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Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

• flutas 3y ago
  Ah, the rare triple down. Funnily enough, the whole thing was posted because a mod of a dead-ish sub (last post was a week ago, 9 posts including one about shutting down in the last month) was complaining that it was "clearly harming the community."
• voisin 3y ago
  Remove them all the way to Lemmy.
• donutshop 3y ago
  What's the end game here for reddit? There's no way this would end well.
  • iguana_lawyer 3y ago
    Why does it need to end well?
    • accoil 3y ago
      I don't think that was a preference. I read it more as a statement about how Reddit's actions seem to be going against their own interest, and their motives are unknown....
  • clnq 3y ago
    What do you mean? How can this end poorly? Most people browsing Reddit are addicted with no viable substitutes. Breaking their addiction through continued blackouts would end badly. Replacing some mods no user cares about will hardly have an impact. Lets be realistic.
    • spondylosaurus 3y ago
      Replacing these volunteer moderators with paid moderators is obviously not in the cards, which can only mean Reddit wants to replace these volunteer moderators with other volunteer moderators. Assuming anyone volunteers in the first place. Given that moderation is a thankless (and, in this case, unpaid) job, do you really think that many people with good intentions are stepping forward to take on that responsibility? Or is Reddit accidentally gonna recruit a bunch of trolls who turn r/apple into a hentai and piracy forum?
      • ClassyJacket 3y ago
        Yes. Yes I do think people will volunteer. There's never been a shortage of mods, in fact reddit has been way over-moderated for about 5 years now. I don't see why there would suddenly be a shortage now. People love having power.
      • rlex 3y ago
        >Given that moderation is a thankless (and, in this case, unpaid) job And a shit one, too. Years ago when i was moderating "not too big, not too small" subreddit about certain game, i was routinely receiving death threats and stuff like that for deleted comments, bans and etc.
    • Legend2440 3y ago
      Social media sites can and do die. Myspace and Friendster died. Digg and StumbleUpon died. Tumblr is looking pretty ghostly. If it's true that reddit isn't profitable, that itself could spell the end of the site. That's a bad sign for a site as old as reddit.
    • tiffanyg 3y ago
      Yes, let's be realistic. Most people browsing reddit are not addicted. This isn't 2013. The site is massive, and, the most important users aren't just random "terminally online" people. Continuing to antagonize a key "constituency" in what makes the platform so incredibly valuable is a TERRIBLE strategy. Even replacing mods of small / unimportant (alone) subreddits is not a good idea (right now). That said, I do think Reddit Inc. can solve this without having to "give" too much ... in fact, I think Reddit Inc. could come out BETTER off if they go about this the right way. Fundamentally, that way is relatively simple and should be easier for them, as well - basically, showing communities, mods, etc. some basic respect. No more dissembling, no more misleading / outright incorrect communication, no more "royal edict" tone in decisions - and, ideally, just the most basic overtures to involving 3rd parties that have HELPED the platform grow and thrive (regardless of whether they've benefitted directly financially or not) ... some basic cleanup of PR and decision-making processes would be very helpful for all. Hell, even a simple apology for some of what has happened - no one needs to be "wrong" for that to be the case. And, I don't think there is any particular person or party that is right or wrong, here. Just terrible communications and decisions, probably "distributed", realistically. If not, the platform likely isn't going off a cliff, but it'll be a shell of its former self and likely enter a classic decline a la LiveJournal, Tumblr, etc. This may be likely in any case, but they hardly need to guarantee it before they've even IPO'ed.
  • secondcoming 3y ago
    I honestly don't think this will affect reddit that much. I find the whole thing quite annoying, to be honest, and I imagine I'm not alone. Unhappy mods are free to leave, there's no need to pull the rug from under everyone else who doesn't care. I don't need yet another thing to log in to. I'll only stop using reddit if they get rid of old.reddit.com.
    • Levitz 3y ago
      >Unhappy mods are free to leave, there's no need to pull the rug from under everyone else who doesn't care. You are assuming that Reddit mods are mentally sound, unbiased volunteers who do it to improve the world. That's simply not the case for a great deal of them. There is a LOT of agenda pushing, a LOT of powertripping and a LOT of mental illness at work. If that wasn't the case the blackout would have been completely site-wide without a time estimate.
    • pokerface_86 3y ago
      [dead]
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    What would be a "not well ending"? This is like a farmer's livestock protesting. At best when the hogs are marching around with their picket signs it's irritating. Most of the time it's just comical. By the end of the week, they'll still be pork chops. The last 10 years of reddit history has been the mods teaching everyone that they're not special and no one will miss them. Now that the admins have turned around and say that the same rule still applies to the mods and even "everyone as a whole"... people are shaking they're heads and whining "no, you're wrong, we are important". But the reddit IPO will go through, spez will be a billionaire, and a bunch of strangers will be moderating that subreddit you thought was so awesome. Which will be full of cat pictures and facebook memes, and the comments will be five thousand deep nested reply chains of bad pop culture jokes.
  • satellites 3y ago
    1. Replace the protesting mods with new ones who don’t care about 3rd party apps 2. Continue making Reddit more addictive and user-hostile, attracting casual browsers and alienating super users (who they don’t care about anyway) 3. Cash checks from advertisers and VCs who like the new strategy 4. IPO 5. Eventually lose relevance and get replaced by the next fledgling community forum site before that, too, gets hollowed out by VC money
    • heatmiser 3y ago
      > Replace the protesting mods with new ones who don’t care about 3rd party apps Until those mods run headlong into the garbage tooling that makes moderating a reasonably active subreddit unmanageable.
  • FormerBandmate 3y ago
    They remove the moderators and replace them with different moderator, then hope that people don’t care and stay on the site like what happened with Twitter. It could happen, the main Reddit alternatives seem to be actively trying to keep most users out of the site with archaic interfaces and site owner/moderator drama
  • bombcar 3y ago
    Some small percentage of Reddit mods and users quit in disgust, some come back, and the rest of the normies hang around until it inevitably dies post-IPO.
  • verhaust 3y ago
    My guess has been that Huffman is just following Musk. My further guess is that he has actually either seeked or been given unsolicited advice from Musk about standing firm. Despite all the whining and complaints about Musk's handling of Twitter, the masses still use it. I see Twitter links on most sites I go to. Huffman thinks reddit is too big for a loud minority to shout down and he is probably correct. Reddit will become a pariah for some, but still used by the masses and Huffman and his investors will get their money. I'm on the side of the strikers and don't personally plan to use reddit daily anymore, but I view that as my personal stance and don't think it will have an effect on anything. I'm OK with that.
    • Enginerrrd 3y ago
      I find comparing the two to be a deep insult to Musk.
      • protocolture 3y ago
        Good?
  • than3 3y ago
    These things are fairly simple to game out, I've got some money on reddit surviving but not without taking damage. That being said, I don't agree with it, but as people are well aware there is no good alternative. The game-plan as I've found, (dons being Reddit mask, and I'm not associated with them in any way). Was always, we own this data (not the community) we bought this when we bought out the founders in 2015/2016, we need to monetize it before interest rates cause an IPO to evaporate, we're going to do this no matter what. We don't want people being able to delete their content (Shredder App), and we can charge for access to this valuable corpus data, and we have all the control because we control the infrastructure. That's where they are coming from. Now, If you look at which protests were successful in history, and which protests were not, you see that it really comes down to whether at the end of the day the authority making the decisions is responsive to the people demanding change. Reddit has never been responsive in any of their actions towards external non-employees requesting changes. They've only ever provided illusory promises, or things they were already going to do (but didn't announce), and they had to fake the first communities until they could get enough people interested. So, they'll let the protest occur for two days because it was planned, and if you crush it you look bad, and you can just ignore it because it doesn't affect the bottom line, people will grow tired and if it lasts longer they would have an automated way to replace the mods. People will whine in their corners when that happens, and the people that didn't see what was happening, or didn't have an easy alternative will go back to their habits using reddit and supporting their overall decisions mindlessly because its habit. Click-whirr, fixed action pattern, no change happens. Its repeated over and over and over. From what I've seen, None of the mods actually gamed out how this would go down and took pre-emptive measures to have a fallback and move their communities off the hostile platform. Some are scrambling to get Lemmy to do that, but Lemmy has been tested by who? I hadn't even heard of it until earlier this week so I doubt its a big project, let alone one that can scale to tens of thousands or above.
  • blibble 3y ago
    back out the changes, bring them back in 6 months at a much lower price then slowly increase the price
    • 9991 3y ago
      Apparently they must IPO this year. I think that's the underlying reason for all of the running round like a headless chicken.
  • ArlenBales 3y ago
    Invest in LLM and have AI moderate their subreddits.
    • tester457 3y ago
      As soon as users discover prompt injection those investments go up in flames.
  • meepmorp 3y ago
    The endgame is an IPO and payout, then who fucking cares about reddit.
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  Sounds good, they should ban the moderators that are ruining the communities.
  • liquidise 3y ago
    This strikes me as a fair impression, as someone who doesn't really have a horse in this race. The job of moderators is ostensibly to foster communication and limit abuse within their subreddits. While i understand the motive of these protests, they appear to run counter to the moderator responsibilities?
    • Levitz 3y ago
      Didn't see Reddit taking action when many subs went private to protest in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
• gareth_untether 3y ago
  Another day and another nail in another awesome online community that has terrible leadership. Where will the communities move to? What new areas of the Internet will be created?
  • i_like_apis 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • no1groyp 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        If the current unpaid mods are in it for the wrong reasons then the new unpaid scab mods they find to replace them will definitely be in it for the wrong reasons.
        • no1groyp 3y ago
          C’est la vie
    • hluska 3y ago
      Neckbeards? You sound pleasant.
    • IntelMiner 3y ago
      The "minority of whining idiots" are the ones who run reddit with their free labor The "minority of whining idiots" are the ones who developed 3rd party moderation tools because Reddit refused to The "minority of whining idiots" are the ones who run subreddits without pay The "minority of whining idiots" are the ones saying that disabled users can't access the site anymore because of these changes Reddit's entire existence is built on user submission of content and curation of that content as unpaid labor by users and mods
• ardit33 3y ago
  Sorry... but this was handled very poorly by reddit and its CEO. Should have just disabled the 'go private' option. A subreddit, is not 'owned' or property of a moderator. Eg, https://www.reddit.com/r/Brooklyn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Brooklyn/, should not be own by one person that decides what to do. The questions and answers are made by common people that want to see their content that they posted into the subreddit. They are not property of some anonymous mod/editor but belong to the community. As a user of reddit, my relationship is with reddit and not some primadona mod who decides to deprive the community out of vital information. I have contributed to many subreddit, and the mods never asked for permission form the contributors if they actually wanted to go dark. They don't own the content, and reddit needs to act.
  • nikau 3y ago
    In that case reddit should pay for a moderating team vs volunteers.
    • ardit33 3y ago
      true... or just get new moderators in that are ok with keeping the site without turning it into private/blocking access to everyone else. No one likes personal fiefdoms, and the mods are acting like local warlords. This is just bad management from reddit.
      • protocolture 3y ago
        Well thats the crux of the issue, reddit mods find third party apps improve their ability to perform their free labor. Theres no expectation that new mods would find the core reddit experience better. Current mods can protest even after their removal by mass reporting posts on their former subs, causing the new mods to engage with the poor moderation experience on the core app.
  • jadamson 3y ago
    If the mods couldn't make the subreddits private, the protest would then have meant they stop moderating but the subreddits remain open. I'm not sure that would have looked pretty, and it would have taken time for Reddit to go through each sub and appoint new mods. Would have been less boring though.
• yk 3y ago
  Thing is, I am much more loyal to the mods of my favorite subs, then I'm to reddit. And my guess is, that is the case with a lot of the power users.
  • throwaway1777 3y ago
    There’s no way that’s common. I can’t name a single moderator or a single subreddit and I use the site every day for years.
    • yk 3y ago
      No idea if it is common, but for two or three communities the community threads became rather more interesting than the rest of the sub, so there I actually know some of the mods.
  • unclekev 3y ago
    9 out of 10 days most Reddit mods are considered the scum of the earth, it's a literal meme at this point how bad a lot of them are. They are the heroes this week because it fits their narrative. Censorship, power-tripping, running subs with a iron fist, etc Nobody knows or cares who they are. As much as they'd like to think they are, the mods are not the community. The community is the people. The people are not there for the mods.
    • ulrashida 3y ago
      Sounds like you may need to find some different subs to participate in. Majority of experiences with mods in mine have been between very okay and positive.
      • mvdtnz 3y ago
        He's right though.
      • SkyPuncher 3y ago
        I’ve literally never had a bad feeling towards any mods. The only ones that seem to have negative sentiment are those running massive subreddits (which come with insane challenges).
• rychco 3y ago
  One thing that I was unaware of, that seems even more dire than the api pricing changes, is that Reddit apparently intends to IPO in the near (< 1 year) future. This signals to me that the service is guaranteed to steadily worsen until it's unrecognizable & forced into (deserved) irrelevance.
  • tumaru 3y ago
    Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone please explain what this reply means? It isn't the first time I've seen "* * *" and I'm wondering what it's significance is?
    • tumaru 3y ago
      Odd, maybe it's a quirk of the harmonic app, as I can see a normal comment now. Please ignore my previous reply.
      • TechBro8615 3y ago
        I believe @dang has addressed this before. You see it when someone has configured a "delay" (see the input field at the bottom of your settings page [0]) which is an integer value representing the number of minutes before which your comment is "published" (visible to other users) - it's meant to be a short window of time where you can edit your comment before anyone has seen it. Once the delay has expired, other users will see the comment. I've personally never observed it, but I use the HN website, which I think just doesn't render the comment during the delay period. IIRC, you'll see the asterisks when viewing comments in alternative clients that fetch them from the API. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user https://news.ycombinator.com/user
        • tumaru 3y ago
          Thank you very much for the explanation, that makes sense.
    • ClassyJacket 3y ago
• wilg 3y ago
  The only way this is fair is if they just end private subreddits entirely. Otherwise the rationale is very thin.
  • magpi3 3y ago
    Or make people pay money for private subreddits. That would be a pretty clever troll at this point.
• Havoc 3y ago
  Ah the classic beatings will continue until morale improves approach. Starting to think Reddit leadership is genuinely not all that sharp
  • CincinnatiMan 3y ago
    There are likely hundreds if not thousands of users who would be willing to become mods of each of the subreddits that are still in private mode. I know I would mod some of the subs I find useful.
    • EA-3167 3y ago
      How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse? What's the ratio of the former to the latter, and does Reddit have the manpower to tell to the difference on a time frame that keeps the subs alive? What's the impact of a bunch of people who know how the sausage is made being essentially coup'ed by Reddit? Are they going to shrug and move on? Swear eternal vengeance?
      • George83728 3y ago
        > How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse? Same way Reddit admins have always done that; by ignoring all but the most egregious violations.
      • Karellen 3y ago
        > a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, I think it's probably worth splitting this category into two, with one of them being the kind of user who would like to help keep a sub running, but has no idea of what's actually involved or how much time it takes or what a grind it is, and just isn't a good fit for the work involved.
      • basch 3y ago
        They already are fiefdoms
• Fauntleroy 3y ago
  The argument for leaving Reddit for good improves daily.
• k2xl 3y ago
  For someone kind of out of the loop, can someone explain what they think reddit should do instead of charging for their API access? After all Reddit is a business right? What alternatives do users want reddit to do instead?
  • Fauntleroy 3y ago
    If they're going to charge for it, they should at the very least charge a reasonable price. They are not doing that, and are thus essentially extorting third party apps (who will not be able to pay the exorbitant fees).
  • danboy4 3y ago
    Charge a reasonable amount instead of intentionally pricing third party apps out of business. Alternatively, make their official app as useful as the competition.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • reso 3y ago
    Reddit has entirely failed at building their ad business, which every other major social site has done successfully. Reddit makes 1$ per user-month on ads, while Instagram makes $35. If they could even get to $2, they would be profitable. The API access issue is largely a side-show to this core problem. The challenge for this is that targeting on reddit is harder than other sites which have lengthy profiles and interaction statistics they can use to do targeting. An elegant solution to this problem would likely involve some product tweaks to incentivize users to tell reddit more about themselves, and a refocus on ad sales. Neither of these seem impossible to me.
    • Legend2440 3y ago
      Also reddit users hate ads and widely promote adblock.
    • lazycouchpotato 3y ago
      > An elegant solution to this problem would likely involve some product tweaks to incentivize users to tell reddit more about themselves, and a refocus on ad sales. How much more information do they need? They already take all that info [1]. I'm pretty sure 99% of the official app users did not turn these settings off. [1] https://i.imgur.com/VpWlCnO.png https://i.imgur.com/VpWlCnO.png
• Yujf 3y ago
  I still won't entirely understand where Appolo's 20Million figure comes from. As far as I understand all the outrage is because of what the Appolo dev published, but reddit seems to claim that even for third party apps they get 100 queries per minute per user which seems like it would be enough? Whay is Appolo doing that this is not enough or what am i misunderstanding about 100 queries per Oauth client?
  • chabad360 3y ago
    OAuth client means the Apollo app, not the individual user.
  • rbera 3y ago
    It’s not 100 queries per user, it’s per client id where the client id refers to the app as a whole. Effectively they changed this from the old limits where it was per user. See https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/_/jnk7rfg/?context=1 https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/_/jnk7rfg/?...
    • Yujf 3y ago
      Ah I see. Thanks for the link that clears everything up.
  • flutas 3y ago
    Old API was 60 queries per user, per client. New API is 100 queries, per client flat. So if Apollo had 100,000 users (as an example) they had 60 API calls for each of those users (6,000,000 / 10 minutes), now they have 100 per 10 minutes for all of those users total.
  • frisbeemaniac95 3y ago
    The cost is $0.24 per 1000 api calls. At Apollo's scale this works out to $20 mil per year. https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
• wkdneidbwf 3y ago
  oh man, this is the thing i anticipated and the thing that will continue to isolate users
• charcircuit 3y ago
  >If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. Most moderators haven't decided they want to stop moderating. Privating a subreddit is completely separate from the desire to moderate.
• satvikpendem 3y ago
  > If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made. If the majority of your userbase likes sub X and some mods (fewer than 10 for such a sub) want to shut it down, then of course Reddit would open it back up. People here on HN and Reddit decrying this as the end of Reddit likely don't remember all of the controversies of Reddit over the past 17 years since it's been active. Hell, most of the current userbase came in after the most recent blackout in 2015 due to Ellen Pao firing Victoria. This has all happened before, with no effect to Reddit, indeed, much the opposite, seeing their user growth numbers.
  • ddtaylor 3y ago
    Mods have always been told that subreddits are their spaces to operate and that as long as they're not breaking any of the site-wide rules, they are free to do whatever they wish. This is a violation of that trust.
    • satvikpendem 3y ago
      How can anyone sincerely believe that being a user, even a mod, on another platform by a corporate entity lets them have their own space? I mean, of course the company owns everything one does or publishes on said platform. There is no trust because the premise is faulty in the first place. The fact that people actually believed that is not really the problem of the platform, there is always inherent platform risk.
      • throwaway25190 3y ago
        So maybe it's naive to think reddit wouldn't just seize control regardless of the "rules" (although I've seen plenty of posts from mods that mention this possibility). But that's not relevant to the question which is whether or not the moderators are moderating - as reddit is still using the rules as a pretense. I say to the mods, make it an easy answer, re-open the subs and remove every post that isn't a copy-paste of a stickied statement, something like that. Make them admit the rules were a convenient excuse for something they'd do anyway.
• irrational 3y ago
  I used shreddit to delete all of my comments a few days ago. I was shocked to discover today that they are all back. I'm deleting all of them again, but clearly Reddit is doing things on the back end. I've also read of people having their unsubs reversed.
  • boomboomsubban 3y ago
    When a subreddit is private, I don't think you have access to your comments to delete them. So depending on your timing it may have been unintentional.
    • irrational 3y ago
      I had many comments in non private subreddits (subs that never went private) that were deleted and then came back.
• concinds 3y ago
  The dishonesty continues. > if they are no longer interested in moderating that community They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies. > [if] at least one mod [...] wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    Doesn't seem dishonest to me. Reddit cares more about having an open subreddit then the mods do. This was the obvious conclusion
    • jjulius 3y ago
      GP already highlighted the dishonesty, it's here: > if they are no longer interested in moderating that community The mods, as GP stated, are interested in moderating that community, they just disagree with Reddit's changes. They wouldn't be taking the path of shuttering their subs in protest if they didn't give a damn. That is absolutely dishonesty on the part of Reddit.
      • xattt 3y ago
        The gaslighting of moderators’ intentions also mirrors the experience of Christian Zelig who was accused of holding the platform hostage.
      • ryanmerket 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • jjulius 3y ago
          Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.
• moskie 3y ago
  We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other... >Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      The anguish in that piece is visceral but the writing itself is beautiful.
  • mandmandam 3y ago
    Yes! And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run. Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.
    • vxNsr 3y ago
      At scale that’s relatively expensive though, $2.5x1billion is still 2.5 billion dollars. That money needs to come from somewhere…
      • epicureanideal 3y ago
        Membership fees. If we could get customers used to buying things again, $10/yr or $100/lifetime membership fees seems more than reasonable.
• juujian 3y ago
  Wow, they really did their research to come up with the worst possible responsive. First, declaring in response that they don't care and won't budge, then when that inevitably resulted in an extension of the blackout, threatening the mods, their mouse valuable resource. They must have consulted Musk to come up with this.
• javajosh 3y ago
  One gets the feeling that the Reddit leadership is "feeling themselves", and have lost sight of the fact that people can just walk away and suffer no ill consequences. In fact, it might even be in their psychological benefit to do so! Take a break, and maybe come back in a few months, a year, and see what distributed forums people have started. Sounds like a great thing for the internet, tbh. (I finally deleted my Twitter account early this year, and apart from massimo I don't miss it - and turns out he's mirrored on mastodon.)
  • Loughla 3y ago
    The break from reddit has really opened my eyes to what I'm afraid is a full blown smartphone/reddit/doom scrolling addiction. I wonder how many other oblivious people like me there are who are realizing the negative effects of reddit on their psyche.
    • Tildey 3y ago
      I’m far more addicted to scrolling on reddit than instagram. As good as modern social media algorithms are, my curated feed of niche interests and communities I’m a part of, is just a lot more addictive to me. The format of mostly text based content (even if it’s an image on reddit, I’m mostly there for the discussion below) is a lot easier to open and look at for a few seconds than the mostly-video instagram/TikTok feed.
• gdiamos 3y ago
  I’m just off Reddit at this point.
• mtc010170 3y ago
  Watch out folks - critical discussions about Reddit seem to be getting flagged as flame bait. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347400 Idk why. We should be able to have a civilized, intellectually curious discussion about this. The future of Reddit (and its implications for the future of the Internet) is pretty on-topic to me for HN. @dang can we get a stance on this?
  • tinus_hn 3y ago
    It’s quite possible that people are just flagging these stories because it’s not interesting enough to facilitate 20 discussions without it turning into threads with 500 comments rehashing the same arguments. Reddit might be a big deal to you but many people over here just don’t care and they don’t want to see topic after topic about a site they don’t care about. And it’s going to have the same impact on the ‘future of the internet’ as the demise of Digg. Not a whole lot really, sites come and go, in a year nobody cares. Remember MySpace?
    • tester457 3y ago
      In this more mature internet, a demise of reddit would be more impactful. "Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts" [1] Digg never had this influence, nor a decade plus of useful threads with information not found anywhere else. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36319392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36319392
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • Seattle3503 3y ago
      Reddit is a big deal to me, I moderate multiple subreddits with 6 figure subscriber counts, from a third party app. With that said, the discussion on HN is basically played out. There isn't a lot new to say.
  • silcoon 3y ago
    https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit
• ddtaylor 3y ago
  > but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. That's essentially forcing a tragedy of the commons game theory.
• r2vcap 3y ago
  I don't know why this is a problem. Moderators are intentionally "sabotaging" subreddits, and there are many who are against it. I also don't like Reddit's recent move, but moderators' powers are neither permanent nor innate.
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  Reddit would be right to remove these moderators. This protest does nothing for the users of Reddit. Why would they maintain a website of derelict communities when there's a clear and obvious alternative?
  • Avamander 3y ago
    Huh? The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not? The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate and keep their platform working. Give it to someone else willing? Good luck with that. Hand your house keys to a stranger, you're gonna love the new interior design.
    • mvdtnz 3y ago
      > The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate and keep their platform working. Sounds good.
    • George83728 3y ago
      > The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not? First off, different people have different opinions. Pointing out the apparent hypocrisy of loose groups of people with different opinions, different reasons for associating with each other, is just silly. Secondly, reddit and their users might need moderation, but that doesn't mean they need these particular mods. Reddit can take the subreddits from these mods, give them all the finger, and keep whatever users choose to say (which is probably most of them.) There will be no shortage of new mod volunteers. Many of them will be bad a the job, they can be weeded out over time just like usual. They don't have to pay mods, mods have no leverage to make such demands because there's a huge crowd of scabs willing to take the job and no labor organization laws cover unpaid mods.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• minhazm 3y ago
  Reddit has handled this pretty terribly but I also think people are being unreasonable. This is no different than me creating a third party YouTube client, charging for it and displaying no ads. Why would YouTube allow me to do that? And why should Reddit allow third party apps to do that? Reddit screwed up in the first place allowing third party apps that they have zero control over to build a full frontend replacement. They already have Reddit Premium, they should just say that you need Reddit Premium to use third party apps. The technical details would be pretty straight forward. If you look at the features of reddit premium the only one anyone cares about is ad-free browsing, which third party apps today get to give users for free. So reddit was having to compete with these third party apps.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • r2vcap 3y ago
    I also agree. I was using the rif premium version. third-party apps removed Reddit's ads and offered a paid version instead. I'm not saying rif is a bad app. It is uch easier to use than the official app. However, it is self-evident that it would have contributed to the deterioration of monetization on the reddit side. It is not a civilized way to blow up huge communities by inciting people and setting fire to their seats because their means of earning deteriorate. Moreover, if the alternative is discord or a service hosted by some random person on the internet.
    • Rebelgecko 3y ago
      That's not really true. 3P apps don't strip out ads. The API never included them in the first place. I think it would've been interesting f reddit let the API exist in an ad-supported way and had a TOS that would prevent apps from removing the ads for non-premium users
    • thatguy0900 3y ago
      It's not really correct to say they removed reddit ads. Reddit never gave anyone access to put reddits ads in to begin with.
• tinus_hn 3y ago
  Interesting, that way we will get to see if those moderators are as irreplaceable as they claim.
• PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  This isn't remotely surprising and I called it from the very start of the controversy. It was clear reddit wasn't going to budge, and since they control the platform, there was only one way this would end.
• pyuser583 3y ago
  Notice how Reddit changes the rules without changing the rules. “It is your commanding officers wish, which is the best type of order.”
• ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  I think the blackout is a huge overreaction. They should try to phase it out to not financially damage app creators who now have to issue $10k-100k+ in refunds, but otherwise, there is far more disruption from the blackouts than having to switch to the official reddit mobile app.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• pyuser583 3y ago
  Notice how everything has to go through a moderator. Is that a legal thing? Does it insulate Reddit from liability somehow?
  • Havoc 3y ago
    Unpaid volunteers are a great deal for Reddit. Unless they’re rebellious of course Legal no, but it does outsource modding decisions and blowbacks to a third party which solves a bunch of problems for Reddit. Eg having two diametrically opposed subs both run by Reddit staff would be tricky. If it’s 3rd party then problem solved - no conflict. So they really want to hang on to this mod setup both for financial benefits and above. Just with more compliant ones
  • meepmorp 3y ago
    Moderators keep the site going, and they work for free. It's a cheap way of handling a task thing.
• jtode 3y ago
  Lemmy over there like "Good. Good."
• xwdv 3y ago
  I would gladly volunteer to replace a mod for a very popular subreddit. No one should be moderator for life, time for new ideas.
• Simulacra 3y ago
  It was only a matter of time.
• Vanclief 3y ago
  Unfortunate, but it was pretty obvious this would happen. The blackouts lasting only 48 hours was a mistake anyways. The only way I see them changing course is if enough people: 1. Delete the official app 2. Stop buying reddit awards, subscriptions, etc. 3. Mass delete their comments (Ideally after backing them up so that they can restore them later) 4. Stop visiting reddit all together From reddit, this could easily be solved by offering "Reddit Pro", where you pay X per month, get perks and gives you an API key that you can use in any third app you like. Everyone is happy.
  • MaxikCZ 3y ago
    1. never used it 2. never bought any 3. too much work 4. as soon as my RedditIsFun app stops working
    • aerio 3y ago
      Cool story bro
• dannyphantom 3y ago
  I suppose this will be a litmus test on how valuable long-established moderators are to the platform. At the end of the day, they are volunteers who are now boarding themselves behind the property of their digital landlord so the risk of eviction isn't really all that surprising. I've seen endless complaints from users who feel personally offended by being muted/banned from a community and a common response to their complaints is "if you don't like it, go to another site". If the moderators are not happy with the direction of the platform, they are free to vacate the property willingly or have an admin spend :30s removing them. The relationship has always been unilateral in favor of the people who actually work there.
  • bee_rider 3y ago
    The relationship is skewed in favor of the owners, seems like a more accurate description to me. The mods do do real work (absurdly, they just do it for free).
  • michaelmrose 3y ago
    The community is the only worthwhile thing about reddit. Their IP is simply awful garbage that could be profitably replaced with their own old open source code and their leadership is full of the kind of folks who think they can hire a sex offender then silence community outrage. The last thing they own is hardware not valuable enough to pay severance if a substantial portion of the community leaves. Worse the folks they are threatening are the tiny minority that are most liable to walk away with that value.
    • yanderekko 3y ago
      The community is exactly why toxic mods should be removed.
      • michaelmrose 3y ago
        Can you explain why you believe the mods are toxic? Reddit allowing autonomy created an entire army of unpaid mods in order to create communities that pay 100% of managements salaries despite current reddit management being basically bad at every aspect of their jobs. They absolutely can crush them if they want to but if they do they stand to crush those communities and end up owning the shell of what they wanted to control. Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges. For a case study consider freenode and look how that turned out.
• boringuser2 3y ago
  Moderation on reddit was always pretty heavy-handed, arbitrary and unnecessary. Reddit should have removed most of them a long time ago (at least from the popular boards), but doing so now just looks distasteful.
  • pbae 3y ago
    Nah, it was overdue, and this provides an impetus to execute a purge which would have been hard to do before. Never let a crisis go to waste.
    • boringuser2 3y ago
      It's a bad look, though, to be punitive in the face of protests. If they had simply terminated the mods prior to this, well, they both wouldn't have actually had a problem to begin with, and could have easily chalked the whole thing up to a push to be more "open".
• capableweb 3y ago
  One thing I don't quite understand is how the CEO first claims that only 3% of the user base is using 3rd party apps, and then later claims that "And the opportunity cost of not having those users (3rd part app users) on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant" (from https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-h... ) Is that 3% of the user base really having such a big impact so it's worth all this drama and continue to alienate the users of the platform?
  • flutas 3y ago
    That 3% probably consists of a majority of the 1% who post content, and the .1% who moderate content. Without either of those, the site becomes stale and overrun by trash content.
    • capableweb 3y ago
      He also claimed most mods don't use 3rd party apps: > Huffman said 97% of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site. He said "the vast majority" of moderators also do not rely on third-party apps.
      • galleywest200 3y ago
        Most mods seem to use the old.reddit.com website, possibly utilizing Mod Toolbox as well. It seems most mods do not use an app for moderating at all.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • flutas 3y ago
        The big issue is you can hide a lot in statements like that. I can't find super trustworthy numbers (and I can't verify this due to that), but if there are about 3.4m subs and only 140k of them are active, every single active sub could have a mod that uses a 3rd party app and you could still claim "the vast majority" don't use them. I also find it fairly interesting he would quote a percentage for users, but not for mods. [0]: https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/ https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/
• TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  But unmoderated subreddits will get banned, so isn't Reddit actually shooting itself in the foot?
• diego_sandoval 3y ago
  Wouldn't it make sense for third party apps to get the content by just scraping the Reddit website instead?
• sedatk 3y ago
  Voluntary moderation isn't free labor. It's paid in power, influence, or moral gratification which may work with small platforms, but will eventually cost the platform more than a salary. Reddit just seems to be figuring that out now hence the frustration.
• cm2012 3y ago
  Good! I'm tired of drama from 3% of the Reddit population (or less) impacting the other 97% negatively. I just don't think either side has the moral high ground. The mods like the convenience of 3rd party apps. I get it. It's not a real moral issue. Reddit has both said moderator-specific as well as disability related APIs will still be free.
• ahahahahah 3y ago
  "Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust." This seems like a totally reasonable position. I don't want subreddits that I care about held hostage by some moderator with a vendetta.
• Ledienejid 3y ago
  Without taking sides, the main insight of this whole debacle is how incompetent Huffman and his team are. Dude failed an AMA on his own platform, how he could not know what that AMA was going to look like? He was absolutely not prepared. Absolute dolt.
• fswd 3y ago
  Corporate citizenship can indeed have dystopian outcomes
• BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  Is this a management strategy where the end game is: win or no longer exist. The win scenario has so much upside (almost entirely related to upcoming IPO) that it's worth risking the no longer existing scenario no matter what. What are the downsides of the No Longer Exist scenario for management? Retire with millions rather than billions?
  • flutas 3y ago
    > Is this a management strategy where the end game is: win or no longer exist. I've seen a lot of speculation that Reddit could be close to running out of funds. If (big if) this were the case, then it truly is a win or die scenario for them.
• superultra 3y ago
  Mods are users, and if not, are they employees and spez owes them a paycheck?
• nullindividual 3y ago
  They've already done this with the Trump related subs (which were later banned) a couple of years ago.
• thih9 3y ago
  But the community supports the protest. Subreddits can just open and pivot. E.g. architecture communities could become places to discuss api architecture and 3rd party apps; etc. Or subreddits could start going private every Tuesday and Wednesday. Or something else; with community’s support there are countless loopholes.
  • onionisafruit 3y ago
    /r/anime_titties can pivot to pictures of anime titties
• 0xParlay 3y ago
  Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation. All but new users are aware that subs are governed by mods. Installing a corporate-approved mod panel because a community isn't acting in Reddit Inc's financial best interest is to light the whole product on fire. What's the point of starting a new sub if it'll be repurposed as reddit sees fit? What's the point of joining a sub and contributing if upon gaining popularity - it'll be taken away and controlled by "the adults". Imagine starting a discord group for your buddies and then corporate decides the group should be controlled by some outsider. At least perform a sham referendum to maintain a facade of authenticity. "Do you want to remove the evil stinky mods with fun cool ones? Vote now!"
  • rand_r 3y ago
    I take your point, but to a large extent the value of the subreddit is in the name since it makes it easy for people to organically find the right space for the content they want. Domain names are the same. For example, for content local to New York City, going to /r/nyc was my first guess. /r/UncleBens can claim to have developed their own thing, but not the obvious ones like /r/Apple, etc.
    • 0xParlay 3y ago
      Seems like survivorship bias considering you wouldn't be familiar with well-named poorly moderated subs that never took off. But also you searched /r/nyc instead of TheNewYorker.com because what you're after is community curated content instead of the views and opinions of Condé Nast and their vast network of quality publications that are already available for subscription. Following /r/nyc and /r/newyorkcity during the mayoral elections was what made reddit useful. You could see how moderation could create an echo chamber and distort a users perception of reality. Having reddit install "community leaders" is a hilariously bad idea. So long and thanks for the fish! Looking forward to see what replaces Reddit.
  • itsthecourier 3y ago
    I'm super angry of all the mods who are taking the subs prisoner. If you don't like to pay reddit back, then let us use it. I'm a premium user and I pay reddit because I like the content, freemium users pay back watching ads, I was a freemium user of other platforms for decades. Why is letting them charge so bad?
• TheAdamist 3y ago
  The mods are only punishing the users of the subreddit, they arent hurting reddit itself at all. Ban them and free any closed subreddits. All the user polls various subs are overwhelming voted to stay open with 99% of the comments pro open.
  • Matheus28 3y ago
    1. The only people who are voting are the ones crossing the picket line. What did you expect? 2. Obviously it's hurting reddit, otherwise they wouldn't even feel the need to threaten taking back subreddits.
• replwoacause 3y ago
  This is the death knell for Reddit. Steve Huffman swan dived the mfer into the ground.
• bane 3y ago
  hmm...well....I just tried Lemmy (lemmy.world) and it's honestly pretty great. Nice, clean, simple, none of the aggregated cruft reddit has picked up. I've found quite a few comparable communities to the ones I'm used to and they have decent populations. I don't know if I quite "get" the fediverse yet other than some theoretics. My mom definitely won't, but she doesn't get reddit either.
• 127 3y ago
  Would this not change the relationship of moderators to unpaid workforce? Would this not conflict directly with either US or EU labor laws?
• km3r 3y ago
  Reddit claiming removing mods is for the community, yet the community is against these API changes, and seems to support the blackouts from all the polling i've seen.
• itsthecourier 3y ago
  Just accept we need to see ads to pay for the bills or get a premium subscription. Personally I find unethical to use a freemium service and block the ads. Because how am I reciprocating the service they gave me? Using a client different than reddit's official should be allowed upon the agreement to make reddit win something else back, e.g. subscription
• itsthecourier 3y ago
  Free reddit, ban the blockers
• binarysneaker 3y ago
  As a mod of one of the subs staying dark, I'm done with Reddit and their management team. Time for the next thing...
• activiation 3y ago
  I read the opposite just a few hours ago... They need to switch CEO
• paulhodge 3y ago
  it's fun that the online community is getting a crash course in how protests and strikes actually work. As people have known since forever, a strike needs to be all-in or else it's too easy for the company to replace them with strikebreakers. There's been so so many bad takes of "oh why don't they just protest by doing X instead" and 99% of the time the answer is, because we already know that X doesn't work.
• heatmiser 3y ago
  I understand (note: I don't necessarily agree) with Reddit's decision to alter its API amidst the AI renaissance of 2023. OpenAI and their ilk recognized the value of this dataset for training, regrettably for Reddit, before Reddit itself did. Now, it's Spring 2023, the data horse has bolted, and Huffman is looking for dollars to wipe the egg off of his face. Though Huffman should have foreseen such a turn of events, we all collectively erred in the same way when we surrendered our social graphs to Facebook in the 2000s. Furthermore, Facebook committed a blunder similar to Reddit's, allowing Twitter to establish their social graph before Zuckerberg secured that data. To the disadvantage of thousands of communities, millions of users, and even the Reddit corporation itself, capitalist forces are pushing Reddit's leadership to recoup every possible cent of opportunity cost.
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  Despite not being a Reddit user I'm quite enjoying this episode as it's revealing corporate despotism for what it is. Nobody goes to Reddit for the great infrastructure or (ha ha ) the user interface. they go there because there are interesting people having interesting conversations. The owners and managers provide very little of the value that people derive from it; as Adam Smith said 'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.' Here's hoping he site collapses and the residual value of the assets is frittered away on litigation.
• gonehome 3y ago
  Yeah the obvious move from them imo. Probably best for reddit just entirely kill 3rd party API access and restrict the power of mods. Arguably they should have done that anyway like Twitter did rather than just set prices high to sort of get to that outcome anyway. You can't change the behavior without fixing the incentives, you can't fix ad-model incentives by being a user within an ad company, the users should just accept that when operating in that space and try to operate in spaces where they can actual own the platform. If you build a company on some other company's owned API you're on borrowed time the moment keeping you around no longer benefits that company.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• gumby 3y ago
  There's a recurring theme that appears on HN: company is founded, grows for a while, then a new CEO comes up and screws things up. That even happened to Reddit already! But what fascinates me is that I believe it's one of the founders killing the goose this time! At least it's a change from what we usually see.
• imchillyb 3y ago
  Every post / discussion about Reddit and these new changes play right into the hands of Reddit's upcoming IPO. No matter the outcome spez (the ceo) can simply point to how 'important' reddit is for the internet. How much people 'rely upon it' for their day/day information. All of this mess simply raises the amount Reddit can raise in its IPO.
• throwaway5959 3y ago
  This just supports my decision to delete my 13+ year old Reddit account.
• potsandpans 3y ago
  do mods on reddit have the ability to wholesale delete posts? I wonder if any are considering reducing the subs to a [removed] wasteland. I suppose reddit would just restore to some prior state.
  • LordKeren 3y ago
    Funnily enough, yes, it is very easy to mass remove posts on Reddit with both the api and third party extensions. However, removed is not deleted. Another mod can reapprove a removed post and it would be restored. Reddit already has the tools to undo this kind of sabotaging
• rtrunck 3y ago
  Love online communities and losing reddit is a huge hit. If hacker news ever goes I honestly don’t know what I’d do.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  This is a weird move. I wonder if the Reddit leadership aren't feeling their egos bruised a bit by this user revolt. A better solution would be to deprecate subreddit blackouts "due to a bug" wink wink
• Balvarez 3y ago
  The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the second best time is now. I for one will be moving off Reddit to the fediverse. Is it as good as Reddit?... no, but it could be better.
• eek2121 3y ago
  u/spez is not yet at the FO level of FAFO, but he is getting close. If he keeps doubling down, he's going to find out just what happens when a "startup" like Reddit begins to act like twitter does. Specifically, Must can juggle lawsuits and lose money hand over fist. Reddit cannot. Like, I get the naysayers, but VC funded companies only have so much capital. I have worked for startups most of my life, and the last time a CEO/CTO acted like u/spez in my arena? The company went from near profitability to bankrupt overnight. At that particular startup, I was actually let go because I asked a lot of questions. Then, customers started asking questions...then investors. Then, the lawsuits started.
• sagebird 3y ago
  I am suggesting a user protest procedure. 1. Reply to as many Reddit posts as possible with irrelevant, low quality answers that are wrong and do not make sense. It should be purposefully bad and poor training data for LLMs. 2. Begin your replies with the word “This”. It lets others know you are in on the joke, but doesn’t reveal your hand fully. If Reddit starts throttling replies that start with the word “This” it will be embarrassing for Reddit to explain. 3. Upvote every nonsense reply. Downvote real replies.
• interestica 3y ago
  There’s not much stopping Reddit from taking over the user accounts and just reopening the subs with the same ‘mods’ — but run by different users. The scariest part is that they could use those accounts and ‘speak’ for them — “we’re sorry, we changed our minds. we are back. huffman was right”. They’ve already demonstrated that they have the power (and will) to modify existing users’ comments.
  • LordKeren 3y ago
    A large amount of subreddits also have discord servers under the same alias. This would immediately blow up in Reddit’s face and get them mocked by every new publication > They’ve already demonstrated that they have the power (and will) to modify existing users’ comments. Huffman was also immediately caught and has been restlessly mocked about doing that.
• steakscience 3y ago
  Subreddits (self-governing communities) seem like the perfect usecase for the fediverse
• neop1x 3y ago
  We need an open, ideally decentralized Reddit clone like Mastodon is for Twitter, archive those Reddit communities and delete them at Reddit.
• flyinggiant 3y ago
  [flagged]
• noonething 3y ago
  can they get rid of the mods AND restore the api access?