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> 48 hours will not even ding reddit. I don't think the direct losses of the 48 outage will be what matters here. Rumors are that Reddit wants to IPO later th

by Aaargh20318 3y ago

> 48 hours will not even ding reddit. I don't think the direct losses of the 48 outage will be what matters here. Rumors are that Reddit wants to IPO later this year. This blackout will put the spotlight on two issues: - Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community, especially the moderators who provide an essential service for free. - Reddit is out of touch with its own community, and keeps pissing off the very people their existence depends upon. If I were planning to invest in Reddit, this would make me think twice.

jacquesm 3y ago
Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business. This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community you don't actually own the community.
- feyes 3y ago
  People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.
  - izzydata 3y ago
    This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.
    - hipposec 3y ago
      I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point. So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving). Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".
        worrycue 3y ago
        I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Much already has, and it's very sad, as Discord creates an entirely different "feel" for a community, and is not visible to the Internet at large.
        kbenson 3y ago
        There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login. Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).
  - digging 3y ago
    While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account. Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.
  - CrazyStat 3y ago
    We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over. It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.
    - hombre_fatal 3y ago
      I was so bitter about the experience that I wrote a script that crawled the top 10000 subreddits looking for possible takeovers, and my friend and I took over a few dozen lucrative subreddits*. Think generic words like r/skateboarding (not one of them). Just add a spammy automoderator account to your modlist so it can't get taken back over. It goes by the "last activity" timestamp of your creator/modlist, so even if you are actively moderating your subreddit (like attending to the mod queue), your subreddit can still get taken over if you aren't posting. The system is so, so stupid. * If you search the takeover requests subreddit you could even see that we weren't even stealing the subreddit from the original owners who did all the work to grow the subreddit, but rather from other takeover bots.
Ma8ee 3y ago
And the loyalty to the platform itself low. There are other ones, and Reddit should remember the great Digg Exodus.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.
  - insickness 3y ago
    Digg users went to Reddit, a viable alternative. There's nowhere for Reddit users to exodus to.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      That's true, and puts reddit in an even more powerful position. If those mods were anywhere near serious about this they should just roll their own reddit and attempt to migrate their communities. I'm pretty sure that would elicit an immediate response from reddit but that would be a much harder fire to put out than this one.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      Until someone starts one … heck you are looking at one right now; specialised but it works in more or less the same way (with more restrictions on downvoting).
    - cjs_ac 3y ago
      Redditors have many alternatives, which is the real problem: the communities will fracture as they find new homes.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
stingraycharles 3y ago
> Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community Are they? Assuming they all go dark for 48 hours, then come back online, and business continues as usual... wouldn't that somewhat prove that Reddit doesn't have to worry too much? What if certain subreddits go dark for extended amounts of times, multiple weeks, maybe even a month. And then new copycat subreddits pop up, what do you think will happen? Reddit will be fine, the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know, it's the powerusers and moderators that care a lot. (FWIW, I absolutely think the protests are justified and Reddit's pricing is insane, but I'm cynical and don't see them being affected by this all that much)
- worrycue 3y ago
  I wonder how all the various subreddits will work without their moderators. If moderators stop doing their jobs I have a feeling many subreddits will devolve into chaos - spam, off topic posts, crazy people posting the most vile and repulsive shit, … etc.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Worth reading the long thread https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1587588321777451008 https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1587588321777451008 If they enable the subreddits without moderation, they'll die very soon. They really need moderation and users often don't realise how much crap they're protected from until it's too late.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I suspect that would be a far more effective protest, though if successful it may well kill the subreddits. The mods are trying to have their cake and eat it too: make a 'principled stance' without risk to their subreddits. That won't work.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    So... it'll become Twitter?
- 3y ago
plagiarist 3y ago
Showing off mods who will continue working after mild token protests in the post-IPO ad-infested trash hole the site becomes against users' wishes is a great signal for short term gain.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Lmao, maybe certain groups of people can boycott stuff, but human beings in general sure can't. I'm pretty sure the average/more casual Reddit user either: doesn't use 3rd party apps, or doesn't care and will just use the official one. It's Twitter all over again "omg everyone will leave it now that Elon's in charge". Yeah, that hasn't happened. At. All. Now, knowing how us fleshy meatbags work, you're probably thinking I'm in favour of Reddit/Twitter/Elon or whatever. That is not the case. All I'm doing is reiterating that humans gonna human and that no meaningful change will come from a few hardcore users when the average user couldn't give a shit.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  While you're not wrong, I think it's that certain group of people that matters. They're the most engaged, and if you think that group follows the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule then that's really all that matters, since they're the ones creating the content that the lurkers consume and go to the network for.
comprev 3y ago
It's not about length of time but a show of how much support the communities have for each other. 48 subreddits going dark for 1 day is more of a statement than 1 going dark for 48 days. The mods know many people rely on their communities for a multitude of reasons - mental health support, technical support, mentoring, etc.

jacquesm 3y ago

Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business. This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community you don't actually own the community.

feyes 3y ago
People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.
- izzydata 3y ago
  This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.
  - hipposec 3y ago
    I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point. So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving). Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".
      - worrycue 3y ago
        I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Much already has, and it's very sad, as Discord creates an entirely different "feel" for a community, and is not visible to the Internet at large.
      - kbenson 3y ago
        There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login. Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).
- digging 3y ago
  While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account. Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over. It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    I was so bitter about the experience that I wrote a script that crawled the top 10000 subreddits looking for possible takeovers, and my friend and I took over a few dozen lucrative subreddits*. Think generic words like r/skateboarding (not one of them). Just add a spammy automoderator account to your modlist so it can't get taken back over. It goes by the "last activity" timestamp of your creator/modlist, so even if you are actively moderating your subreddit (like attending to the mod queue), your subreddit can still get taken over if you aren't posting. The system is so, so stupid. * If you search the takeover requests subreddit you could even see that we weren't even stealing the subreddit from the original owners who did all the work to grow the subreddit, but rather from other takeover bots.

Ma8ee 3y ago

And the loyalty to the platform itself low. There are other ones, and Reddit should remember the great Digg Exodus.

jacquesm 3y ago
That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.
- insickness 3y ago
  Digg users went to Reddit, a viable alternative. There's nowhere for Reddit users to exodus to.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    That's true, and puts reddit in an even more powerful position. If those mods were anywhere near serious about this they should just roll their own reddit and attempt to migrate their communities. I'm pretty sure that would elicit an immediate response from reddit but that would be a much harder fire to put out than this one.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    Until someone starts one … heck you are looking at one right now; specialised but it works in more or less the same way (with more restrictions on downvoting).
  - cjs_ac 3y ago
    Redditors have many alternatives, which is the real problem: the communities will fracture as they find new homes.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

stingraycharles 3y ago

> Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community Are they? Assuming they all go dark for 48 hours, then come back online, and business continues as usual... wouldn't that somewhat prove that Reddit doesn't have to worry too much? What if certain subreddits go dark for extended amounts of times, multiple weeks, maybe even a month. And then new copycat subreddits pop up, what do you think will happen? Reddit will be fine, the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know, it's the powerusers and moderators that care a lot. (FWIW, I absolutely think the protests are justified and Reddit's pricing is insane, but I'm cynical and don't see them being affected by this all that much)

worrycue 3y ago
I wonder how all the various subreddits will work without their moderators. If moderators stop doing their jobs I have a feeling many subreddits will devolve into chaos - spam, off topic posts, crazy people posting the most vile and repulsive shit, … etc.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Worth reading the long thread https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1587588321777451008 https://twitter.com/SA__moment/status/1587588321777451008 If they enable the subreddits without moderation, they'll die very soon. They really need moderation and users often don't realise how much crap they're protected from until it's too late.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I suspect that would be a far more effective protest, though if successful it may well kill the subreddits. The mods are trying to have their cake and eat it too: make a 'principled stance' without risk to their subreddits. That won't work.
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  So... it'll become Twitter?
3y ago

plagiarist 3y ago

Showing off mods who will continue working after mild token protests in the post-IPO ad-infested trash hole the site becomes against users' wishes is a great signal for short term gain.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Lmao, maybe certain groups of people can boycott stuff, but human beings in general sure can't. I'm pretty sure the average/more casual Reddit user either: doesn't use 3rd party apps, or doesn't care and will just use the official one. It's Twitter all over again "omg everyone will leave it now that Elon's in charge". Yeah, that hasn't happened. At. All. Now, knowing how us fleshy meatbags work, you're probably thinking I'm in favour of Reddit/Twitter/Elon or whatever. That is not the case. All I'm doing is reiterating that humans gonna human and that no meaningful change will come from a few hardcore users when the average user couldn't give a shit.

rjbwork 3y ago
While you're not wrong, I think it's that certain group of people that matters. They're the most engaged, and if you think that group follows the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule then that's really all that matters, since they're the ones creating the content that the lurkers consume and go to the network for.

comprev 3y ago

It's not about length of time but a show of how much support the communities have for each other. 48 subreddits going dark for 1 day is more of a statement than 1 going dark for 48 days. The mods know many people rely on their communities for a multitude of reasons - mental health support, technical support, mentoring, etc.