Reddit Admins are forcing protesting subreddits to open to the public again
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
r/steam: https://lemmy.world/post/239075
r/piracy: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35555
r/antiwork: https://infosec.exchange/@vertana/110557520854046992
r/pics: https://lemmy.world/post/206930
This is really the only problem I've been struggling with on lemmy.
Otherwise, the experience has been okay. Teething pains, sure, but most of those are getting resolved in real time.
And, if the "external reddit app" people all start developing their app for lemmy instead, holy cow, that's going to put a lot of programmer hours into it.
Reddit may go down a lot faster than I expected. I really expected spez to win this one simply by holding his breath and running to the IPO. However, things are kinda collapsing faster than I expected.
Edit: Nope: search didn't work for the lemmy.world one. Presumably that only works if someone on your instance has already pulled in the group to your instance.
Apparently, someone on your instance has to have pulled in that group for the search to work.
My question still stands: How do you view a link on a foreign instance on your home instance?
To be honest: I don't need an alternative to reddit. I'm happy to leave porn, politics and cat pictures on reddit.
What I want is somewhere sorta like reddit where all the low-traffic tech-focused sub-reddits can congregate and get indexed.
I'm not being sarcastic and I am fairly far detached from the Reddit drama. Just trying to understand the value that exists in moderating a Reddit community for free. It seems threatening to take it away is making them compromise on their values quite effectively.
I'm not super emotionally invested in the final outcome, as much as I believe reddit and the CEO are torching a valuable marvel of humanity without an ounce of ???? (I'm seriously speechless) but instead with utter tonedeafness and serial doubledowns.
(Although, I cared enough to edit out my comment history by hand in support, since my overall count isn't high.)
/caveats /disclaimers
"It's a private||public company that answers to its shareholders||board." Fine.
> why [is] losing mod powers [..] such a big deal?
You're doing a disservice to the protesting by reducing their message to "drama" over having their moderator positions seized.
"[A] reddit community" alone is as many different things as there are the number of subreddits, to the same broad degree as your label just trivialized them.
(e: last P. hopefully now sounding more discussive and less accusatory)
Drama it is, by dictionary definition. That's how I used the word.
> "[A] reddit community" alone is as many different things as there are the number of subreddits, to the same broad degree as your label just trivialized them.
I think it's rather poor spirit to belittle someone for not knowing, when they have specifically asked to learn.
If you have a compelling reason to argue that losing moderation powers is not trivial, you are very welcome to share it, and it will be appreciated.
I guess my earlier ode to the tire fire that is reddit right now, which has, in its time, captured and digitized so much of humanity (and in one place, to boot), is largely my appeal. Your response to a sibling thread, while accurate as far as I see it, feels like it operates off of a narrowed definition of "personal gain".
On the subreddit scope: it's a neighborhood watch for residents. It's tech support for PEBKACs. It's a woodworking learning center for aspiring careerists and hobbyists. It's a coordination hub for criminals. It's a porn portal for the hormonally befuddled or sinfully licentious, depending on who you ask. It's where future spouses-to-be and predators-and-victims meet. I'm not trying to say you don't realize this or that people can't do these things just about anywhere else; just that maybe you're completely glossing over the human element to it, if anything. Maybe you and certainly I are among these people. If you want to keep to your distanced vantage point, I'd posit that it'd serve as a pretty relevant case study for decades, at the least. "One for the history books." As we already know, nothing lasts forever.
Didn't mean to accuse; and definitely didn't mean to belittle.
E: p.s., not to mention, all the staff and volunteers behind the scenes, CEO included.
> It seems threatening to take it away is making them compromise on their values quite effectively.
What exactly are you referring to here? I see this narrative in a lot of places and I’m confused about what “values” mods supposedly collectively have? So much discussion online paints moderators as some sort of a connected cabal with alternative motives instead of unrelated nerds who enjoy niche content.
significant group indeed became well organized in aggressively pushing one sided narrative, it is possible you are not a member of that group.
Taking communities private was a stand for values (or shown as such). Now that's being reversed when these mods are threatened with removal. So there seems to be some significant value in modding they don't want to lose.
> So much discussion online paints moderators as some sort of a connected cabal with alternative motives instead of unrelated nerds who enjoy niche content.
I wouldn't describe it as a cabal (some secret, influential, political org). But these strikes have been coordinated half-publicly[0] and half-privately among mods of subs. And the goal is to influence Reddit in a way that the group prefers. In a political context, that would be close to a cabal. Regardless, I don't think cabals are immoral unless their goals are.
So most of the personal value comes from being able to influence this part of the internet in a positive way?
but for mods, it boils down to this: reddit does not provide the tools to manage the communities. if it had provided good tools, then mods would be using them and not 3rd party tools.
So, the best way to effectively manage these communities is to keep them private. invite only. that is the only means they have to effectively manage these communities.
Till they create comparable tools, they have no right to ask mods to open up those communities
I wonder if r/pics' John Oliver policy will be reversed in the coming days: https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14bai7s/henceforth_rp...
Moderators voice their concerns: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14bwfai/moderator...
Without the cooperation of the mods, you'll never clean the garbage up.
Even the fundamentals of a sub, the topic title rules etc are copyright if the mod who wrote them, not of Reddit.
And since large scale changes are required to negate copyright there's little chance any extant sub could remain of the mods and users of that sub chose to revoke the licence.
Right?
Since these subreddits were never 'owned' in the first place, such things like this was always possible and these 'protests' (on someone else's website) are just futile and the owners do. not. care and will seize control by force.
This 'protest' has already failed right from the beginning. A test of power that resulted in a crushing defeat for the so-called 'protestors' with little effort from the owners.
Did they really think they had any chance against the actual real owners of Reddit?
Something something old man yells at clouds. I hate how the internet has become a handful of large sites to the average american. Shamelessly going to plug that projects like mastodon and Lemmy have been super fun and I really hope it's a direction we start seeing people move.
Simple federated sites without some cryptobro vapourware.
As much as I wish that were the case, 99.9% of people don't care, won't care, and want the admins to steamroll this so they can go back to scrolling on the toilet.
This is the same reason the public attacks climate change protestors rather than the people who actually cause damage. People don't want change, they want anyone in the way of their current habits deleted as quickly as possible, and they don't want to be made to think about anything they are doing.
I'm so sick of reddit's bullshit and it's clear that the platform is going to get worse from here on out. I honestly hope that people do move on and find and popularize new platforms. Even if reddit calms down and starts working with their users, the competition would be healthy and otherwise, I'm fine with reddit suffering the same fate as digg and myspace.
Like, if you don't use reddit, just don't comment like you know what's up. And if you do, feel free to screenshot me your homepage and tell me it looks normal.
Clues that you might not know what you're talking about:
- acting like the protest hasn't affected the site or it's content
- acting like mods don't literally keep the site from being overrun with trash, trolls and racists
- acting like losing the most enthusiastic users, and those who participated and contributed invaluable niche knowledge to small subreddits, won't affect the long term value prop of the site to users or investors
But hey, were like a week in of it not mattering, more and more of spez's lies keep coming out and some of y'all just seem oddly gleeful to denigrate those that care. I don't get it, doesn't seem very nice to me.
I have two main reddit accounts, one subscribed to "serious" discussion-focused subreddits, and another to all the meme picture-heavy subreddits. The latter's frontpage is mostly OK but the former's is completely desolate.
The whole affair has resulted in Reddit very publicly taking on the status of a lame duck platform rather than one that's enjoyed by users and is on the rise.
Reddit is too big to be disrupted quickly, like Twitter was. The current leading sites are too entrenched.
But this has all been about these sites taking a very public, tangible, official turn into sites we hate but use anyway because we have to because they're there. This plays out over the next 5 years, not this one month. Facebook didn't die, but no one takes it seriously anymore and after 10 more years it will be Craigslist.
Reddit and Twitter had already gone downhill before Musk and before this, but it was more subconsciously felt, tacit, unspoken. But from now on, period, these sites are tolerated instead of loved. Mocked, cursed, communally understood to have been enshittified past the point of no return. Like Facebook now, they're the DMV of the Internet.
Protest is nuanced and slow. It's ridiculous to see people reducing it to the surface level and the now.
The worst possible outcome for Reddit was they start paying people to moderate their largest, most visible subreddits. That’s maybe a dozen or two mods (a few years back 5 mods ran a large percentage of the top subs).
The volunteer mods like to act like they’re mission critical and irreplaceable. Reddit is quickly showing most of them that’s not true. Even arguments like “Facebook spends $500m annually on moderation fall flat”. Reddit can continue to rely on volunteers until subs gain critical mass. Even then, the moderation problem seems far easier on Reddit.
It’s really looking like Reddit is going to get through this while ridding itself of 3PA (rip) and non-compliant mods.
In 2023 it doesn't make sense as the mods are free labour to Reddit Inc.