Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest
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It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.
Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual?
Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?
Is this the beginning of the end?
Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come?
It's an interesting time.
Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app.
Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
You probably don't as most requests that app makes, are tracking requests. And they clutter the app so much, it's basically unusable with all the ads and broken video players.
If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.
A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...
There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.
/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.
So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
Maybe that effect is overstated.
This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).
> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.
It’s similar to how the API is limited compared to what the official app can do and lacks many basic features (streaming or callbacks) that are needed to avoid polling it. They’ve said before that if they started charging there would be improvements to the API. Where are they? Are developers supposed to take them on faith/trust? I’m pretty sure Reddit has burned what little of that they have left.
I wouldn't be shocked if that's because third party bots are counted in there, and in terms of sheer scale of spam etc that is 80+ of mod actions.
Huffman has a very good reason to use figures in a misleading way to downplay the impact here.
So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.
So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.
Anyways, IMO most of the really interesting discussion on the topic happens on twitter already. My best guess is that instead of finding a new home for the subreddit, we'll eventually just either give control to some other body (or reddit takes it from us) or we'll just set the subreddit to public again and let it go its way without being very involved (Most of the current mods weren't really involved anymore anyways). I'd love to find a new place devoted to this topic (twitter definitely sucks for long form discussion), but I haven't found such a place, and don't have the time/energy to set one up myself.
But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top.
As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found.
If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam.
This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking.
I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.
This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.
> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult
I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/<insert similar here>, this type of situation would be common.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...
If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.
> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
This is a sticking point =(
> SEO spam
Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.
It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit.
I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too.
Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.
You do understand that you are posting this to hacker news right?
Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low.
Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz".
I feel like Hacker News is literally the last little glint of light in a sea of seething darkness... it makes me nostalgic for the internet we had and lost.
Projectilepoints.net too!
My HN usage is quite low and acceptable as I often find work-related content.
Bold strategy. How is it going so far?
But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.
I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years.
I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.
an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
I legitimately think it's possible that a properly managed "for the profit of the investors" social media company will always follow this path.
It's why I think the right future for social media is non-profit. None of this is amazing technology anymore. This would also have the benefit that it would take the question of "how do we avoid doing harm while still making profit off the table." Could write a statement of values and intent that legitimately puts well being of users and society ahead of everything else. (Which no for-profit with externally raised capital is able to do today.)
This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either.
Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.
The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated.
I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO.
I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff.
I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.
So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.
Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.
And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?
The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.
I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit.
I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/147ebxd/ex...
> It’s like the secondary school for r/CSCareerQuestions.
It started few months ago when sub suddenly become popular. A lot of... how to say it, trivial questions/topics.
but regardless, I removing myself from the traffic of the site..
by the 30th I plan on archiving all my historical comments, and deleting my accounts
I have mostly for the last six years used Apollo to moderate the sub, but that will not work from July onwards, I will probably not un-private the sub.
I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.
1. The communities
2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past
It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities
edit: apparently an ad company bought it in 2018. Doesn't seem to have affected the quality of links.
Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.
Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.
It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.
Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.
I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.
Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.
N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.
I think that qualifies at trivial.
The quality differences are 100% due to the differences in the communities. They are social deficits, not technical ones.
Not one moment does he reflect if this is the course to take. I understand why, the railroad of any tech site is to sell out, make those billions. Get some money.
Reddit’s DNA seems different enough, like you say, it is far more about community building. A model like wikipedia, to see it as an utility, would be far more in line with what it is.
Spez if I had to guess probably is just flipping tired of it all and wants to cash in asap.
Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities.
Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase?
This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators.
Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part.
[1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users
[2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard
I think from reddit perspective that could be considered as jackpot: 48 hours downtime it just 0.6% ( 100-((363/365)*100)) over year, if it is keep going - update TOS (something like - huge subreddits cannot be converted to private and etc.) and just replace mods...
As for endgame I think slowly users will start leaving, but it could take years.
yeah. "Just".
I think a better question is what's Reddit's endgame? Mods of huge subreddits will just capitulate and use Reddit's crappy tools to do their unpaid work? Somehow those subreddits won't be flooded with spam and trolls? People will stick around to look at ads when every other post on /r/awwww is gore because the mods won't be able to keep up? Everyone will just download the complete shit that is the official Reddit app?
Reddit's value lies in what its users provide and post about. This also goes for that data that Reddit (publicly) wants to protect from AI companies. With their change, not only do they screw over its users and communities, but also mess up any valuable future conversation data.
Needless to say, they've done fuck all and the sub is very often a dump.
This current 'movement' is extremely organic and decentralized. A couple power mods started rallying the troops, and the movement went viral among mods over the course of about 2 weeks. There is very little direct coordination between subreddit mods, and it is mostly people deciding on the fly to make big decisions.
TLDR, nobody is really thinking much about the concerns that you are pointing out.
Its certainly something that people have thought about, very minimally, but the current counterargument to the idea of reddit just replacing mods is twofold.
argument 1: "They can't replace all of us!"
IE, subs are all run by an army of volunteer mods and mods think that they have a lot of bargaining power here.
argument 2: "I don't care. Let all of reddit burn to the ground!"
Quite frankly, a lot of people on reddit have gotten very worked up about this situation, and do not care about the consequences. If they get replaced, or reddit drops the hammer, they are fine with the consequences and will just leave.
But, the most important thing to note is absence of the following argument.
Argument 3 that doesn't exist: "We have a coordinated plan, back plan, and backup backup plans as for what to do about this, in communication with all the other mods"
That would be the smart way to do this, but unfortunately for the mods involved in it, this isn't what is happening. For better or for worse this is a viral outrage movement with nobody in charge.
(small sub, 18.5k, but needs active moderation not to go to shit - our topic is in the news a lot lately. thankfully the reddit tools are up to the task at our scale, but bigger would be bad)
the disconcerting thing is that Twitter and Discord are simultaneously going to shit, because enshittification is what happens when suddenly borrowing carries an interest rate and VCs get squeezed.
Again, as an outsider, I see a few problems here:
1) You're not being paid at all, so you're not really 'labor' per se.
2) You're not unionized, so you don't have a spokesperson and can't coordinate your desires.
3) Reddit can't pay you to begin with, as they have basically no money for each mod, and isn't willing to negotiate before the IPO
4) Reddit seems perfectly fine and able to just get new mods and turn the subreddits back on, spam be damned.
5) Reddit also seems like they will just let the wildfire of outrage pass (really spitballing here) and most users will likely not even remember this by the 4th of July.
I think someone with actual union experience could really help you all. If you managed to get something of a 'standard' going, with payment in stocks or some other token monetary amount, then I'd say that would be a huge boon to the internet in general and a great roadmap for other companies. A real big opportunity is hiding in this and I wish you all the best in grabbing it.
That's what I'd do. Most subreddit mods are easily replaceable. And in many subreddits, the people who are mods aren't necessarily the best suited for the job. They often got there through luck, bootlicking, etc. It isn't a meritocracy.
Most companies have to pay for moderators, reddit has gotten them for free for a long time. If they piss off all those free mods, it’s gonna cost them an unimaginable amount of money.
If Reddit wants to force open protesting subreddits and find a way to recruit new mods to more than 7000 subreddits, then I assume this is within their right, it's their site after all.
NTA.
With all of the big subreddits going "dark" my feed is dominated by all those small community subreddits that I actively subscribed to.
Honestly it's somewhat refreshing to open reddit and nothing has changed on my frontpage.
Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits.
If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.
Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.
What I really wish people learned from all these issues with Twitter and Reddit is that the best way to avoid abuse of power is to not let power concentrate so much in any single centralized entity.
We don't need everyone with technical skills to make something completely decentralized. How about we take the (I don't know) 3-4% of the population who does have enough sills to buy a domain, manage a server (even if only through basic click-ops) and to offer these services for their closest friends and family?
People are lazy and want everything in the same place.
Also it's not 1998 any more. Running a forum is a full time job. Need to handle DMCA takedowns, deal with illegal content, think about ways to monetise the site and so on. It's much harder than simply moderating a subreddit.
You can have a separate forum, but you don't need a separate account. You just need need these different sites to talk with each other. This is how email, Usenet and now ActivityPub works.
> People are lazy and want everything in the same place.
It doesn't have to be the same place for everyone. For me (and my friends and family), the "place for everything" would be the server I set up for them. For you, it could be a different server. For journalists from a media outlet, it could be an institutional server.
Also, stop projecting. Instead of hiding yourself in the excuse of "people are lazy", just say that you are lazy and don't care about giving your freedoms away to faceless corporations.
> Running a forum is a full time job. Need to handle DMCA takedowns, deal with illegal content, think about ways to monetise the site and so on. It's much harder than simply moderating a subreddit.
This is the key principle behind the idea of "Small Web". Your servers will be serving your immediate circle only. By definition, you would be only dealing with content created by people who you actually know.
- By not having to deal with thousands of users, the setup and maintenance is minimal.
- There will be no problem that you can not solve by just picking up the phone or knocking on their door and talking with the person directly.
- There is no need to "monetize" the site, because the operating costs are negligible and you are doing it only for yourself/your close circle.
But if you need something bigger then you can't avoid the problems that I mentioned.
My country's gamedev community had a phpbb forum that was created 2 decades ago. But now it's dead and everyone is using discord instead.
None of them are can be composed into an open web of links, and you are still at the mercy of large corporations.
> But now it's dead and everyone is using discord instead.
And RSS was a big thing until Twitter killed it. Your point?
My friends aren't going to leave Discord. And talking to myself isn't very fun.
If you use Brave, I think there even is a built in redirect to Wayback if the page loaded is failing.
Devils advocate of course, I love my third party apps.