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Comment by jfasi | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?

The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.

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Reddit is just where a community posted up. Reddit is free-riding off the efforts of the community, it is a lopsided arrangement. Reddit is not a challenging software platform to replicate, there are already platforms ready to be migrated to.

They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.

If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.

There are lots of users that are unhappy with Reddit for this. I've stopped using it this week.

I looked at one reddit: r/science. That is blockaded now. A 'private community'. This is (was) an aggregator of SCIENCE news and information. How does blocking the flow of potentially life-saving information help "the cause"?

Reddit is dead to me, too. This is beyond sad.

The good news is that you could go create your own subreddit. Right now. Go create r/Science2. Go do it and mod it yourself, then link it here.

Sounds like one more point for the protesters, nice!

I think you didn't see the amount of popular support these actions had. Many subreddits put it to a vote to go dark or not. The ones I am a part of were 90%+ in support.

I mean if they follow your plan and replace the moderators of the subreddits I enjoy then I'm done with Reddit. Reddit can't expect to freeride off various communities and then kick out mods without a reasonable excuse, and this definitely does not classify.

And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.

The most 'obstinate' users are the content creators and people actually driving those Reddits. I would hope you're familiar from the history of social media websites what happens when you drive out the users creating content.

How much times has this happened in history?

Digg and Tumblr?

People love a good bandwagon too, this will live or die by the PR it gets. People will leave if their favourite community gets messed with and the messaging falls flat, given how tone deaf they have been so far the odds of that are high.

I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.

> force communities back open

Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.

Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.

Moderators and content creators. The majority of Reddit users are lurkers. They never contribute anything, they don’t even comment.

The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.

All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.

I left precisely because of API pricing. I'm not using Reddit's shitty mobile app. I see the writing on the wall. old.reddit.com will be gone within a few years along with RES. I won't suffer that.

Fuck 'em.

If "the community" is upset at the moderators, they can take solace in the fact that the communities are almost certainly coming back - it's just a matter of if it's under new management or not.

The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.

Which happened because of API pricing? The moderators are why the community works at all at this scale. They're also how reddit makes the site palatable to advertisers. That's just the current controversy anyway, Reddit inc has been making numerous user hostile choices and their choice to push third party apps away is clearly not for the benefit of the community.

And if they didn't do anything you'd have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.

they are protesting the high/unreasonable API price out of nowhere

And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.

Incorrect, it is a legitimate protest. Many have pointed out that Reddit could just wait out 48 hours, so indefinite blackout is a more logical move.

An indefinite blackout is not a protest, it's extortion. It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."

Aren't all protests essentially extortion? We will sit here until you give into demands. We won't work until you give into our demands. We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.

All that matters is who the community supports.

> We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.

its more like blocking highways indefinitely.

Blocking an abstract highway where it takes 2 seconds to build a new one right by it at zero cost.

Reddit's original deal was hands off community as a service. I guess the mods are putting that to the test?

no, lots of info locked in specific subreddit, you can't recover it at zero cost.

Maybe reddit will provide such function.

And? Reddit can reverse course and have the highway back at any moment.

>It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."

Who has said that users shouldn't be allowed to use the new app? I haven't seen even a single instance of that. The problem is that Reddit - the centralized entity with power - is forcing that to be the only option.

Reddit could be reasonable and continue to permit both. Until they decide to be reasonable the protests will continue. If Reddit gets butthurt and wants to call organized collective action "extortion" they can, but their childish whining isn't impressing anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.

Incorrect, it is holding information hostage, due to vainglorious moderators.

The internet routes around damage.

The damage here is what Huffman & board are pulling. They can have their website and free moderation back after they grow up and change their attitude.

You could make the argument that it's a reasonable API price compared to other social media sites. What I really wish is they made a distinction between people signing into Apollo to use the app and Apollo making API calls, although I suppose they're probably trying to push people onto their app to improve ad revenue

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