7245/7806 subreddits that pledged to go private are currently dark | Hacker News Reader

7245/7806 subreddits that pledged to go private are currently dark

reddark.nextflow.cloud

67 pointsvladharbuz38 comments

7245 out of 7806 subreddits that pledged to go private have gone private. Title makes it sound like Reddit only has 7806 total subreddits

Ok, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!

Thank you, I wasn't sure if I should edit this for clarity when I posted.

Yeah but if they include the biggest subreddits it will be affecting most of their users. The long tail of small subreddits doesn't really matter if the big ones are down.

The page is implicitly weird, too; r/books, for instance, is public but actively participating in the protest by refusing to post for 48 hours. The protest isn't a public/private binary.

EDIT: Is this even a list of subreddits that "pledged to go private"? Looking at r/askscience, they never pledged to go private, just to go read-only, like r/books. So why are they and r/books even on this list?

More interesting would be the number of registered users who have at least 10 of these 7,245 subreddits in their front page feed.

I’d wager that with these 7,245 subreddits “dark”, over 99% of Reddit users are at least somewhat impacted (fairly confident in that) but also that a large minority now face a hardly recognizable front page (hard to put a number on that).

They are hoping people start "forgetting" like they have about twitter. I'm of the impression that reedit's core users are too stubborn and too involved to let this slide. At best this trigger a vote of reddit's board and they oust the idiot that is responsible, and we can hope for a better stance from the next one. Realistically it will probably blow over and people that actually care will move to or create something similar. VC/corporate greed knows no bounds when it comes to the original integrity of the business

Twitter seems to be on a poor trajectory. What Reddit is up to is bad enough, but if the leadership was looking at Twitter and thinking "yeah, let's do that", that would be even sadder.

Twitter has also been bleeding advertisers, the estimates I saw in a recent NYT article put it at 59% down from the same time last year. I don't see how that's sustainable for a company with a debt structure like Twitter's.

They seem to have gone the route of “just stop paying the bills”

The difference with Twitter is that Reddit's core is moderators. Reddit is moderators.

Reddit thinking they can piss off moderators an incredible level of not understanding what makes their company run.

Is it possible they want to change that? I'm sure the board is aware of how the site works and how important all the unpaid labor is to keeping it alive. But maybe they don't like that? It seems like the most profitable thing for a social media platform is to make it appeal to everyone, and not just "reddit people", for lack of a better term.

My normie friends who all have instagrams and tiktoks are not on reddit because it's full of "reddit people", and those people are... weird to them. They still make fun of me for being a "reddit guy" despite having deleted my account years ago. Reddit wants to go public, and I think they know that they have to shed that reputation if they're going to be successful with that. They must have known what a shitstorm these API changes would cause, so maybe it's all already priced in, and they're ok with a mass exodus and they have some horrible plan to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Of course, that would completely ruin reddit, but the point is to make money above all else.

How old are you? Because I feel like Gen Z makes jokes about “Reddit guys” and “Discord mods” but they all absolutely do use those platforms. They’re basically unavoidable.

I’ve seen more than one tiktok with 100k+ likes joking about how they add “reddit.com” to their Google search queries to get real results instead of SEO/sales funnel optimized shit

We use it but with a burning sense of hate.

When you go to college, the only anonymous forum you can use is your college's subreddit, when you apply for internships the only forum for somewhat actionable career advice is cscareerquestions, and when applying to Law School or BSchool all the relevant information/tips/guidelines/strategies are all hosted on LawSchoolAdmissions and MBA.

We all know Reddit is a toxic piece of garbage but where else can you find actionable advice at scale?

I haven't seen as much hate for Discord, but Discord has a discovery problem and is still kind of niche.

I'm a millennial, so I can't really speak for zoomers. But to speculate, I'd say that a lot of people are on discord because if you play video games, you're probably on discord to socialize and/or to use the audio/video chatroom stuff when actually gaming. But the reddit thing seems more like a "lifehack" content thing than anything else. I doubt many people saw that tiktok and created a reddit account because of it, which is what I consider "using reddit". And 100k seems like a lot, but couldn't that just be all the reddit users who also use tiktok?

They could ditch all the moderators by choosing to ditch them. But what would they replace them with?

Mods do useful work that needs to be done, and anything Reddit could do to replace them is going to cost so, so much more. The alternative is a site overrun with trash.

> They are hoping people start "forgetting" like they have about twitter

Forget about twitter or forget about Twitter's latest issues and decisions? Because I used to open twitter 3 times a day to periodically check in on recent research and stuff. I stopped doing that (maybe once a month now) because all of my fav researchers would get vitriol in the comment sections.

What's the next play for Reddit leadership? I feel like it's just a "wait and hope it all blows over?". If they don't change, are all of these subreddits going to stay dark? If the subreddits do stay dark, how long will it take before someone creates a replacement that gains enough traction?

I'm participating in the Reddit blackout (as a 15y user), and I love to see the collective action, but not sure if it's really going to bring about long term change. Egos are clearly involved here, so I think Reddit's future hinges on spez's personal ability for change and growth. I'm not optimistic.

why wouldn't reddit remove all the mods and open the subs?

they still might.

Well they could, but who is going to moderate then?

Scab moderators? Reddit is built on monetizing the efforts of volunteers already, so presumably they figure they can just get more volunteers whenever.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a community-organized effort to crapflood the subs and make the scabs' lives a living hell.

Furthermore, the people most pissed off at Reddit aren't just the moderators, it's also a lot of the power users who post the vast majority of the content. So Reddit would have to hire a bunch of scab "power users" to post content. And a lot of subreddits are based on original content, not news links, so real power users won't be so easy to replace.

ChatGPT to the rescue.

I think the feeling at Reddit HQ is that as long as there isn't someplace else for the users to go they will be alright. I mean where else are you going to get a Reddit like experience? Digg? Tumblr? Livejournal? Slashdot? Twitter? Usenet?!? Nothing really compares to Reddit. Personally, I wouldn't feel too confident. I saw how fast Digg and Tumblr collapsed. Even if you don't know the name of the next big thing, it is probably out there already.

as the mods of Ask Historians have explained, and I have seen in the subreddits that I visits. Finding unpaid labor is much harder then finding paid labor, and many companies can not find paid labor right now....

Most of the subreddits were already having moderator staffing issues and were very much understaffed with no one wanting to do it...

Couple that with the shit show moderating the site will be with only official tools and I think this idea that the admins can just boot all the mods and snap their fingers with all news mods is a bit fantastical

As long as the IPO investors don't know that it is all good.

There’s been very poorly detailed/researched press coverage even in tech circles about this.

I do worry about the quality of credible press coverage around this. The issues are much deeper than charging for the API. Many prudent points are missed even in the “I was there when it happened” explainers.

And who will moderate them?

"hey what if we replaced all our mods with AI, that's pretty hot right now, that might look real good on our IPO"

Only some of the subreddits are going to stay dark unfortunately. The mods are worried that if they stay private too soon, scab redditors will make their own subreddits and take their niche's users.

Once third-party tools are gone those huge subreddits will degrade quickly. Moderating a busy subreddit becomes very cumbersome using the native tools, so even if they don't go dark we will see a dramatic decrease in browsing quality as spam fills up the queue.

Probably for the best. So many reddit users are overly pejorative to moderators because of bad experiences. Let the current moderators get replaced and maybe people will appreciate the previous experience.

Maybe then, reddit will get off its ass and build proper tooling for moderators.

I had to remove the reddit icon from my phone's home screen, since my fingers know how to launch the app even with without my brain telling them to :P

So far, work productivity is up, but bathroom reading/scrolling is down.

Additionally, a lot of those that are still public have restricted submissions (mentioned on the page too).

Which I appreciate. My biggest worry about the doom of Reddit is that Reddit has replaced forums for compendiums of knowledge and solutions to problems and that will all go away.

I think/hope the Archive Team managed to backup all or almost all of reddit.

Reddit was archived by PushShift, which was killed along the API changes. Nevertheless the archives remained online. https://the-eye.eu/redarcs/

I do wish this service would list large subreddits that aren't participating as well, perhaps in red

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