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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Before the blackout, many subreddits hinted at extending the blackout indefinitely if Reddit is being adversarial.

This seems adversarial.

Extending the blackout indefinitely has now become a coordinated action via /r/ModCoord (which is the also the source of the list of blacked out subreddits that people are using), with an optional "solidarity mode" that involves blacking out one day a week in perpetuity (which they're calling "Touch Grass Tuesdays"): https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...

The irony of organizing a blackout to teach Reddit a lesson while organizing it on a subreddit.

It isn't irony at all.

Reddit gets almost zero revenue from the sub organizing it.

People aren't protesting Reddit in general, but a policy of reddit.

It’s not about revenue. As people have mentioned already, the CEO said the blackout has had almost no revenue impact.

it’s funny to create a protest and hoping for change by showing Reddit that the community can walk away…and then using reddit to organize it.

You are basically showing you can’t think of any good alternatives to organizing or chatting with people. So you will continue to use Reddit, even during a protest specifically about not using reddit.

“we will leave you if you treat us badly” and then also “I have to use your product cause I can’t find anything else.” Doesn’t work well together.

...Except that /r/ModCoord does have other venues, like the Discord linked in the sidebar. They mirror announcements to Reddit because that's the only place that's guaranteed to reach everyone involved, who are on Reddit by definition.

Sure, but shouldn’t they all not be on Reddit by definition?

If they don't need reddit, then they should stop using it to demonstrate that point.

> "I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want."

> "Okay then, prove it and quit today."

> "....No."

> If they don't need reddit, then they should stop using it to demonstrate that point.

Why wouldn’t you use every available, easy to use mechanism to broadcast a message? Clearly the actual organizing is happening on a variety of channels including Discord.

Because the message is “don’t use Reddit”

Use every available and easy mechanism, unless your protest is about one of them.

> Why wouldn’t you use every available, easy to use mechanism to broadcast a message?

Because continuing to use reddit broadcasts a different sort of message: they're a bunch of addicts who will come crawling back.

> Clearly the actual organizing is happening on a variety of channels including Discord.

All the more reason for them to quit using reddit...

The irony is that there is no viable alternative platform for the mods to organize on, demonstrating that Reddit has the market position to set high prices if they want to.

It doesn't take an intellectual giant to realize they are organizing on Discord.

This sounds like finding ways to fold without it looking like they folded. The question is simple - can they live with the new situation or not? If they are willing to, then protesting on Tuesdays is not going to do much. If they are not, then they are not on every day, not only Tuesday. I don't endorse either side here, but looking realistically, it's either win - Reddit changes their behavior to more acceptable - or loss - Reddit doesn't. Solidarity Tuesdays are just a form of the loss where people still pretend it's not lost yet.

For reference, 93% of the responses there so far are for indefinite blackout, and only 7% are for weekly blackouts.

There are a handful of subreddits (for example, one for recovering alcoholics, one for legal advice) that have decided that their value to the community is higher than the value of staying closed. So I think if it does get extended then the eventual outcome is that "general" subreddits will remain closed, and those dealing with, for lack of a better phrase, vulnerable communities, will show solidarity with weekly blackout days instead.

Funny you linked old.reddit, I find the new version unusable via firefox (I do not do mobile).

From Reddit's perspective overall this is a terrible idea, but from Huffman's perspective it's purely rational. If he has to walk this back it's probably not compatible with his continued tenure after all, the question of why this was done so hastily and rudely would inevitably undermine his leadership. If he just barrels ahead though, and prays that the addictions of mods and users are greater than their pride/desire to have a functional site, then he can possibly survive.

It's not as though there's a third choice, he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them, then expect that to not blow up in his face. He can't walk this back, and he's doubled down on libeling the dev of Apollo for example. "Stay the course and hope everyone just gets over it" is his best option, having already sunk into the quicksand.

IMO of course.

> he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them, then expect that to not blow up in his face

I'm not so sure about that. I would be very surprised if there was a high % of redditors that know / care about the mods or mod system. This could be the cynic in me but I bet he could eject all the mods tomorrow, replace them with more faceless accounts, and the vast majority of reddit's userbase would not see a difference.

Those that have been around the site for a while would notice and feel the change and not be happy about it, but we're most likely talking about a very small single-digit % of the userbase.

I don't think the problem with ditching the existing mods for new ones has much to do with how users would perceive the shift. You have to ask how the hell Reddit would vet that number of replacements in any way, how they'd find the required number of able replacements, and not just people who would (through incompetence or malice) run things into the ground. That's doubly true for the mega-subs which genuinely require a LOT of constant moderation, specialized automated tools, and so on.

That doesn't seem like a feasible path to me, and I think if it was remotely possible it would have already happened. The only way it COULD work is to get rid of the volunteer mod system and replace it with paid mods... and I don't think Reddit has the funds for that.

You're correct if you hold the assumption that they actually care about the quality of the content.

I definitely don't think it's a good idea for Reddit to do that as it will eventually create a substandard product. However, I do think if the goal is "profits at all costs" and an IPO in the near future (which is what it clearly appears to be), replacing a large number of mods with literally anybody is a possible path forward.

Again, it's a horrible idea and I think it would cause irreparable harm to the platform down the line.

I don't think the users mostly care about the mods directly. They will care about the effects of not having motivated, committed mods, because it makes the subreddits less pleasant or compelling to use. That is, there wouldn't be user protests, just lots of users drifting away because reddit kind of sucked.

I agree, it would be a bad idea. But I also think it would take time for the average user to feel the negative effects of such a short-sighted decision. Enough time, perhaps, for an IPO and cash-out for the c-suite at reddit.

Users will definitely notice when their favorite subreddits suddenly go to crap under the tenure of the new puppet-mods.

This decision comes from the board of directors, not Huffman. Huffman's job here is to be the whipping boy for their decisions.

The one login for multiple forums as nice but I wouIdn't mind it if they fold. But not HN. Today, I can just spin up a dedicated forum browser and save all the username-password there in isolation.

> he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them

Out of hundreds of millions of users, finding new mods does not seem that difficult. There are a lot of power-hungry users and people looking to leverage moderating for political or financial advantage.

There would be backlash, but I don't know what it would take for the real mass-exodus of Reddit. Lemmy/Tildes aren't showing massive numbers of new users that would make a real exodus (Lemmy has gone from 1k users to 18k, but that's far from 500M on Reddit).

* Source on Lemmy numbers https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Huffman isn't going to walk it back or he'd have done so during the Q+A. Like nobody doubts that mods are willing to take subs private, the move was telegraphed well in advance. Spez doesn't care, he's not going to back down on this change, that was the message from the Q+A last week and actually pushing the button doesn't change the status quo from last week.

They're gonna wait the 48 hours, lever open any major subs that stay closed, and move on with life. If mods leave en-masse there are "abandoned communities" procedures for new mods taking over or being inserted. There will always be someone willing to take on the work for the modicum of status and power it gives you. Some of those will be bad, and life will move on.

Don't mistake "terrible for the communities that have been built" with "terrible for reddit as a business", and yes you're probably also right that there is also "terrible for spez the person" in play here as well (there always is). Even if they lose 25% or 30% of the users turning it into Reddit-Shaped Tiktok, that may be more profitable for Reddit The Business than operating as a community platform. Because advertisers are, on the whole, willing to pay more than the average user, that's always been the thing about Facebook and Google and every other platform. Nobody's really paying for a Kagi subscription, in the grand scheme of things, that's a lot smaller revenue than Google selling Adwords and offering a free search service on the back of it.

But users have an emotional attachment to their posts and their community, and see it (rightly) as something they've built collectively and is being taken away from them. But that's not necessarily where the interests of Reddit The Business lay. Reddit-Shaped Tiktok probably is more profitable.

At the end of the day this is their platform, Spez is YCombinator and they're gonna chase the YC payday. You don't have to like it, but after the symbolic protest they are gonna clear the place out and get back to it.

If you want to build sustainable communities hosted by people who aren't chasing a payday, use Mastodon and Lemmy and Matrix, and not a Ycombinator platform or Facebook or other centralized service. Otherwise we're back here in another 2 years crying about how great Imgur Communities (idk) were before they cranked rates.

It is, of course, an ironic sentiment for YC, home of the “10,000x ROI or go home” mindset. Hypercapitalism is great up until it affects you personally, right? Very “bioshock”.

Tiktok bans leave a market gap for TikTok-Shaped Reddit and everybody in the industry wants to be the one to fill that gap. Spez is pivoting to profitability and 1000x revenue in classic YC style and people act like he’s grown a second head.

Fediverse is too disjointed, I want one place to go for all the seedy "ask reddit" stuff, or for "history", etc. Single-topic silos is a big feature that you can't get in the fediverse when there could be askhistory on multiple instances, etc, and when the whole community is going to different servers to access lemmy, etc..

A centralized reddit that is a co-op / wikipedia like org, would be better. It could still be profitable, it could still run ads even, but it doesn't have to take VC funding, or sell it's soul.

I wonder how many of the people coordinating the blackout sent the "challenge accepted" meme to one another, on reading this quote. It was sure the first thing that popped into my head, on reading it.

"We can remain r*tarded longer than they can remain solvent"

/r/de, THE German sub has extended till Sunday.

One of the fun things about reddit is that if mods decide to extend it indefinitely, users are free to create their own subreddits and move their conversations there. Any mod who thinks they're ultimately important in the grand scheme of things is deluding themselves.

I don't think that's true at all. Users can certainly create new subreddits, but new, compelling subreddits usually require... committed mods. Where are they going to come from, and why wouldn't they also care about these changes that make modding much worse?

It's essentially an empty threat.

No individual is all that important, but collectively, a bunch of individuals are extremely powerful. A bunch of angry individuals can destroy quite a lot in a short period of time.

The individuals that are deluding themselves are the very few individuals at the top of this scheme.

Seems like someone determined to finish the task his masters sent him to do.

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