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I’m just annoyed the local community group I primarily use Reddit for is dark. I don’t see why this helps anyone. Reddit is a private company, go someplace else

I’m just annoyed the local community group I primarily use Reddit for is dark. I don’t see why this helps anyone. Reddit is a private company, go someplace else. I think 99% of users don’t care, or don’t care enough to do anything substantial. Just move on.

over_bridge 3y ago
This point has been discussed to death already. Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest. The majority of users just passively absorb the work of the few.
- theossuary 3y ago
  Not to mention most all subreddits had votes beforehand that were overwhelming in favor of going private or read only. This isn't a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down. This is akin to a union holding a vote and overwhelmingly deciding to strike.
  - goykasi 3y ago
    But do we actually know that it isnt a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down? From all of these threads about reddit recently there is a lot speculatively statements pointing to heavy support of this boycott. But there is never proof provided to support these statements when requested. What percentage of users actually voted in the polls? If its not a significant portion of the sub-reddit population, was the poll even valid? But a sub-reddit may have still taken action: "90% voted yes... but less than 5% voted" hmm? I personally dont like the official apps or new.reddit, but I think Im part of the minority. It wouldnt surprise me to find out that most users dont actually care about the API price increase, because they use the default homepage and mobile apps. In that case, this boycott would actually be creating a degraded experience for them and negatively impacting their opinions of the moderators that are complaining and making polls to shut it down.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  I really wonder how most people even conceive as what goes into community moderation? Personally I’ve always thought anybody who would do the amount of free labor Reddit mods do is a stone cold fool - precisely because it is so time consuming and the monetary value is all captured by EvilCorp.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  > Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest. Sooooo why would I care that a small number of Reddit users are complaining?
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Because Reddit as you use it every day wouldn’t exist without them.
  - redsaber 3y ago
    it keep Reddit usable by deleting the spam you will likely to see. But not only mods are going to be affected. If you are going to build a bot on Reddit you have now to think twice with the increase pricing cost
  - vSanjo 3y ago
    You missed the point here entirely. The work those few do help people like you in ways you might not completely fathom. Reddit doesn't auto-regulate itself as much as we think. It's hard work but a small percentage of people who are paid nothing, and use 3rd-party tools to work best.
- thr_low_latency 3y ago
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  - lokar 3y ago
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    - thr_low_latency 3y ago
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  - joshstrange 3y ago
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    - thr_low_latency 3y ago
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JshWright 3y ago
A subreddit is a group of private individuals, go someplace else. Just move on.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Reddit is a private company that runs on the donated labor of thousands of people doing moderation and policing. 99% of users rely on that labor. And it isn't a given some other forums will rise to the same level. This dumb trope of "economics will ensure an equivalent product will appear" is a laissez faire fantasy.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  I moved from Twitter to BlueSky and am much happier. Mastodon wasn’t for me. When I log into Twitter now it’s just to see how bad it’s gotten and I log out. I’m sure it will be similar for Reddit - no clear “winner” at first, but the start of a gradual and irreversible decline for the incumbent.
  - ktosobcy 3y ago
    Pity it's still closed for now. To my understanding, it would be distributed and virtually independnet from central provider. It would be nice to have something like that for "communities" (slightly different from microblogging or chat/discord)... lemmy seems nice but it's somewhat akin to mastodon where each server is kinda isolated and while you can now federate, searching for communities across the fediverse is not the best experience yet...
  - dumpsterlid 3y ago
    [dead]
Conscat 3y ago
At a certain point, some "private company" must be so important that it becomes an essential service. Maybe Reddit isn't at that point yet, but that you're frustrated it's gone suggests that it is important. If an essential service is privatized, then its owners have a huge amount of leverage over how we live our lives and how we engage with technology. For instance, Apple tries to prohibit apps not on the App Store from being used by iPhone owners, who constitute 20% of smartphone users world-wide. That's 50% for specifically the USA. What if that number was 100%? What if all decent GPS programs only worked on iOS? Could we simply stop using iPhones? At that point it might be too late to protest. Imo, the time to protest is before a company has this reach. Maybe Reddit isn't that big of a deal. They don't own 100% of all Internet discourse. But I think Reddit matters a good deal, since C++ language evolution is influenced significantly by Reddit conversations (yes, actually). But either way, the argument that Reddit should have total leeway doesn't generalize.
- sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [dead]
- jerf 3y ago
  It isn't even close to being so important that it's an essential service, because it is 100% replaceable. It has no technical moat. The only moat it has is the network effect and that can turn on them, as it may very well be in the process of doing. In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ... Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do. As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.
ktosobcy 3y ago
So, to follow your advice: go somewhere and find another local group, noone is preventing you from...
ikiris 3y ago
If you don’t like it, you’re free to go somewhere else as you rightly point out.
HWR_14 3y ago
They are moving on. The mods who built the community are leaving, and inviting you to, as you put it, go someplace else.

over_bridge 3y ago

This point has been discussed to death already. Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest. The majority of users just passively absorb the work of the few.

theossuary 3y ago
Not to mention most all subreddits had votes beforehand that were overwhelming in favor of going private or read only. This isn't a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down. This is akin to a union holding a vote and overwhelmingly deciding to strike.
- goykasi 3y ago
  But do we actually know that it isnt a small group unilaterally deciding to take reddit down? From all of these threads about reddit recently there is a lot speculatively statements pointing to heavy support of this boycott. But there is never proof provided to support these statements when requested. What percentage of users actually voted in the polls? If its not a significant portion of the sub-reddit population, was the poll even valid? But a sub-reddit may have still taken action: "90% voted yes... but less than 5% voted" hmm? I personally dont like the official apps or new.reddit, but I think Im part of the minority. It wouldnt surprise me to find out that most users dont actually care about the API price increase, because they use the default homepage and mobile apps. In that case, this boycott would actually be creating a degraded experience for them and negatively impacting their opinions of the moderators that are complaining and making polls to shut it down.
TX81Z 3y ago
I really wonder how most people even conceive as what goes into community moderation? Personally I’ve always thought anybody who would do the amount of free labor Reddit mods do is a stone cold fool - precisely because it is so time consuming and the monetary value is all captured by EvilCorp.
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
> Reddit is extremely reliant on a small percentage of users who moderate and post content. Those are the ones being impacted and complaining the loudest. Sooooo why would I care that a small number of Reddit users are complaining?
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Because Reddit as you use it every day wouldn’t exist without them.
- redsaber 3y ago
  it keep Reddit usable by deleting the spam you will likely to see. But not only mods are going to be affected. If you are going to build a bot on Reddit you have now to think twice with the increase pricing cost
- vSanjo 3y ago
  You missed the point here entirely. The work those few do help people like you in ways you might not completely fathom. Reddit doesn't auto-regulate itself as much as we think. It's hard work but a small percentage of people who are paid nothing, and use 3rd-party tools to work best.
thr_low_latency 3y ago
[flagged]
- lokar 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - thr_low_latency 3y ago
    [flagged]
- joshstrange 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - thr_low_latency 3y ago
    [flagged]

JshWright 3y ago

A subreddit is a group of private individuals, go someplace else. Just move on.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

Reddit is a private company that runs on the donated labor of thousands of people doing moderation and policing. 99% of users rely on that labor. And it isn't a given some other forums will rise to the same level. This dumb trope of "economics will ensure an equivalent product will appear" is a laissez faire fantasy.

TX81Z 3y ago
I moved from Twitter to BlueSky and am much happier. Mastodon wasn’t for me. When I log into Twitter now it’s just to see how bad it’s gotten and I log out. I’m sure it will be similar for Reddit - no clear “winner” at first, but the start of a gradual and irreversible decline for the incumbent.
- ktosobcy 3y ago
  Pity it's still closed for now. To my understanding, it would be distributed and virtually independnet from central provider. It would be nice to have something like that for "communities" (slightly different from microblogging or chat/discord)... lemmy seems nice but it's somewhat akin to mastodon where each server is kinda isolated and while you can now federate, searching for communities across the fediverse is not the best experience yet...
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  [dead]

Conscat 3y ago

At a certain point, some "private company" must be so important that it becomes an essential service. Maybe Reddit isn't at that point yet, but that you're frustrated it's gone suggests that it is important. If an essential service is privatized, then its owners have a huge amount of leverage over how we live our lives and how we engage with technology. For instance, Apple tries to prohibit apps not on the App Store from being used by iPhone owners, who constitute 20% of smartphone users world-wide. That's 50% for specifically the USA. What if that number was 100%? What if all decent GPS programs only worked on iOS? Could we simply stop using iPhones? At that point it might be too late to protest. Imo, the time to protest is before a company has this reach. Maybe Reddit isn't that big of a deal. They don't own 100% of all Internet discourse. But I think Reddit matters a good deal, since C++ language evolution is influenced significantly by Reddit conversations (yes, actually). But either way, the argument that Reddit should have total leeway doesn't generalize.

sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
jerf 3y ago
It isn't even close to being so important that it's an essential service, because it is 100% replaceable. It has no technical moat. The only moat it has is the network effect and that can turn on them, as it may very well be in the process of doing. In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporative-cooling-effect-in-social-network/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ... Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do. As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.

ktosobcy 3y ago

So, to follow your advice: go somewhere and find another local group, noone is preventing you from...

ikiris 3y ago

If you don’t like it, you’re free to go somewhere else as you rightly point out.

HWR_14 3y ago

They are moving on. The mods who built the community are leaving, and inviting you to, as you put it, go someplace else.