderators because clearly the no longer seem to have the ordinary users interests at heart. This is why this is such a dumb play. You either have a 'batna' or you don't. Reddit holds the cards, and this is pretty much begging for them to show that they do so. Worse has happened and it never made a difference, as long as ordinary users aren't impacted to a degree that makes a difference to them things will stay as they are.
And a 'look at what you made me do' defense won't hold water, the users will blame the moderators because they can't get their fix, not reddit.
Reddit will die like every other community: through attrition, not because the moderators throw a fit over something that they may well see as important but which does not offend others.
Moderators ARE users of Reddit. Drawing a line between "moderator" and "user" isn't the line that matters. The line that matters is "lurker/regular user" and "power user"
Moderators are power users. They're part of the small percentage of users that contribute a way outsized amount to Reddit by curating portions of it.
If the rule of thumb of online communities that 90% only lurk, and only 10% contribute, they're part of the 10%. That 10% is what makes Reddit work, period. Moderators use third party apps to aid in moderation, but a lot of power users just use third party apps because they are a lot less shitty. This ban ultimately targets all power users - the entire 10%.
>This is why this is such a dumb play.
I think the "play" you are referring to here is the idea of temporarily or permanently shuttering a subreddit.
But it's actually the opposite - if Reddit exercises their power resurrect subreddits (I think they could get away with the biggest ones like r/videos, but anything medium size and smaller no way) they lose, BIG TIME. And so many of these subreddits are participating they'd have to do it for hundreds of subreddits just to juke KPIs for their fail to launch IPO.
The idea that the users will just blame the mods is silly, as I said most of these blackouts were discussed at the subreddit level and the overall community sentiment is positive. And some of these people have been moderating these communities for years. You can't just replace them with randoms and expect the experience not to deteriorate.
Here is an example on a subreddit with 50k subscribers:
Initial thread discussing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/13zou5n...
Mod thread announcing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/142hhy3...
It's difficult enough to find anyone willing to actually put the hard yards in to moderation as it is, let alone when all of the resources and tools currently at moderator disposal get shut down.
You decide rules and shape the "culture" of the subreddit. Yes, there are absolutely people who are moderators and on insane power trips. That's always been a thing, for every form of online community I've ever known of (IRC, forums, etc...) But there are also many who view the role differently. That's why moderators of subreddits like r/programmerhumor, a meme subreddit that is also a place for programmers (specifically newer programmers) to blow off steam and joke about things they're stressed out about believe they have the power to shut down the subreddit permanently and Reddit will not "bring it back."
If Reddit crosses that line and brings subreddits back, installing puppet leaders who on earth is going to invest time into building a community on Reddit again? Knowing it can be yanked from them at an arbitrary whim - not even for breaking moral rules, but for threatening profits. This is a much more delicate balance than the commenters are painting it as. They clearly don't understand why Reddit works and seem to think it's pure network effect that has consolidated things away from independent forums.
When people talk about googling something and adding "reddit" as a keyword, it's because they want to read authentic discussion from real people about a topic - and sometimes a topic that is somewhat obscure - not an SEO optimized landing page that's going to ask for their email and try to sell them something.
That only exists in communities that are curated and participated in by people who care about them. Removing that removes the core of Reddit's being.
I don’t see how having bad mods not willing to put in the work and is just taking the role for the power is good for the subreddit and Reddit as a whole.
Great example, that one already has a possible replacement at programminghumour.
and the pinned post is saying they need moderators so back to square one. creating a new one isn't a problem but scaling users and finding people to run it well is
I'm not sure. I've seen several subreddits where they've done polls about going dark and they've overwhelmingly supported going dark. For example, r/AcademicBiblical is currently around 80% in favor of going dark and that's not a subreddit I would think is just chalk full of Reddit power users.
I'm pretty sure the average/more casual Reddit user either: doesn't use 3rd party apps, or doesn't care and will just use the official one.
It's Twitter all over again "omg everyone will leave it now that Elon's in charge". Yeah, that hasn't happened. At. All.
Now, knowing how us fleshy meatbags work, you're probably thinking I'm in favour of Reddit/Twitter/Elon or whatever. That is not the case.
All I'm doing is reiterating that humans gonna human and that no meaningful change will come from a few hardcore users when the average user couldn't give a shit.
48 subreddits going dark for 1 day is more of a statement than 1 going dark for 48 days.
The mods know many people rely on their communities for a multitude of reasons - mental health support, technical support, mentoring, etc.
I feel like 48 hour long outage for a social media website is huge. That's 2 days for people to look around at alternatives. Remember when google plus launches FB argued that they had zero hours to lose and they were kinda right.
I remember when Ronald Reagan fired all air traffic controllers in the US, that definitely had me wondering about the wisdom of the move and yet it went off without a hitch. Not a single plane crashed on account of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
P.S. Also moderating anything on the internet has been derisively called being an internet janitor.
I don't think that's enough to lose a ten+ year habit of checking Reddit. A week or more, maybe. 2 days, I don't think.
Once a company has a large enough network effect they can do almost anything and people won’t leave. I’ve come to believe that it’s the most powerful form of lock in.
Sometimes you have to act, even if it will have no effect, because it is the right thing to do, where our sense of moral indignation is so great we are motivated to act regardless of the overall outcome or what we may or may not reasonable expect to achieve.
There are actions that would be much more likely to result in a response, the mods are clearly engaging in a balancing act rather than a principled stance and I predict that if they stay this course they will simply be supplanted by more pliable individuals. A credible threat requires some actual work and preparation, not just the clicking of a link that another party controls anyway.
I think what Reddit would prefer is a "rip off the bandaid" situation where they just get all this over and done with as quickly as possible, with the least amount of noise possible.
I think this is one major reason that until the AMA that's happening today, all official communication has been happening in backchannels despite effecting a large number of Reddit users, whether they are effected directly by a 3rd party app going away, or indirectly, by a subreddit they are a member of being moderated with worse tools.
I'm actually surprised reddit hadn't introduced more democratic options for controlling subreddits that reach a certain size. There may be a lot of users that really don't care about 3rd party apps and want to keep their content flowing
A two-day blackout is a warning shot.
Protests are much stronger if you have a viable alternative lined up. They don't have any.
Any subreddit that does this will have the community forked before the end of the first week - without the involvement of Reddit Inc.
I left facebook because it became a place where people I knew spent their time curating a false virtual identity of themselves and seemed to become a place to establish social status rather than any meaningful conversation. I've avoided instagram for the same reason. Twitter seemed a good platform for open discussion, but now it looks like a pit of misery.
Mastodon is pleasant and friendly, but I find it hard to talk about the topics I am interested in. Like twitter it is more person-focused. What would be nice is if there is a way to cut across it easily in a more topic-focused way. Hashtags are present, but they don't have the feel of a forum. For positive or negative, there isn't any 'algorithm' on mastodon other than reverse chronology, and I think that does miss out on highlighting interesting topics and replies. Also there is no moderation or guidelines for hashtags, a feature which helped guide people to the right discussions in reddit.
I also like not being insulted and topic specific subs allow strict moderation and the banning of unpleasant people.
What, I won't be doing a bunch of free labor for a multimillion dollar company while being called a dictator all day? Yes please!
Reddit would probably have to step in and start removing moderators, digging their hole even deeper.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...
Likewise, several major apps (I know of Apollo and RIF) will shut down on the 30th, before the API changes take effect. I'm sure some people will relent and use the official app / website after that, but others will just quit.
I'm not sure yet myself, it'll suddenly make a big gap in my idle mode browsing. I'm sure there'll be other things I can get on with though.
From my perspective, the HN you’re describing is equivalent to tech, IT, startup, VC sort of subreddits. Obviously HN has broad news too but the Overton window and acceptable dialogue of HN is limited to how those sorts of subreddits are.
hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators. if you wanna charge for API access, you should also pay your moderators since you are profiting from their work.
The investors that have pre-IPO stock and who are looking to sell as quickly as possible, gain from IPO pops, so it's in their best interest to maximize short-term profits. That group of investors include a lot of the existing investors, and in almost all cases the founders and C-suite of the company.
A large portion of those might be for checking reports etc, since reddit at least does seem to do a slightly better job trying to keep humans in the loop there.
I wouldn't be surprised if this move actually damages Reddit enough that they can't IPO because the user engagement numbers will take such a sharp negative turn.
And then it's perfectly legal.
And they continue to do that, go read any prospectus, it's all about how everything will die and the company is dead.
Their logic is they should make other for-profit companies who make money using their APIs pay for using their APIs?
This is a common issue with discussion of companies, people say "look they're not making any money" just because the company accounts are not recording profits.
But if you pay out all your money as C-suite wages (for example) then you have "no profits" as a company but people are certainly profiting.
Another angle is political steer; you can make profit outside the company, or make social change, and so forego intrinsic profit.
C-suite and other employees profit from selling their time to to Reddit. It's kinda weird to start acting like that isn't how employment works.
That work is not forced, they all choose to "work" for free and can quit any time they want.
And that work may be unpaid in monetary terms, but many of those moderators enjoy their share of internet fame or a sense of power over "commoners" or their feeling they are doing something for a common good, that they are happy to continue working unpaid.
Whether they enjoy it or not is beside the point.
Moderators are providing value to Reddit. If all mods quit, and no one stepped up to take their place, what would happen? Now who deserves to take profit monetarily for that value?
As far as Reddit "development" they should have stopped a long time ago, the site is horrible to use and has been for a long time.
A lot of the content on Reddit is promotion and semi-hidden forms of advertising. Again Reddit doesn't see any of this spend.
In both cases Reddit is paying other companies for using their platform for making money.
Why would a corporation pay hundreds of thousands for ads when they could spend tens of thousands on some employee time to post, comment or moderate and get better results?
I imagine that the commercial entities using Reddit are using third party tools but the changes will hurt normal users more visibly.
Optionally, follow up with a badge or something that tags all content from commercial accounts as such, and allow users and mods to report commercial content that doesn't have such a badge.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...
Edit: sorry if I phrased something badly or was contradictory, I'm a bit tired :P - good night!
My point is twofold: first, I think this kind of commercial use is probably the much larger missed financial opportunity for Reddit. Second, if Reddit's intent with API restriction actually is, in fact, to try and capture some revenue from these kinds of behaviors, then they're clearly ignoring the much more targeted, and much more effective, approach of updating the ToS and directly restricting commercial use.
Using the above example, the PR firm would be required to have a commercial account, and Reddit would be free to set the pricing for that commercial account however they wanted. This is better for Reddit (they can charge way more than they would earn via API calls), it's better for users (more transparency re: what is or isn't commercial content), it doesn't affect third-party apps (no restrictions of API usage), and, if the pricing was right, it would be acceptable for the PR firm as well (paying for commercial exposure is standard practice basically everywhere else).
This would also give them a way to distinguish between commercial API usage like third-party clients, where the API is acting on behalf of individual users, vs commercial API usage like "scan reddit for mentions of this keyword and notify me", which is providing a direct commercial service without ever actually interacting with other users. These different kinds of usages could then be funneled into different pricing tiers for API access.
From a strategic perspective, I can't imagine a scenario in which Reddit's current approach is the right move here.
I think the situation is the opposite of what people believe is going on. Reddit just wants its biggest profiteers to start paying for what they’re taking.
The changes actually won’t hurt normal users at all. Users somehow don’t understand that this is not about them. The proposed changes are about limiting exploitstion from a handful of commercializing individuals.
Free access to the API is getting expanded, from 60 calls to 100 calls per minute. Developer resources will continue to be protected for non-commercial use. And bots and mod extensions are to remain unaffected.
But yeah, meanwhile regular users somehow think they need a call to action, even though nothing will change for them… except maybe the guy who runs Apollo will kill his app, but not because Reddit killed it. It’s because he doesn’t have the time to rewrite his code to be more efficient.
That’s not a fair summary of his position. If you read his testament, they really screwed him over, lied to him, and didn’t give him a realistic chance to turn any reasonable amount of his revenue to Reddit.
Even if he could lower the average number of API calls per daily user, they’re not even in the same ballpark, expense-wise.
Reddit demands so much to make it impossible
Maybe this is happening for subs over a million only?
Mods are given to most active and helpful users, those who are paid to be on Reddit for a living have an advantage.
Additionally, mods are not needed for influencing the content of a subreddit. Active users are.
It's worth saying that commercial moderators are against mod guidelines or TOS.
It seems to me the only revenue they seem to have is ads?? But I use it on the web and never seen ads (except for actual posts that are ads, but those usually get quickly downvoted and I don't even see most of them)... I think people who use Apollo or other apps also like to use Reddit on those because, among other things (like nicer UI) they do not show ads (and probably don't make any money either). Hence, it seems to me, perhaps naively, Reddit is giving us stuff literally for free.. they can't even monetise user data like Facebook, as most of us are anonymous users...
So, would be really interesting to understand how they're making money, which could help understand their motivations here.
There's also reddit premium (no ads, customizable avatar, reddit coins) along with a award system where people can give awards that cost reddit coins to exceptional comments. These awards cost reddit coins which can be gained through either getting awards on comments, or subscribing to reddit premium.
I would love to hear someone elaborate on this part. The API returns the same information as you get from the HTML interface right, but structured? If the API and the website had the same traffic, then wouldn't the HTML part (which is more complex I guess), but more expensive? If the API disappeared, wouldn't the HTML rendering require the same infrastructure? I'm not clear on how maintaining the API adds much overhead, except maybe compatibility inertia because it's a public interface. But infrastructure-wise?
When the speech police benefits the mods, they are all on board with it. Now that it doesn't, they seem so suddenly shocked.
These free power tripping mods standing up for themselves can be steamrolled by employees, and probably will be.
It happened to more than one sub I was in. They installed their own mods to 'keep the peace', and despite warnings that bad actors were at play, shut down the subs anyways.
Curious to see how this plays out.
Reddit used to be a place where you go for relatively unbiased opinions. Some mods and subreddits were better than the rest, some worse. But atleast there was an illusion of being unbiased. Mods to for brand/product subreddits atleast officially were not linked to the company.
But that is no more the case, just realized a few weeks back that /r/midjourney is modded by the official team and reddit does not seem to be doing anything about it.
Guess Reddit is trying to become more like Facebook with major brands managing their own subreddits, so no more random mods needed.
Reddit marketing is done best if it looks grassroots.
You don't own it, you were just either the first person to create the subreddit or someone who has since becomes the longest-serving moderator on it.
I'll never understand how camping on a subreddit gives anyone the right to say that they "own" it or gives them more power over everyone else indefinitely. It's a big flaw in Reddit, I think all subreddits should be put up for some kind of vote every ~2 years.
And the US Government has never done anything similar? Heck, they don't even need to be punishing you to take your land, they can just have plans for a highway that will pass through where your house currently is.
There is no objective and constant set of universal rules for what defines ownership because it’s a made up concept
Unless you’ve ingested something to burn for calories, or destroyed something then nothing is strictly and forever yours to keep and dispose of as you please.
Your "ownership" of a subreddit amounts to a single row in a database on one of Reddit's servers, which they can change for any or no reason.
Moderators (and users in general) need a reality check about their relationship with the sites they frequent. You are not a part owner. You are not an employee. You are one of ~500M monthly users who they use to generate advertising revenue, and your loss will not be noticed.
If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch. Reddit isn’t stack exchange. It’s more like running an open source project.
The problem is that there’s this hostile corporation that sometimes tries to kill their own product every few years overseeing everything.
That's much easier said than done - say you don't like the moderation or content of /r/gaming, how are you going to spread the word about your new subreddit? It won't have as good a name as /r/gaming, it's not a default sub so it's more difficult to find, and you might find that mentions of your subreddit make it onto a powermod blacklist, ensuring you can't even link to it from other subreddits.
How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
There’s also r/gamingnews.
I think that over time the concept of a default subreddit has been imbued with a significance that it didn't originally have. Basic UI design dictates that if someone shows up at the front page of your link aggregator website they should see some links, so they had to show some subreddits even before the user did anything. I don't think it was originally meant to imply any kind of guarantee or quality or approval by Reddit. But for various reasons, mostly to do with the huge growth in traffic to the Reddit front page (as well as some political meddling by the admins), that is now the impression a lot of people have.
Reddit hasn't had default subreddits for a few years. These days you're onboarded onto r/popular and then algorithmically recommended a few you can subscribe to.
If reddit is thinking that their content is king, then closing subreddits that help generate that content is not ideal for them.
This can also be seen when you mention davidjl, who was a user super into r/counting. There was a thread of that yesterday I believe.
OpenAI thanks you for your Reddit contributions.
I’m unfamiliar with most of these subreddits and in some cases I’m curious what they’re about.
As a bonus, this could be an organic attempt at moving to a different place.
EDIT: Seems the source for MAU I found was way high, making this potentially even bigger. Every other source I've found is 400-500m range for MAU on reddit (as another pointed out).
Some portion of users will also just fall back to visiting other subreddits on June 12.
It doesn't seem like there are many subreddits not participating in the blackout.
The "dang" model where the moderators get paid a salary for their work seems the only reasonable and fair way to go.
Having mods work for free is effectively a form of psychological abuse, taking advantage of people's social media addiction for corporate benefit.
> Harassment
> Threatening violence
> Hate
> Sexualization of minors
> Sharing personal information
> Non-consensual intimate media
> Prohibited transaction
> Impersonation
> Copyright violation
> Trademark violation
> Self-harm or suicide
> Spam
Those moderators aren't doing their work for free, so why should anyone else?
Because they actively volunteer to do so.
Having an army of willing volunteers helps, but it's not good enough because these are unpaid, untrained people without the psychological helplines that professional moderators have. I hope Reddit has good tooling to prevent the volunteers from seeing the worst of it.
That said, I do think that everyone contributing their time to social media like this should get a cut from the revenue; I'm 100% confident Reddit has exact numbers for the value per subreddit and even per post, so they can apply math and give the moderators a percentage of that, and even the posters of good posts.
I mean yeah then you get the problem of reposts and simple copiers, but that's already an issue, it's just that the issue is karma instead of money.
Lemmy is still too obscure to be on the radar i guess.
Anyways, maybe this gives Lemmy a boost towards the next level.
If you want to join, probably better use one of the smaller instances.
Also without a business model they will struggle to maintain the servers required for even a tiny fraction of Reddit
Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are no ads at least not yet.
For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?
The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.
Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."
I don't mind if something is slighlty difficult to use, as it serves as a filter to participants and limits growth (subreddits with over 100,000 participants tend to be kind of guerrella marketing, meme-infested shitholes).
The obvious drawback of course is that you lose the non-tech savy interesting people and experts. I don't know how to mitigate that, but still very interested in seeing where this all goes.
This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.
If HN had a subforum feature and an ability to embed pictures or videos in posts, or some kind of markdown light syntax, Reddit usage would die for me.
If not in the content-mix sense, then in the sense that there is one and only one homepage, and that it's everything posted to the site.
Though in truth: there are some alternate views. "Pool", "Invited", and "Best" are subsets of submissions. You can also do a blank search on Algolia and set a time window to view the best items of the past day, week, month, year, or other arbitrary interval.
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
- also, I really wish you could block users
Of course, that often backfires.
HN hasn't actively sabotaged mobile. But it hasn't gone out of its way to make the experience better either.
I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.
Regarding mobile clients, there are at least a few third party mobile clients on both Android and iPhone that work quite well.
dang does not want to have to look at CSAM.
I think we had the model right before the concept of social media came along, which is many small independent communities.
Looks like it's 5/10 of the ones with over 30M subscribers and 9/23 over 20M, I was actually surprised that it's only that many in total for the 30M group.
I presume some might still make the decision given yesteray's attempt at blatant slander by Spez.
I also wonder about the moderators of the ones that aren't going dark, many larger subs are moderated by a select group of the same people more or less.
https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/142kct8/...
(PD: The archive.org waiting queue for to submit old.reddit looks collapsed. Was this organization warned before promoting a massive submit? )
I know it because it happened to me.
The consensus on HN is largely that being hurt or offended is the moral transgression, but some of the base motivation of moderation and moderators is protecting people from that kind of harm. Intentionally exposing people to it through inaction to make a point to another entity is not particularly neutral, I don't think.
Why invest your time/effort into any ecosystem which doesn't have a proper redressal mechanism?
I am not contributing to reddit anymore, I think as with all entities/companies/empires they are past their prime and they are on the down. I remember when a lot of users jumped ship from Digg to Reddit, I wish another entity comes along which is better than reddit.
It was in a crypto-related reddit but in a thread about programming algorithmic trading bots.
Looks like the wrong sword cuts both ways, too.
Anything but a permanent blackout is just peanuts to them.
Reddit's adminstration team seem extremely rattled for something they can stand without a problem.
While Reddit is a dumpster fire, it is still a business and you never owned the 'subreddit' and it is not yours either and its API is subject to price rises. This sort of risk should not be underestimated and it was only a matter of time that the API was going to be paid. Like Twitter, it has now happened to Reddit.
Going dark for 1 day will do nothing to Reddit and it will be just business as usual.
Reddit people are temporarily disabling the subreddits altogether. Like disabling the busses (the thing the company pays for) rather than stopping to drive them (the work you want to get a certain compensation for).
Not sure it's a great comparison as it's not about wages (or wage-related things) at all in reddit's case
At the very least, it's nice to know that rather than a lukewarm welcome, any would-be Eternal Septemberists will be met with "kys leddit spacing, phoneposting, ******" should they try 4chan as an alternative.
Coincidence? Actually I think so, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little unnerving. :)
Plus, even just looking at Mastodon/ActivityPub activity, it's dropped back down to nearly half of what it was in January at the peak of the Twitter exodus.
Going dark is the equivalent of thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting.
I have posted, asking the readers how they feel about going private.
I run my own forum, and can move the content there.
Or, since you just need one mod in every sub to keep the others in line, replace the top mod. With a script.
It's a good thing, most moderators are bad.
> origin: "https://reddark.untone.uk/",
Pretty unanimously, 3rd party app developers have said they'd happily show Reddit's ads in their feed, but Reddit never came out with this feature. I don't think any 3rd party app developer was expecting a free ride on Reddit's API forever.
Pretty good read, you might have already read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/orqnr2/recommendat... https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/t5t9n2/whats_the_b... https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/11w5ky3/a_review...
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
Which kind of Community will stay ? 20% ? It's hard to make change.
Surprisingly, the server response time is very long even though all it sends back is a mostly empty static index.html. Is it the absence of caching that's responsible for this?
Loads instantly for me. Seems to be the same website.
Which begs the question why the hell they didn't work on getting the apps used for browsing Reddit to display ads? Just include them as posts like they do on the website, perhaps just with a label added. If the apps try to filter away the ads, revoke their API keys.
If users pay extra, omit the ads from the API. If companies want an entirely ad-free API, for training LLMS etc, they can pay extra.
This problem seems like something that could have so easily been avoided. I think I would happily pay a small monthly fee to keep an ad-free Apollo browsing experience, especially if it could be done in a way where the money was split between Reddit and Apollo. But.. they never even tried?
Yep, that's what Telegram did - there can be ads in public channels, they're clearly labeled as such in the API, and third-party clients must not filter them or will get their access revoked.
If reddit would pay subreddit moderators, top commenters, users that submit very interesting stuff, and in the case of Apollo, people creating the Apps that enable you to use Reddit in a pleasant way, then the story would be different.
Facebook moderation is especially awful, however. Pre-2022 (at least) a fairly common tactic against anti-Kremlin posts was to have the troll farm report the user and/or random posts of theirs in large amounts. Done! Many fought it out and got reinstated after several weeks, but some just gave up and quit Facebook in disgust.
(And that without mentioning the “Khokhlov” incident: “khokhol”, genitive plural “khokhlov”, is in addition to its literal meaning of “tuft” a fairly standard pejorative for Ukrainians; unfortunately for Facebook, it’s also the surname of physicist Aleksej Removich Khokhlov, presidential nominee and later vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which some years ago got several science-adjacent people and IIRC even a science monthly covering the election suspended for “hate speech”.)
Then Cambridge Analytica scooped up all the profile data of all of your friends when you completed a fun Buzzfeed style quiz and that created enough outrage to change it.
Whether Cambridge Analytica was actually able to make any use of this data to "subvert democracy" is very debatable. If you look into it, it's just how they marketed themselves.
People tend to like things they have, no matter how unreasonable. If you own a building where nobody lives, and I move in secretly and live there for five years, then you finally discover me and want me to get gone... good luck. Somehow I now have legal rights. I never paid you, did nothing for it, usually these people also completely trash the place (this is the part I don't get), yet you can't make me homeless on the spot.
We tend to feel entitled to things quickly, and reddit users (myself included) are used to just using the service via whatever third-party app. If reddit wants to change that, I'd like to get the opportunity to make it worthwhile for them to continue to support this.
Instead, it seems that the developer of the app I use needs to front these costs, and within a number of days (after being free for over a decade). My rational side tells myself that I have no reason to expect otherwise and that I should have questioned why this is all free in the first place. But I also don't like it and support any movement that aims to come to a different agreement with reddit. Surely if it was fine for many years, something can be worked out in the next months and enacted after a transition period.
It's not like reddit doesn't know how many people use reddit this way and that having them all pay a little bit for access is way beneficial as compared to cutting them off. What they're doing seems dumb from any angle that I can see and that's what makes me additionally support these protests. Talk to us, reddit.