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Comment by predictabl3 | Hacker News Reader

I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private and shocked at some napkin math of how many total subscribers are affected.

Further, the Discord is well, finally getting a bit too riled up to hear coherently, but is easily the largest live, wholesome gathering of people I've participated in a live event with. And on top of that, numerous people are signing up for Matrix and joining the bridged room.

Lots of conversations about what platforms will go down this same route.

Today is an okay day after all.

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> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private

My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.

I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web.

Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.

But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.

I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.

There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.

There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.

IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.

I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.

When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.

But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.

It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.

It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.

While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.

[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-michael-seibe...

I wouldn't say unique, r/bayarea has been a dumpster fire for a long time now. r/sanfrancisco followed suit a few years after that. I won't miss the toxicity they bring to Bay Area discourse at all.

> There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.

Did you report that to 911?

Unless the threat seemed imminent, wouldn't the FBI be better at addressing this concern?

Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.

Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.

>Wow! Reddit as a business does a disservice to mods by not compensating them for the effort they put in to keep these communities safe and functional.

No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.

For the person that threatened a mass shooting, the correct move would be to contact the FBI.The FBI would have then reached out to Reddit.

I use third party apps exclusively, and will not be participating in Reddit after Apollo shuts down.

Why couldn’t the third party apps just ask the user to provide their own api key?

It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?

That is how it worked already, apps made requests through the users OAuth creds and rate limits were specified by unique OAuth cred and App combo. The new system is just each app having global rate limits, after which they have to pay. Getting an API key requires submitting a written application to reddit and seemingly precludes "I want to use a third party app".

The Reddit API changes are hyper-focused on killing 3rd party mobile apps.

Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).

But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.

So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.

Those 3rd party apps have mod tools built in that have been requested for years by moderators and never implemented by reddit.

The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.

“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.

Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?

Can you post the Discord link? I didn't know that was a thing... Is it an official Reddit Discord or something just for the current situation?

https://discord.gg/ukXPkeU9 I'm assuming they are talking about this.

I'm mostly worried about how long this can last and whether it will have the intended effect. It's a huge community rallying point but Reddit has clearly shown it does not care about the community's opinion.

Where is the Matrix room?

> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private

really?!?!? I find that surprising given that something like <1% of the subreddits have gone private. Are you blown away because it's so few? Honestly, given that mods have the power and people with no life love to mod like 10s-100s of subreddits, this could be something like a protest of 100s of people who happen to control lots of subreddits.

Honestly, these mods only have the power to do this because other people don't care enough to deal with the bullshit that mods have to. While reddit needs mods, it doesn't necessarily need these mods.

It may only be <1%, but many, many subreddits are barren, unmoderated, entirely inactive wastelands. I would assume that if you only consider subreddits with actual content being regularly posted, the percentage is significantly higher.

Counting subreddits is meaningless as a stock percentage. For example, there are millions of subreddits, but only 150k or so even have any activity at all. A small percentage of those are responsible for most activity.

The number of users impacted by the (very popular) subs that have gone dark looks in the region of almost... everyone.

What will reddit look like without r/pics? Without r/funny? Without r/Music, t/aww, r/todayilearned, r/explainlikeimfive, r/DIY? Etc.

Less than 1% of all subs are going down, but it's substantially comprised of subs that matter the most, appeal to the largest number of users and literally have characterised the site as a whole for over a decade.

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