Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely
theverge.com
theverge.com
- regular people get a break from their echo chambers
- VOLUNTEER mods get a break
- journalists get their news article
The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users data via comments and posts. I said this in another post but the existing CEO needs to get replaced. Maybe throw in a few other C—level executives to serve as additional blood sacrifices.
Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.
It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively, almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing "reddit.com".
Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!
I have however visited HN and kbin 5-10x more today.
> redirect to CBS.com
am I missing something?
<Click> Hacker News
That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle jerks. Why was I part of any of that??
It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty well.
Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the right model for moderation.
The best part was you could set your personal filters to exclude “funny” comments, or boost “offtopic” ones if you want. With thresholds! So the funniest stuff could still break through, but you didn’t have to wade through a million pun posts to find the serious comments.
They also have a metamoderation system where others’ moderation choices are shown to you and you agree or disagree.
Never seen another site like it. Kinda hope /. makes a resurgence.
And this is another thing I think made that mod system good. Only so many points available.
I have to say the most enjoyable comments were often those that got to +5 but with a negative label, like (+5, Flamebait).
You're right, it was a pretty good way to do moderation. As in everything with software, what old is new, right?
Soylentnews also exists based on the slashdot source, and uses the same/similar moderation.
I mean even 4chan doesn't have downvote functionality, if people disagree with you they'll just call you a f* or n* which, while nasty, doesn't actually change visibility of your post, plus only the admins can ban you or delete a post, not jumped-up mods, and frankly you'd have to be pretty extreme on there to earn that.
"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.
You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.
The main issue with that is that it assumes anyone on the internet is arguing anything in good faith. Boosting checkmarks has turned twitter to nearly unusable to actually unusable, because the signal to noise ratio on the replies from checkmarks tend to be somewhere on the factually provable incorrect to outright slurs spectrum. Expecting any better on 4chan of all places will be a a fruitless endeavor more akin to self-harm. If you don't want to wade through shit, maybe don't have your discussions in a sewer.
HN, while not perfect, will often be a place that cultivates some rare insight.
To be realistic, this can be that case, especially on the net, and there are ways you can make an educated guess. But it stays a guess and in the end I want to do the guessing myself. It cannot be outsourced aside from the most trivial cases like spam, advertising, etc.
That aside people with a foul mouth might use words differently while others people might receive it as a slur. We now have words that have much more might than they had before with the better approach to such issues.
See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA
And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.
It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.
I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.
Hate to say it, but fleshy meatbag humans love this stuff on and off line. Our species is evolutionarily motivated to group up.
It's completely undeniable, societal progress regardless. We still do it all day every day, some worse than others.
My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.
When Twitter went crazy, there was a clear migration path 'Just use Mastodon'[1]. With Reddit shut down, there's no clear alternative for communities to migrate to.
You say forums are clearly superior? Are you volunteering to operate r/seattle (or whatever community you/I care about), and its 100-500,000 users as a phpbb board? I sure as hell ain't...
[1] I mean, there are problems with that migration path, but they are significantly smaller than migrating a large subreddit to a forum. Reddit, both pre- or post-enshittification is still the path of least resistance for running a community, which is why people who put in the time to run communities use it, over self-hosting. It wasn't 'dramatically worse' for the people that mattered.
I want to see real problems other homeowners are facing and the knowledge many other homeowners have to fix it. That's not something I see on any platform other than Reddit.
If you want to create a traditional forum, you have to figure out how to host it, what forum software you want to use, how that software works, how to configure it, etc. If you get attacked by spammers, hackers, or trolls, you have to figure out how to stop that more or less from scratch. It requires a significant amount of technical knowledge, time, and money to make it work.
Then, even if you use a dedicated forum hosting service, your forum is still basically on an island. You have to find a userbase and attract them, convince them to register dedicated accounts for your forum specifically, and keep them coming back, which is really hard if you don't have an existing userbase to make your forum compelling in the first place.
With Reddit, nearly all of that goes away. Creating a subreddit is extremely easy and costs nothing but time. Moderators still have to moderate, but they don't have to figure out how to manage forum software or handle DDoS attacks. Since any Reddit user can join and participate in any subreddit, and since posts appear on users' homepages in one feed, communities can grow much more quickly and are less likely to die out due to inactivity. And there's only one UI for the whole site, so users don't have to learn how to use whatever random forum software each site has chosen.
The solution to Reddit is a similarly centralized approach managed instead in the style of Wikipedia (not suggesting exactly replicating their governance, rather something generally akin to Wikipedia's not-for-profit direction).
A long time ago, Google used to have a filter you could select for "forums". Once that disappeared, we had the "+reddit" hack. Now what? I have no idea.
Phpbb-style forums are a mess. Simultaneously too ordered and not ordered enough - you don't get threaded replies, but you do have to put everything in the right topic and the right forum. No notifications that do the right thing.
For years I remember forum makers refusing to offer a "just notify me when someone's replied to my question, otherwise don't bother me" feature on the grounds that it would destroy participation. IMO the main reason Reddit won is that it offered just that.
I've never made lasting connections with people from Reddit/HN for exactly that reason.
I wonder if that's gonna work against the boycott here. If for most people Reddit is more StackOverflow question+answer + TV (mindless background scrolling) than a sticky community/communities, than that will make mass migration that much harder to coordinate and manage.
This is clearly the reason in my eyes. I append "reddit" to most of search queries not because reddit always has the best advice/information, but because the alternative is usually wading through page after page of SEO blog spam. Even if I know the information is better found somewhere else, I can usually find that somewhere else from reddit.
Want to compare headphones? Search returns blog spam. Computer components? Blog spam. Software framework or library question? Blog spam. Healthcare / Medicine? 1000 government / hospital websites that all give the same useless information. Nutrition? Blog spam. Every search results is either endless affiliate spam blogs or endless blogs all sharing the same trivial parts about a topic.
It's possible that there is a ton of useful information on the internet, but it's certainly not easy to find. It's amazing to me that Reddit failed to take advantage of their position as quasi internet hub, and seem to just want to be yet another endless content scroller app.
I agree this is likely, which will extend the negative reactions further and alienate even more users. Unless Reddit execs do a 180 in the very near future I think the platform will be forever crippled.
Large networks rarely die overnight and whatever happens they will still have a number of users for the foreseeable future, but the steady fade to irrelevance will begin in earnest.
Power users drive a huge amount of content and moderation, and they are especially livid right now for good reason.
I'm skeptical they can afford to lose all those subs or replace their mods.
source: https://reddark.untone.uk/
I currently moderate 2 subs (down from 5). I'm looking to offload those 2 without having them get banned for being unmoderated (again).
To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. At least if the mods of some sub go haywire, users can always create another sub. With widespread use of AI moderation, there'd be nowhere to go to escape.
THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi.
The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah."
We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing.
Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.
Maybe they saw your "it was my neighbor on my wifi, I swear!" and reflex-nuked.
Also, mods don't suspend accounts, employees do. From user reports. Then admins reinstate or don't.
I wouldn't put it past them to auto-nuke any appeal with the word neighbor, though. That's the "my dog ate my homework" equivalent of trying to get out of a warranted ban.
There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity.
This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon.
Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.
Because they make all their content mods sign one that also absolves them of all responsibility.
It'll be hell.
We've had conservatives here forever, but I haven't seen people talk about things like "replacement theory". I think there's been a definite overton window shift towards the right wing.
Yesterday there was a question where someone asked what /. is and there were 20 replies with "slashdot" in reddit style. I haven't seen a straight out of reddit comment thread like that for months.
I've definitely found myself angrier reading hacker news than I have been in the months previous. I haven't figured out if that's more of a "we become what we behold" (https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb) or a real change.
I'm not convinced they lose out either. The front page doesn't really feel different than it did before. There are a handful of "Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments" posts, but I'm kinda blind to them the same way I'm blind to ads as I scroll past. Otherwise it just feels like any other day on reddit.
I was looking at tents earlier and wanted to see reddit reviews but literally every single link was private. Reddit has to be noticing this.
Most regular users on Reddit view it through feeds not individual subs. It’s very plausible the bulk won’t even notice, except when other people tell them it’s happening or it makes the news. Eventually others might wonder why they haven’t seen some sub posts recently but it will probably take a month or so.
These are the people clicking ads and using their mobile app.
As a mod I am getting messages from regular users who are desperate to see posts that have likely troubleshooting answers to problems they are having at work.
Reddit is kind of a critical technical resource for some people and this is really hurting them at least right now.
Barron's reports that Reddit's potential IPO is now in trouble.[1]
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/reddit-stock-ipo-revolt-6e8...
Huffman / Reddit Inc. have misread this repeatedly. Just saw he's reportedly assured staff it will "blow over" and "hasn't hurt revenue".
Wrong move.
Completely avoidable PR disaster, and until the ego(s) driving all of this step back, they'll just keep making the situation worse.
I will be extending my blackout on the site indefinitely.
Just one of the dumbest PR / corporate comms debacles I've seen. Almost as though the Reddit execs saw what Twitter is doing and said "hold my beer".
Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.
When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.
I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.
and a love of r/jailbait
The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."
Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.
People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later."
So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.
So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.
There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".
We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.
Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.
Isn't it a bit hypocritical to ban people from r/conservative for not toeing the party line and then complain about that same behavior being applied to themselves?
I considered those actions to be protective of free speech rather than in violation of it.
And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.
well, except for Buzzfeed, who seems to exist solely to repost Reddit threads with GIFs.
Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.
A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users who don’t post top-level content or serve as moderators are on the 1% who do.
That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.
>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.
I think reddit did change for the worse though. Restrictions to speech and opinions, aggression if you deviate from the allegedly correct perspective. The company did revoke their principles of free expression for sleazy advertisers and market "research". Typical corporation.
Of course they need a way to finance their costs, but I think in the long run they shoot themselves in the foot. I believe we will also see age restrictions in the near future and do away with anonymity. Might kill the platform completely though.
A prime example of cutting your nose to spite your face.
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.[^1]
It's encouraging to see that some subreddits are responding to the fact that the company is just planning to ignore users.
[^1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
I was there for a very long time (before it was even “launched” officially).
So I do it with a heavy heart, but I don't think there’s any way of going back for them now. Its been a downward trend for literally years at this point.
Its extremely unlikely I go back because ultimately I will feel like I have less than I did before.
even if its just fake internet points.
reddit always had extremely cringy but popular sides to it (Unidan, Boston Marathon witch hunt) and since the very beginning the decisions of the leadership have felt immature, off and wrong.
Reddit's leadership has always prevented reddit from being a thriving, productive community and their ineptitude has simply reached a boiling point now. For most of the time it felt like sifting through liquid poop to find a gold nugget once a week.
I hope the communities I used to engage in partake in this prolonged blackout.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
What gave you that idea? The fact that spez (the ceo) was head-mod for /r/jailbait? Or was it spez firing the AMA mod that had -massive- community engagement? Or was it spez bullying one of the top reddit-app developers (Christian, Apollo reddit-app developer)?
Reddit /obviously/ respects each and every user, the app developers, the subreddit mods, and it shows! /s
There’s no need to slander the guy with false information. Reddit used to allow the moderators of a subreddit to automatically make someone a moderator of that subreddit. Then, as things like people being added as an r/jailbait mod against their wishes became widespread, Reddit changed to an invite system which required a user to accept an invite to be a moderator.
Here is a post on Reddit from 10 years ago describing in depth how the ‘new’ mod invite system works and also stating that you could be made a moderator against your wishes: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/117wkp/reddit_ch...
Spez was not an actual moderator of r/jailbait, he was added against his wishes. Please don’t spread harmful lies about the guy, there’s enough true things about him to criticize.
You forgot ‘stealth edited the posts of other users by editing the database directly’ in his list of crimes, don’t forget that along with the firing of the AMA person and lying about the Apollo dev. Those things are all based in reality.
Spinning it to the dev saying he was referring to Apollo as a "noisy API user" was really suspect, imo. I've never heard a heavy API user being called "noisy" and why even mention a number for a buy out multiple times? The "mostly joking" was a cop out as well. Is it a joke or not? Because when he was asked for clarification, he clarified $10m and 6 months again.
Moderation is a hierarchy and the CEO is the head of a company.
A CEO moderator is THE HEAD moderator.
Your attempt to quibble over meaning instead of acknowledging that the most powerful position in the company took on a powerful position of moderation…
… for /r/jailbait …
There’s no amount of spin you can put on this to make what I said any less correct or damning.
And he's probably correct. Mark Zuckerberg once called Facebook users "dumb fucks" but plenty of people still use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The addicts will return to the drug.
People keep saying this. It's true of the vast majority of protests. And yet, they keep happening, and I don't think it's because they're completely ineffective.
I'll grant I don't entirely get it either, but here's my theory of how they work: by being a show of unity, protests are an honest signal of power. In any case where the party being protested against is not willing to cause mass civilian casualties, unified rebellion is a genuine threat. It's an even bigger threat in a democracy, or a commercial setting. It's also a signal of willingness to accept costs (not guaranteed honest, but it's still pretty hard to coordinate a bluff in public).
Negotiations are typically held during a ceasefire, not while the parties are actively trying to hurt each other.
We can hope that even if the Reddit protests ultimately go nowhere, they will at least have shifted public opinion, if only slightly.
I think a replacement of spaz would be the only thing that could move the needle at this point.
Domain-squatting on a couple dozen important keywords and brand names in 2005 is the powermod secret to success, not that they’re just that great at their job that they rose to the top on merit.
There are quite a few subs that prove this - really, really badly moderated but sitting on super, super valuable real estate. And Reddit doesn’t really have a mechanism for handling this unless the mod is outright posting gore or something - they got their first in 2005, that’s the end of it.
And you can expect people engaged with the protest to take full advantage of this if it happens, making the problem that much worse
If you simply reopen without any of the current mods, the site will be overrun
Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry, particularly on a sub like Music or Videos. Finding a replacement mod team without specific agendas is going to be hard. Only the most power tripping or ideologically driven will want the position as paying mods seems out of the question given Reddit’s stance.
Inexperienced mods will also be unable to handle the torrent of spam and low effort posts and comments the big sub attract.
It’s not impossible to punish the dissident mods but having a functional replacement on short notice is impossible.
Everything made sense except this part.
Power goes to everyone's head.
imho it affects people who didn't seek/don't want power differently from those who went looking for it.
Most of the mods of bigger subs have been doing it for years and it’s just a quirky hobby/obligation.
Obviously the super mods are in the pocket of the admins, and political subs are very controlling.
But appointing a new round of mods for a sub with millions of subscribers will attract the most bottom barrel power hungry people.
Fair
Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.
Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?
For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.
A human has discernment. An AI is looking at cute colors at a wall but doesn’t actually know which one is red or blue.
I'm a mod at a 150k+ user subreddit. AI can probably handle removing objectionable content, but I spend most of my time on other areas that are much less susceptible to automation.
• Removing requests when there are recent similar posts. We've found that users disengage when the same requests are posted every week.
• Hosting AMAs. An AI isn't going to know who we should invite or whether they'll be a good fit for our subreddit.
• Detecting and banning people deceptively promoting their own products. This is incredibly common and often quite difficult.
AMAs don't require a mod to participate, just the community. All mods really do is sticky a thread.
People deceptively promoting their own products, others are free to down vote them and report the post.
AMAs don't happen spontaneously in major subs. As with everything else, there's a lot of admin work that goes on behind the scenes. We mostly invite people for AMAs; under 10% of this year's 10+ AMAs were requested by the participant. Someone has to email them, answer their questions, schedule a time, explain how to post, join them in a chat channel, etc.
Deceptive promotion is rarely flagged on our sub. We got ~450 reports last month and none of them were for promotion. Promotion posts are quite rare; they're against our rules and most people don't even try. What we regularly see are comments from users recommending their own products. Some cases are obvious, e.g. new accounts frequently recommending a book without ratings that was released yesterday. Many are much harder to identify; we regularly search user profiles and the Internet to confirm an identity. One person we banned last year had been covertly recommending their book for months. It took numerous searches and several weeks to remove all their promotion comments.
> Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.
There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge.
I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.
There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs.
But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.
And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.
I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.
But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(
It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.
“Fact: there is NO DEFENSE against the digital ghillie suit!”
Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.
Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them
I had no idea futurology was that big. I remember years ago when it used to be a singularity/life-extension/transhumanist subreddit, and then it got brigaded by climate change activists, to the point that most of the articles on the front page were about clean energy, rising sea levels, and recycling. Also a lot of doomer types actually bemoaning life extension outright, because of the usual nonsense about "where will we put ALL THE PEOPLE" and "Drump will live FOREVER." I stopped checking it out years ago, but it serves as a case study of how entryists co-opt and destroy online communities.
And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.
The only reason why it's working right now is because the mods in charge of these subs are upset, and a few mods can shutdown a 30m+ sub. I suspect the number of users on r/aww that care _that much_ to get their account banned for spam.
If it was just users being upset (which would be the case if reddit reclaims them) I just don't think there's enough upset people for there to be an impact like that.
Just earlier this month Reddit started having issues with follower spam -- something that was specifically a problem because it bypassed volunteer mod control and Reddit was doing a shit job taking care of it. There were tons of threads about how to turn off those notifications.
Just yesterday Musk was lamenting about how bad the bot situation on Twitter has gotten recently.
And none of that even gets into keeping content on topic for a community, just straight up spam.
And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?
there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.
Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.
The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.
Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.
Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.
But even ignoring that, suppose all >15M subreddit suddenly get salaried mods. Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it? Or would they just wait around and keep working until their subreddit is also "siezed" by Reddit inc.
Is there any example of a community which successfully runs on mixed salaried/volunteer moderator labour in such a way?
I'm sure there'd be plenty of volunteers who already manage several of the big 20M+ subs that didn't go dark. We're only talking about 6 subs, and they aren't that complex.
> Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it?
They don't matter nearly as much. The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.
Again we're only talking about 6 subs. Not even double digits. There's already groups of subs that mod many, many large subreddits.
> The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.
Reddit wouldn't exactly be Reddit if you reduce it to only /r/aww and five of the other most mainstream subreddits. If that's what you think will happen... Well I don't exactly disagree with you, but Reddit would be a very different product at that point.
i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be their last resort though
Bringing up that stat doesn't seem really relevant.
However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)
User content is the safety line, not whether the platform pays moderators.
Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is?
>Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?
It does. (And 230 isn't part of the DMCA, it's the only surviving bit of the CDA).
I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).
That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.
While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.
There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them.
Here's a couple cases drawing the difference:
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230 for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it themselves
BUT
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat... - Lycos is protected against defamation claims on their own message boards
People are coping super hard.
Is this not the answer to your question? Reddit can't afford to pay people to do this job. They rely on impassioned people to volunteer.
If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption that these people can be easily replaced for granted.
Not if they get a chance to be in charge. Also many don't actually care about the changes despite what the mod blackout is asking people.
>If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption that these people can be easily replaced for granted.
Well this posts article tone makes it sound like they expect the mods to get bored. Which most will. And like I said, they are replaceable.
/r/videos, sure, that's got its own culture, history, known reposts, moderation style needs, etc. It will take some work to for a group of communications majors to figure out how to moderate it.
But /r/PLC, where I hung out frequently? You need reasonably intelligent electrical engineers to discern spammy press releases from interesting news! We don't work cheap, except when we work for free. Elite athletics, weird hobby niches, professional forums, on and on...Reddit's long tail, where much of the value was, relies on domain experts who were also good communicators. Those are hard people to find.
Stackexchange, love it or hate it, has the same thing going. Are you going to hire a pilot to mod the aviation stack, or a post-doc to moderate mathematics?
And when you have to insert paid moderators, the cost to moderate all of the huge communities will blow up Reddit’s internal budget.
It’s easier said than done. Just ask FB or Google (with YouTube), they have difficulty moderating their own platforms and they have billions of dollars at their disposal.
Trying to milk 3rd-party developers with excessively high API fees while expecting the community to provide all the value for their site free of charge was a very short-sighted move.
When people actually start migrating away from reddit and post/comment volume is significantly down, you'll see reddit suddenly be a lot more willing to engage with the community.
Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed using tildes.net lately. I know everyone is jumping on Lemmy and federation, which is great in practice but Tildes feels more accessible to me and for that reason may have more potential to actually capture a user base.
If you have one available, please consider throwing me a tildes.net invite.
Thanks m8.
Many thanks :)
In my case, I've replaced my Reddit time ~50% with HN and ~50% with... something else, like doing work.
The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy.
Theses changes, what's happening at twitter, the tech layoffs, govt regulations and fines, are all signs using Freebies for Attention Capture are not going to endlessly scale.
They are also screwing their moderators who use API-based tools, and people who need accessibility accommodations that reddit does not provide.
Not to mention the scummy behavior towards the Apollo developer.
AFAIK historically the % of GDP spent on advertising was more or less constant so it s not like advertisers bailed
Worse for Reddit, dumping long-time community moderators en masse would be crossing a Rubicon that could tip Reddit into a death spiral of low-effort moderation reducing content quality and engagement which will feed back on itself. The mods going dark for longer may in fact be hoping to goad Reddit into responding with such self-destructive stupidity.
Instead, I’m in far smaller niche and location-relevant subs. I didn’t realize what cutting off my city subreddit would do for my sense of connection to my city. I didn’t realize how shit general search results are for questions about hobbies.
It’s really made me question if can allow one entity to serve as such an important conduit to my interests again.
The F1 subreddit (over a million subs)is one of the absolute worst places on the internet for any kind of discussion. It's totally dominated by The Hive Mind, dissenting opinions are absolutely unwelcome and the top posts on every single post are low-effort jokes, usually jokes that have been told a thousand times before. It's awful.
MotoGP (250k+ subs) is better, but still suffers from similar problems.
V8Supercars is quiet, but the discussion is of a far higher quality.
"Better than twitter" is a low bar to clear.
The exception is subs that lean heavily into over-the-top curation which is also its own special kind of groupthink hell imo.
All the big subs are garbage these days
Blackout isn't enough, don't let them scab the VOLUNTEER mods - don't cross the picket line - better yet, delete your account after using a tool to scrub your account's history. Delete isn't enough, you need to replace it with junk.
If you're going to lurk, make sure you're blocking first party ads.
If they don't want people scraping their site, they can require an account and EULA.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/
At some point he'll either be forced to back down or replace the mods of the big subs with people willing to cross the picket line, I don't see why he doesn't just pull the plaster off now either way rather than drag this out bleeding credibility all the while?
I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers.
What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers?
- Reddit would get many more premium subscribers
- App developers would be able to avoid managing subscription fee’s themselves and continue as before
- Users of the official Reddit app would not be affected
- Users of third party apps would have to pay for Reddit Premium - but maybe at a discount
Talking with regular non-techy people who use reddit regularly - nobody outside our bubble even knows about or cares about the whole API fiasco. Most people I've talked with shrug and say they'll just use the official app if that's what it all means. The others asked if they can just pay and use the same 3rd party app in the future.
Reddit has been, and is filled with drama. These public news pieces make the community appear extremely naïve, to a fault. When people hear some of these apps had tens, or hundreds of thousands of users that circumvented ad revenue for reddit - they mostly do not have sympathy for the 3rd party app developers.
Just being realistic. I like reddit as much as the next guy, and agree the leadership is terrible (reddit has a long history of terrible leadership).
If you drive the power users away, nobody is sharing content or engaging in the comments regularly enough for the 9% of casual commenters to stay engaged and they leave - then the 90% goes because there's nothing at all for them to lurk around.
GME / BBBY is able to raise money from a mountain of APEs by basically giving the crowd what they want.
Reddit needs more funding to turn into a profitable company. They also need these 3rd party apps and other such features (that they're cutting because they don't make enough profits yet).
Just be honest with the world. Reddit needs money, please support the IPO, lets see how much money is raised and where it can go. Promise to use the money to buy out Apollo or something.
An organization needs to make enough money to live, but it doesn't need quarterly RoI and growth. That is a demand of a public market. Reddit got greedy and sold out.
It's time to start building new communities outside reddit. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to happen.
- Extend the 30 day to apply the pricing to 6 months (at least) to let people figure it out their stuff ; - Give some leverage for the _existing_ 3 party apps that contributed to reddit till this point on the form of a smaller price;
I think being honest about their goal would've reduced a lot of the backlash. The issue is that they're claiming to be working with the community when it's blatantly obvious that they aren't.
Ideally they'd just go to more reasonable/free API pricing though.
The way he's described things, it seems like he could've done this or that hail mary thing, a quick gofundme round maybe, to see if the Apollo users wanted to get behind the app in order to keep it by providing the six-month cushion that Reddit will not, and see if they can work out a new, still-equitable pricing scheme. My guess is that as an app with a huge userbase and reputation, he probably could have pivoted this into better income, even. But it also looks to me like he's just taken a sober look at things and realized that the nature of the game has changed and he doesn't want to play.
People on here keep saying the mods are deluded, but I think the mods are something much more powerful: disillusioned.
Gotta make that profile shine for VCs!?
Truth be told I don't care much about all of this, I just want my subs back or replaced so I can mindlessly scroll them. Wasn't using a third party app, but if I was I'd probably feel unhappy for a week before I simply switch and don't think back.
I'm never using Reddit's awful app -- it's just not how I like to use Reddit. I'm an old.reddit.com kind of person.
Honest question, what is so bad about the Reddit app that you would give up browsing the content you like?
I experience little ads, and if I would be annoyed by it I would probably find ways to get rid of it (pi-hole style). I'm OK with how the app displays comments, I can fold them etc. Don't need much more.
How do I find and read that content that I like? It's a very different (and, for me, worse) experience in their official reddit app and on the non-old Reddit.com.
If I'm going to adjust to a different and worse way of browsing content, I might as well just go to a different site entirely. It's similar to how Microsoft keeps adding user-hostile features and degrading the UI on Windows every year. Most users will stay (I do) but a few more will move to Linux or Mac OS. I fully understand where you are coming from -- for you nothing has been lost. For me, it's a significant change for the worse.
If there are no alternatives, which today there aren't to the best of my knowledge, my guess is Reddit will win this stalemate. Sure, people will leave but not nearly as many as the leaders of the strike would like to think. At least, not for long.
I don't expect a rapid fall of Reddit or Twitter but rather a slow decline. It's not unprecedented.
The cycle will repeat for sure -- it's been repeating for over 20 years now.
I don't appreciate being lied to, treated like less than garbage? And I'm certainly not going to keep contributing to a platform that does that to me? Especially when this stuff is only going to get worse as they "march towards profitability"?
I gotta log off. I don't know if ppl here are young, naive, or if it's just the usual inability to remember anything from more than a few years ago, or the short-sightedness of not seeing where this is going. Catch ya on Digg.
My take is feeling offended is a choice. Personally, I just let it slide off and continue my life. Life's to short to get offended by these things. But we are different and that's fine.
Ofcourse this protest was probably not on his timeline. Let’s hope it kills all traction it had.
If the first-part app is all there is, it's easier just to go somewhere else.
It was a nice discovery tool and formula1 subreddit was great (memes and all) but I think spez really screwed it up.
Bummer, I'm sure it was floated, and probably shot down for some stupid non-sensical reason, but I would have insta-paid something in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a year for a personal access token that I could plug into an app like Apollo and continue using Reddit via API.
Is it incompetence? Not a priority because the focus was always on growth? Or just difficult/impossible as nobody wants to pay for anything and block ads?
I don't know the answer, but the answer matters. Both in this strike and the Stackoverflow strike many people are dropping claims that the company only cares about money. Those claims make little sense to me when the companies is making a loss.
You could have very valid reasons to strike, but you're striking against a company in financial trouble, facing an existential AI threat, and an advertiser pullback.
Im curious about spending..
There are likely costs associated with this.
Mods take a break, and just let the bots shit allover the content.
It takes like 20mn of un-moderated internet before it's all ads and spam... Reddit is basically reddit because of the carefully curated posts.
I ended up jumping to another department where I watched him bring in an expensive vendor to implement a replacement for a system I had been using, and then watched corrupt files start appearing in the production files. I was there just long enough to hear about his quiet exit from the company.
Someone else needs to quietly exit from the company if they hope to get this out of the grease fire. At this point, we'll all see what happens pretty quickly I think, but this looks to me like a ship with a thousand leaks and a drunk captain who won't come out of his cabin because people yell at him about problems that are not his when he does.
For the second part—they should free up the names of mods protesting. Fun chaos, unpredictable outcome. I support.
In democratic places they replace people for a reason
HN would hardly be better if random people mostly interested in cooking or martial arts were putting in their two cents here.
I really can't think of any subject that is better on Reddit than it was on an old message forum that was killed off by these giant platforms.
Compare any subreddit about psytrance or trance music to the corpse of forum.isratrance.com.
It isn't even close. The forum owner is also self interested to not be labeled oppressive. I can't think of any old forum I was ever on that had problems of oppressive moderation.
That isratrance forum of course though doesn't scale to a few hundred million people and early investors getting rich.
I 100% agree. Not just Reddit, but Facebook too. The days of phpBB and vBulletin are sadly over though.
And while I know it’s still around, it’s not the same—I miss slashdot.
Win-Win. New community gets the boost they deserve and old one gets to stay dark.
But first they have to make it easy for users to find alternative subreddits. Currently it s not even possible, their search sucks
Then the content can be exported from reddit into each of those platforms.
The instances could be federated. Reddit users could redeem their account across the federated network by proving they control the same account on reddit (either send a message to a bot on reddit, or by generating a one-time password then posting its hash to reddit)
Surface-level: the API price hikes are at a glance meant to force out third-party Reddit interfaces. To speculate, this is aimed to funnel users to Reddit's official application. I can say that because the mobile website is getting crippled over time to "encourage" users to use the app.
Deeper-level: it is reflective of Reddit corporate's attitudes towards its users. They are gearing for an IPO, so they want to tell investors that they will be profitable (read: milk its users, monetize everything, remove convenient features if it will mean profits, etc.)
People are mad because instead of being open and honest about their play, reddit tried sneak it it in. They are trying to give Reddit shareholders their win while everyone else loses.
Moderators(who are doing tons of free work to make reddit a tolerable place) use API based tools to help them moderate. If reddit is going to make their (volunteer!) job harder, why shouldn't they just pack up and leave?
The official reddit app reportedly does not make adequate accommodations for some disabled users, but dedicated third party developers did. They later said that they would give exemptions for accessibility use cases, but stipulated that they could not charge for their service. Some people the perceived this as: "we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it."
Then there is the disingenuous interactions with the Apollo developer.
All-in-all, people think that reddit is acting in bad faith.
()Allowances ? You mean don't ask them for more money, even though those apps are making money. How is this a good business idea? I mean for Reddit. ---------------- ()Moderators are not forced to work for free. If they do, they are doing this willingly and if they choose to quit, nobody is blaming them. ---------------- ()If original reddit app doesn't make accommodations for handicapped people, it is neither the duty of the 3rd party apps to provide them nor to enforce them. It is just a fringe angle reddit opponents are bringing forward. It is not why this ordeal got so out of proportion. ---------------- ()... we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it. ... Although it may not be the wisest idea, the owners of the walled garden can say this and it is up to those non-compensated moderators to stay or leave. It has nothing to do with the 3rd party apps ---------------- (*)After all, is said and done, reddit wants more money out of the pot. So does the 3rd party app developers. It is like a Mexican standoff. And I can guarantee you, first party to blink will not be reddit.
And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk home.
This is an opportunity for new moderators to start new subreddits. Conversely Reddit management may back down.
By "useful" I mean in an easily searchable / navigable / quickly rendering form (not via the Wayback Machine).
Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO. They're fully within their rights to change how people access their website, how people interact with it, and limit who has access to the data on the website.
When I clicked on a reddit result on Google to find some information, only to find it has been closed down in protest after trying to find something on Google, I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company (granted, I guess they do have some power as Reddit is relying on these unpaid moderators to do Reddits job.)
I highly, highly doubt that Reddit will change their tune - they might lower the API costs, they might capitulate in some capacity in some regards to accessibility, but they'll still work towards an IPO and will harm their website as a result.
Their CEO is a scumbag and both their paid and unpaid moderators/admins have strong biases in any subreddits that aren't niche hobbies and meant for wider audiences. Great for those who wish to follow the echo chambers, but not so great for others who don't _really_ have alternatives.
I'll be happy if Reddit disappears off the planet, but I fear what will replace it will be even more restrictive - the internet needs decentralization of social media and communication.
Sure. Technically they are within their rights to do that.
Would it be good for them to do so? Probably not. It'll piss off their user base. As others have mentioned, it'll open themselves to lawsuits due to content moderation. It'll cost them a lot to pay people to moderate these communities, which they currently get for free.
> I would expect them to [seize the subreddits] if they're gearing up for an IPO
See above. This would make them less profitable and most likely negatively affect said IPO.
> ... I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company.
It's not self-ordained. They're doing what they are allowed to do with these subreddits, at least until Reddit takes away their moderator access.
There are two solutions to this: google's cached pages and archive.org.
> Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO.
Reddit's sob story is that they are still unprofitable. They can't afford to hire moderators for the seized subreddits.
If you’re just going dark Reddit will know you’ll eventually cave in.
Blackouts feel like you’re saying “we love you so please change”.
I’d be happy to see people use other services. I’d appreciate the decentralisation.
I wonder if the average Reddit user would be upset enough over the action to stop using the site?
I mean it's 2023, it's not like it takes years to make a web service.
Quitting twitter was easy. Reddit not so much.
If I was running Reddit, this is what I would be planning right now.
If this is extended indefinitely I would expect competing sub-reddits to form.
But some subs like r/comics are strangely boot licky despite how community engaged the mod team seemed to be. Automatically removing requests about the blackout and not even entertaining the discussion.
The next step after that would be an AI to generate the replies, worn out jokes, and repost complaints.
I called this in another comment. Spez won't let this continue - and he gets the nice second-order result of not having to deal with people like Merari
This isn't a drastic change and there aren't any competitors that are offering anything better (ignoring the benefits of something decentralized).
It's a whole different interface
At some point, Reddit will just force all subs to be open again, and any mods that try to delete the sub or do no moderation will just get banned or whatever.
It's pretty hard to fight against the corp using the corp's own platform.
no, because it is actual work to be a mod. work you don't get paid or rewarded for.
i'd say no without hesitation.
Not only that, it would create a revolt among the moderators who were still left so you’d have to do this for all subs at once. Tens of thousands of people.
It would be an absolute disaster for Reddit.
For a company wanting to go public, having users banned from some of the most popular subs, the same subs that rely on said users to publish content, Reddit may as well have shot itself in the foot.
When the corp has relied on the good graces of users and mods to effectively run the site, both by providing the content AND moderating the content, any change to that status quo is going to be met with open hostility from the top 1% contributors.
The current moderators spend an insane amount of time on their communities, and they are very proud of the environment they have built up over the time. They are barely able to keep up with all the automation tools they currently have available.
The new moderators would not have this dedication, would not have the tools, and would have to immediately deal with an absolute deluge of some of the worst content imaginable just because the community will view them as scabs.
When all the dedicated people leave, only garbage remains. Who would want to be in charge of a pile of garbage?
Stuff like r/aww and r/videos would probably survive if it was just the Reddit employees removing offensive stuff that gets upvoted high, but it will kill the long tail where the moderators are less garbage removers and more community organisers. Maybe just the generic mindless feed is enough for Reddit to be a successful business, but it's not what most people think of Reddit as, and it's not clear why such a rump reddit would be able to take users off of Tiktok etc.
Also, is it capitalism you love, or is it free markets and independent business? Cause capitalism is just when someone sits on their ass and collects dividends while other people work.