Reddit policy changes make sitewide protests nearly impossible
engadget.com
engadget.com
By that logic--functioning as a champion of casual visitors--shouldn't Reddit start being responsive when a moderation team gets taken over by a new clique and starts banning most of the regulars?
As a personal side-gripe: Their anti-spam/appeals process is also broken: A frequent account in good standing for over a decade can get l shadowbanned (including all comments anybody else ever made in reply), have the appeal granted, and then nothing is fixed and there's no way to contact anybody because the appeals page falsely claims the account is normal.
As a matter of contract law, it seems odd to be able to declare something will survive the breaking of the contract's terms. (As distinct from regular termination.)
Ex: "The seller will irrevocably transfer ownership of the car to the buyer, and the buyer will give the seller X dollars", and then the buyer's check bounces.
In the Reddit ToS case, it's not clear that revoking licenses already granted will make you whole again. It all depends on the specific nature of the infraction and if penalties for it are already laid out in the contract. If Reddit declines your request to take a sub private, then why would taking away license to your comment fix anything? It's purely punitive, and I doubt there are any statutes with punitive damages that apply to this scenario.
In any case, I'd imagine that the ToS makes you agree to arbitration if you take issue with Reddit's adherence to it. Arbitration clauses aren't inserted into contracts because of how famously impartial and sympathetic arbiters are to plaintiffs. They're in there because they're a stacked deck.
They have basically allowed the worst elements of their community to dominate and manipulate their most valuable properties (the subs belong to Reddit, and when a bad mod team ruins a sub that hurts Reddit more than anyone)
Reddit corporate has also ruined small communities and directly allowed this kind of power mod takeover via minimum activity rules.
The vanity of reddit made it possible that some of the worst people became mods. It was mostly some random pretext to throw people out of their own communities and many of them aren't around today anymore.
Powermods shouldn't even exist, maybe restrict mods to 1-2 subs. This would at least reduce very likely the vast amount of low quality moderation decisions.
But in the end I don't even believe this is fixable. New mods are rarer because the platform is mature. Of course you still can create niche subs, but those are in danger of being captured as well.
Also covered at the Verge (via an earlier, low-traction, HN submission):
The start of malice
Lemmy is one such alternative. I follow a few instances.
* Lemmy has much more "extreme" roots. The original people who went to Lemmy back in 2018/2019 have very strong political ideologies, and even though Lemmy is much bigger now, those roots really shaped the culture of Lemmy
* Lemmy is federated, sort of like email. You can self-host your own email provider if you really want, but you should probably just register to one of the top 3 providers
* Lemmy is missing niche communities. At around ~1% the size of Reddit, you just won't find a community for your favorite game, city, or meme genre
* Lemmy is obviously open source (AGPL), and their servers are very cheap to run (compared to Reddit's insane op costs)
* As a poster, I enjoy "contributing" quality content to Lemmy. No one is getting rich or IPOing off my work, and it is clearly designed in a way that even if the founders wanted to make it profitable, they couldn't
Tl;dr For KPIs, Lemmy is objectively worse than Reddit. The only real reason to go is if you like the "alternative" social media services.
And because of that, many instances also block many other instances, leading to fragmentation and people seeing (or not) different sets of comments... it's very much a "which wind would you like to piss into" situation IMO.
I always feel like my comments do not reach many people and am questioning why I even bother to say something.
I would say the exception to this is communities reddit frowns upon. For example, piracy related.
It's still in invite-only mode, though.
Also, isn't there a function to only allow approved submitters to post in a subreddit?
I believe so.
It would be an interesting to use spam/moderation features to protest reddit. It might put them in a bind of either allowing the protest mechanism, letting their community go (more) to shit, or increasing their admin staffing workload/cost.
The quid, the platform way to attract people offering NOTHING better than someone else it's the key to milk people...
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698762
It's entirely possible Reddit ToS has a general rule of not inciting violence, which that comment likely violated, and could be completely unrelated to who you were talking about.
I wouldn't want to see that comment on this site either.
Also Hamas must be destroyed.