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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

> 48 hours will not even ding reddit.

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.

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> Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community

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)

There are already reports of some large subreddits shutting down permanently, such as programming humor.

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.

What stops the reddit admins from re-enabling 'programming humor' and to solicit one or more new moderators?

Nothing, but it would result in even more backlash.

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.

> People aren’t stupid, and they aren’t as docile as you think.

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.

Ultimately, we can only speculate on what's going to happen. Neither of us can say conclusively, we can't see the future.

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.

> All I can say is that subreddits are built on the idea of autonomy

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?

>On the illusion of autonomy.

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.

You're making all kinds of assumptions about the people discussing this. Some of us have actual experience running large communities and this informs some of the statements you see people making 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.

>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.

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...

This right here. I've been on reddit since 2010 or so and the dejure "most important thing in the world to talk about" is ever changing. Hong Kong, COVID-19, Ukraine, Harambe, Victory (the AMA person?), the great subreddit purge to name a few. Everyone claims they're going to delete reddit but will simply forget about it in a few weeks. haha

I've been on Reddit since 2009, and never cared about any of that stuff or claimed I was going to leave Reddit over it. I absolutely am leaving Reddit over this.

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.

> I absolutely am leaving Reddit over this.

> 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.

There are plenty of people, especially in entertainment who don't use social media but have accounts to announce things like a new project they are working on.

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.

I'm sure you will. I'm saying the population as a whole won't.

You're saying a large percentage of the current userbase won't (probably >90%)

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.

> If they are trying to pivot to just become a site where you can infinite scroll memes and focus on the big subreddits

...

> Nothing, but it would result in even more backlash.

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).

The general unwillingness of people to do unpaid labour for a website that is actively working against them.

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.

Power is its own reward.

Evidently not, since that's already a motivation that isn't sufficient to get enough people actually doing the work - and if anything, Reddit taking the step of unilaterally usurping community leaders for not being profitable enough would only reduce the perceived power of a moderator position.

I think the people that we are arguing with don't understand that being a moderator of a subreddit isn't just about being able to ban people. It's about being a leader of a community.

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.

For every mod of a subreddit large enough to matter the wannabe mods will be lining up.

It's not a matter of "wannabe", it's "wannado". Having a bunch of sycophants in the sidebar isn't going to restore a community unless they're actually committed to making the subreddit an enjoyable place to be, and if they were committed to that they'd already be doing it.

Being a moderator is a lot of work. You'd have to find a sucker to provide free labor for you. You can maybe find a few, but can you find enough to replace all moderators once you pissed them off enough ?

Being a good moderator is a lot of work. There will be no lack of people that would line up to have moderating powers in a large enough subreddit.

> There will be no lack of people that would line up to have moderating powers in a large enough subreddit.

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.

> There are already reports of some large subreddits shutting down permanently, such as programming humor.

Great example, that one already has a possible replacement at programminghumour.

less a replacement and more an alternative made years ago whose last post is 4 years ago and is currently restricted

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 wonder how all the various subreddits will work without their moderators. If moderators stop doing their jobs I have a feeling many subreddits will devolve into chaos - spam, off topic posts, crazy people posting the most vile and repulsive shit, … etc.

Worth reading the long thread https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1587588321777451008

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.

I suspect that would be a far more effective protest, though if successful it may well kill the subreddits. The mods are trying to have their cake and eat it too: make a 'principled stance' without risk to their subreddits. That won't work.

So... it'll become Twitter?

> 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?

For the most part, nothing. The new subreddits will likely be ghost towns.

> the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know

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.

Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business.

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.

People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.

While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.

This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.

I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.

Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point.

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".

There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login.

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).

I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.

Much already has, and it's very sad, as Discord creates an entirely different "feel" for a community, and is not visible to the Internet at large.

The voting system is gamification of forum posting. Instead of posting when you feel you have something to say, people end up chasing a number for the dopamine hit.

There's nothing terrible about downvotes as such if they are done right, but this is one thing Slashdot did right: you can never be more than +5 or -1 on any post.

Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account.

Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.

We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over.

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.

I was so bitter about the experience that I wrote a script that crawled the top 10000 subreddits looking for possible takeovers, and my friend and I took over a few dozen lucrative subreddits*. Think generic words like r/skateboarding (not one of them). Just add a spammy automoderator account to your modlist so it can't get taken back over.

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.

And the loyalty to the platform itself low. There are other ones, and Reddit should remember the great Digg Exodus.

That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.

Digg users went to Reddit, a viable alternative. There's nowhere for Reddit users to exodus to.

Until someone starts one … heck you are looking at one right now; specialised but it works in more or less the same way (with more restrictions on downvoting).

That's true, and puts reddit in an even more powerful position.

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.

Redditors have many alternatives, which is the real problem: the communities will fracture as they find new homes.

Showing off mods who will continue working after mild token protests in the post-IPO ad-infested trash hole the site becomes against users' wishes is a great signal for short term gain.

Lmao, maybe certain groups of people can boycott stuff, but human beings in general sure can't.

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.

While you're not wrong, I think it's that certain group of people that matters. They're the most engaged, and if you think that group follows the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule then that's really all that matters, since they're the ones creating the content that the lurkers consume and go to the network for.

It's not about length of time but a show of how much support the communities have for each other.

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.

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