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The dishonesty continues. > if they are no longer interested in moderating that community They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies. >

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.
    - cbo100 3y ago
      > Looking at Reddit's new API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month The problem I think they will run into is that this 100 calls per day average is across all users, even those who don't use it that much. Once you intersect that with the users who care enough and are willing to pay $2+ per month the average calls per user will blow out. You pretty much have to be a heavy user in order to justify spending money on it. And the Relay dev even points that out: > An example is that a subscription could act as a filter where mostly high-rate users convert.
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      > Who is being dishonest? Steve Huffman is a liar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246529 It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly. It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.
    - blueblimp 3y ago
      From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.
    - danudey 3y ago
      Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it. > Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying. These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair. > To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work. Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere. Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app. Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    They are more interested in affordable API access and third party apps than moderating and first party apps. Not saying that's good or bad, just that it is.
- brerchicken 3y ago
  I think the argument is that the impulsive API change will harm many, many subreddits. Does Reddit care about quality content? Or do they care about becoming profitable? I think the mods make a lot more sense than Spez here. And I don't think you can say Reddit cares about keeping subs open if they're willing to watch them all shrivel away in a sea of spam and clickbait bots.
- gtm1260 3y ago
  I would also bet that the majority of Reddit users care more about having an open subreddit than the mods do as well.
  - bleepblop 3y ago
    At this point let it burn. A giant wildfire stimulates growth. Sure at the moment it's destructive, but over time new life emerges.
    - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
      As our Digg forebearers once taught us. A lesson the current Reddit executives must have forgotten.
  - devmor 3y ago
    Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so. If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
    - bnralt 3y ago
      > Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so. The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either. People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
      - jrhoffa 3y ago
- plandis 3y ago
  Why should I trust the CEO who was just recently caught in a lie about blackmail despite evidence to the contrary and in the past has straight up edited people’s comments without any notification that Reddit is responsible for the edits?
  - JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
    I haven't been paying close attention to all of the spez/Apollo stuff, was there actually any evidence from either side? Last I saw it was mostly just each party posting contradictory text in replies.
    - SethKinast 3y ago
      Yes, Christian (legally) recorded all calls with Reddit and published them.
      - JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
        Ah nice, I will follow up on that. Thanks for the info!
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    What does CEO trust have to do with any of this?
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      Is that a serious question?
- bnralt 3y ago
  Right. If the users of the sub want to continue the boycott, they certainly can. If the removed mods are beloved by the community, it's easy for them to open a new subreddit. But I think most people realize that most of the users, who actually create the content, don't want the boycott to continue, and don't have any particular love for the current mods.
  - jrhoffa 3y ago
    [dead]
lazystar 3y ago
[flagged]
- jjulius 3y ago
  Many of the proposed changes directly impact moderators and aren't something that average users will experience immediately/directly, so of course they care more than the average, non-mod user.
  - lazystar 3y ago
    ah, so the mods plan in a nutshell, is to cut off the nose to spite the face?
- ulrashida 3y ago
  Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.
  - lazystar 3y ago
    A lot of folks here will commiserate with reddit's position - Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's, and they didnt have to provide reddit with a single penny in return. Reddit has to do something to prevent the gold rush of data mining that is bound to occur from other companies building their own copycat LLM's.
    - wtf_is_up 3y ago
      >Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's Source?
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Reddit wants to make money off user-generated content. To my mind this is like a paper manufacturer claiming it has a copyright interest in any printed matter than ends up attached to its product.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Most subreddits doing polls have people voting to remain open, so it really isn't in the interests of the communities to keep the subs closed. The ones who don't like the changes are leaving anyway.
- pkulak 3y ago
  I left the mod team of the sub I started 16 years ago. Just not interested in providing free labor anymore.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    That's all fine and well. I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected. I just don't think mods should be ending the communities, most of which they didn't start themselves. Let other people who don't share their issues take over.
    - neoromantique 3y ago
      >large subs >I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected [Doubt]
      - addandsubtract 3y ago
        Why? I'm just a normal user, but 98% of my redditing was done on old.reddit
        neoromantique 3y ago
        Because /large/ sub modding requires third party tools.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        lol why? I use old.reddit with RES, toolbox and some ublock rules and all is good.
    - 3y ago
coffeefirst 3y ago
Right. I don't really care how the API thing ends. Lower the price, grandfather in some of the big clients for a longer sunset date so they don't have to issue refunds, work out rev-share or per user licensing agreements... whatever. These are solvable problems. But these antics have me thinking I should find alternatives to the very few subs that actually matter. So if anyone knows a good web community for cooking... so far I've learned I'm too old for Discord.
- wackget 3y ago
  eGullet Forums, although it sometimes feels like it leans too much towards "high brow" cooking or molecular gastronomy. Stack Exchange Cooking.
- anjel 3y ago
  RIP Chowhound.com
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    Damn. I didn’t know it was gone. That hits hard. Obviously I hadn’t been in a while, but back in the day chowhound made eating my way through Chicago such a blast. That’s really too bad. Thank god the home brew digest still lives.
basch 3y ago
[I stand corrected, redacting the rest of the comment] In a small defense of Reddit: If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. If the moderators don’t moderate the really bad stuff, Reddit has historically replaced them. I would think the same applies here. It’s hard to argue that people who are not subscribed to a sub are community members. People had plenty of warning to join subs before they went private. Going private alone shouldn’t lead to mod replacement.
- teraflop 3y ago
  > If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. No, this is not accurate. A private subreddit is only accessible to "approved users", i.e. those on a list managed by the moderators. Subscribing is completely different; it's a private, user-settable flag whose only significant effect is to make the subreddit's content eligible to show up on your home page. If you can't view a subreddit's content because it's private and you're not approved, then subscribing makes no difference. In fact, subreddit mods can't even see who's subscribed, nor can they prevent anyone from subscribing, even by banning them.
- paulmd 3y ago
  subscribed members cannot access a private sub, only approved members. Approved member is not quite the same thing as subscription, there are some subs you can't even see without being added, like r/CenturyClub. And being on the approved list (sub visible) doesn't mean it shows up in your home either, you can be added or banned by any sub at any time independent of action from you. It's just literally a pick/ban list for that sub and they can build it off your posts elsewhere etc. Subscription is about curating your homepage, news subscriptions (ugh), etc. Subscription means you want to see and know about popular stuff in that sub. And you can still view stuff you're not subscribed to, if you're an approved member. The access levels that are allowable are: approved only, public but only approved can submit links, and public. You can also set access on items individually, and lock comments on those items, etc. So it's also possible to just blank or remove all the old posts with a bot (API!) and leave only a "fuck u" thread that's uncommentable. At that point reddit probably reverts it and calls it vandalism and puts in new mods and starts banning anybody who's tantruming. Like, be disruptive get banned. You have less freedom here than with a TLD registrar (better ask nicely to get a .edu or .mil or .gov cert issued). Their system, their rules, their call. You already agreed to license your content to them. Shreddit could probably even be undone if they have history etc. And there already is a public dataset already on the internet for like... 10y+ now? how does that work exactly? Who wins in the argument of GDPR vs users having agreed to a perpetual irrevocable license and several other parties already having used those API access to republish those comments under CC (fh-bigquery:reddit-comments, pushift, etc)? Can you revoke an irrevocable license under GDPR as the originator, and if so how does that leave IP licensing in general, just "fuck it GDPR it, it's mine, I don't want a licensee to use it"? I mean probably all social media licenses include something like that, if it's durable then GDPR is relatively meaningless and nobody has to respond to GDPR if they publish their dataaset/API output (interesting outcome perhaps). If it's not durable it kind of fucks up IP law and subassignment in general, everything was always done by an originating creator(s) at some point, then sublicensed to their employer, etc. Can you just be like "patent license revoked, boss, I did the GDPR?". The idea of Google/etc being forced to publish their codebases under permissive licenses to avoid random "nah fuck you"'s from departing engineers would be an extremely funni legal outcome though, like that would have massive implications for knowledge/creative work in general. Maybe the same thing would happen to social media providers... maybe that paradoxically makes the incentive to publish fh-bigquery:reddit and pushift stronger, because now it's irrevocable. And that's the minimum ask for 3PA tooling more or less. On the other hand if the CC sublicense holds in any way, most likely it's legal to say "ok this is the vandalism reversion dataset, it's CC, patch it over the api response inside the client" both for the vendor and the others. I guess to put it another way: would wikipedia have to edit out every line and commit a user has interacted with, if they filed a GDPR? How do you begin to back that out on a word by word basis? Every redditor knew their words were going to be public (for the definition of that subreddit, and potentially public according to future changes of that subreddit). They put it on "wikipedia" knowing the organization ultimately was driving there. Reddit chooses not to unwind history and revert. But does Reddit have a license to do so? What about Wikipedia? It seems like in this case the answer may be "probably, if they want to, it's just normally not a problem but we can do it if people get disruptive". People licensed their posts to the community, that's why they're outraged that the community is being torn away from them, it cuts both ways unfortunately. But it might also be legal to reboot Reddit using that data, assuming it's all really CC etc.
yanderekko 3y ago
>They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies. The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. Seems reasonable enough. What does it mean to be "interested in moderating" if the outcome is that you do no actual moderation? >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. For the sake of grandstanding you might want them to come out and say "any of you scabs want to cross the picket line for us?", but only spez would be stupid enough to actually do that.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. The implication by Reddit is that prioritizing the latter at any point in time is incompatible with the former. Important distinction/bit of nuance.
zedadex 3y ago
> 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 It's transparent, sure, but it doesn't mean it won't be effective. They're counting on a few people's greed plus most people's apathy. reddit seems happy to go all in on the low-effort content mill market, and those users are the kind to get more upset over the protest than losing nice third-party apps or tools.

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.
  - cbo100 3y ago
    > Looking at Reddit's new API pricing, 100 calls per day per average user would cost $0.72 / month The problem I think they will run into is that this 100 calls per day average is across all users, even those who don't use it that much. Once you intersect that with the users who care enough and are willing to pay $2+ per month the average calls per user will blow out. You pretty much have to be a heavy user in order to justify spending money on it. And the Relay dev even points that out: > An example is that a subscription could act as a filter where mostly high-rate users convert.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    > Who is being dishonest? Steve Huffman is a liar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36246529 It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly. It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.
  - blueblimp 3y ago
    From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.
  - danudey 3y ago
    Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it. > Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying. These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair. > To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work. Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere. Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app. Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  They are more interested in affordable API access and third party apps than moderating and first party apps. Not saying that's good or bad, just that it is.
brerchicken 3y ago
I think the argument is that the impulsive API change will harm many, many subreddits. Does Reddit care about quality content? Or do they care about becoming profitable? I think the mods make a lot more sense than Spez here. And I don't think you can say Reddit cares about keeping subs open if they're willing to watch them all shrivel away in a sea of spam and clickbait bots.
gtm1260 3y ago
I would also bet that the majority of Reddit users care more about having an open subreddit than the mods do as well.
- bleepblop 3y ago
  At this point let it burn. A giant wildfire stimulates growth. Sure at the moment it's destructive, but over time new life emerges.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    As our Digg forebearers once taught us. A lesson the current Reddit executives must have forgotten.
- devmor 3y ago
  Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so. If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
  - bnralt 3y ago
    > Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so. The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either. People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
    - jrhoffa 3y ago
plandis 3y ago
Why should I trust the CEO who was just recently caught in a lie about blackmail despite evidence to the contrary and in the past has straight up edited people’s comments without any notification that Reddit is responsible for the edits?
- JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
  I haven't been paying close attention to all of the spez/Apollo stuff, was there actually any evidence from either side? Last I saw it was mostly just each party posting contradictory text in replies.
  - SethKinast 3y ago
    Yes, Christian (legally) recorded all calls with Reddit and published them.
    - JoyfulTurkey 3y ago
      Ah nice, I will follow up on that. Thanks for the info!
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
- yanderekko 3y ago
  What does CEO trust have to do with any of this?
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Is that a serious question?
bnralt 3y ago
Right. If the users of the sub want to continue the boycott, they certainly can. If the removed mods are beloved by the community, it's easy for them to open a new subreddit. But I think most people realize that most of the users, who actually create the content, don't want the boycott to continue, and don't have any particular love for the current mods.
- jrhoffa 3y ago
  [dead]

lazystar 3y ago

[flagged]

jjulius 3y ago
Many of the proposed changes directly impact moderators and aren't something that average users will experience immediately/directly, so of course they care more than the average, non-mod user.
- lazystar 3y ago
  ah, so the mods plan in a nutshell, is to cut off the nose to spite the face?
ulrashida 3y ago
Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.
- lazystar 3y ago
  A lot of folks here will commiserate with reddit's position - Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's, and they didnt have to provide reddit with a single penny in return. Reddit has to do something to prevent the gold rush of data mining that is bound to occur from other companies building their own copycat LLM's.
  - wtf_is_up 3y ago
    >Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's Source?
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Reddit wants to make money off user-generated content. To my mind this is like a paper manufacturer claiming it has a copyright interest in any printed matter than ends up attached to its product.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

Most subreddits doing polls have people voting to remain open, so it really isn't in the interests of the communities to keep the subs closed. The ones who don't like the changes are leaving anyway.

pkulak 3y ago
I left the mod team of the sub I started 16 years ago. Just not interested in providing free labor anymore.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  That's all fine and well. I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected. I just don't think mods should be ending the communities, most of which they didn't start themselves. Let other people who don't share their issues take over.
  - neoromantique 3y ago
    >large subs >I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected [Doubt]
    - addandsubtract 3y ago
      Why? I'm just a normal user, but 98% of my redditing was done on old.reddit
      - neoromantique 3y ago
        Because /large/ sub modding requires third party tools.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      lol why? I use old.reddit with RES, toolbox and some ublock rules and all is good.
  - 3y ago

coffeefirst 3y ago

Right. I don't really care how the API thing ends. Lower the price, grandfather in some of the big clients for a longer sunset date so they don't have to issue refunds, work out rev-share or per user licensing agreements... whatever. These are solvable problems. But these antics have me thinking I should find alternatives to the very few subs that actually matter. So if anyone knows a good web community for cooking... so far I've learned I'm too old for Discord.

wackget 3y ago
eGullet Forums, although it sometimes feels like it leans too much towards "high brow" cooking or molecular gastronomy. Stack Exchange Cooking.
anjel 3y ago
RIP Chowhound.com
- stcroixx 3y ago
  Damn. I didn’t know it was gone. That hits hard. Obviously I hadn’t been in a while, but back in the day chowhound made eating my way through Chicago such a blast. That’s really too bad. Thank god the home brew digest still lives.

basch 3y ago

[I stand corrected, redacting the rest of the comment] In a small defense of Reddit: If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. If the moderators don’t moderate the really bad stuff, Reddit has historically replaced them. I would think the same applies here. It’s hard to argue that people who are not subscribed to a sub are community members. People had plenty of warning to join subs before they went private. Going private alone shouldn’t lead to mod replacement.

teraflop 3y ago
> If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. No, this is not accurate. A private subreddit is only accessible to "approved users", i.e. those on a list managed by the moderators. Subscribing is completely different; it's a private, user-settable flag whose only significant effect is to make the subreddit's content eligible to show up on your home page. If you can't view a subreddit's content because it's private and you're not approved, then subscribing makes no difference. In fact, subreddit mods can't even see who's subscribed, nor can they prevent anyone from subscribing, even by banning them.
paulmd 3y ago
subscribed members cannot access a private sub, only approved members. Approved member is not quite the same thing as subscription, there are some subs you can't even see without being added, like r/CenturyClub. And being on the approved list (sub visible) doesn't mean it shows up in your home either, you can be added or banned by any sub at any time independent of action from you. It's just literally a pick/ban list for that sub and they can build it off your posts elsewhere etc. Subscription is about curating your homepage, news subscriptions (ugh), etc. Subscription means you want to see and know about popular stuff in that sub. And you can still view stuff you're not subscribed to, if you're an approved member. The access levels that are allowable are: approved only, public but only approved can submit links, and public. You can also set access on items individually, and lock comments on those items, etc. So it's also possible to just blank or remove all the old posts with a bot (API!) and leave only a "fuck u" thread that's uncommentable. At that point reddit probably reverts it and calls it vandalism and puts in new mods and starts banning anybody who's tantruming. Like, be disruptive get banned. You have less freedom here than with a TLD registrar (better ask nicely to get a .edu or .mil or .gov cert issued). Their system, their rules, their call. You already agreed to license your content to them. Shreddit could probably even be undone if they have history etc. And there already is a public dataset already on the internet for like... 10y+ now? how does that work exactly? Who wins in the argument of GDPR vs users having agreed to a perpetual irrevocable license and several other parties already having used those API access to republish those comments under CC (fh-bigquery:reddit-comments, pushift, etc)? Can you revoke an irrevocable license under GDPR as the originator, and if so how does that leave IP licensing in general, just "fuck it GDPR it, it's mine, I don't want a licensee to use it"? I mean probably all social media licenses include something like that, if it's durable then GDPR is relatively meaningless and nobody has to respond to GDPR if they publish their dataaset/API output (interesting outcome perhaps). If it's not durable it kind of fucks up IP law and subassignment in general, everything was always done by an originating creator(s) at some point, then sublicensed to their employer, etc. Can you just be like "patent license revoked, boss, I did the GDPR?". The idea of Google/etc being forced to publish their codebases under permissive licenses to avoid random "nah fuck you"'s from departing engineers would be an extremely funni legal outcome though, like that would have massive implications for knowledge/creative work in general. Maybe the same thing would happen to social media providers... maybe that paradoxically makes the incentive to publish fh-bigquery:reddit and pushift stronger, because now it's irrevocable. And that's the minimum ask for 3PA tooling more or less. On the other hand if the CC sublicense holds in any way, most likely it's legal to say "ok this is the vandalism reversion dataset, it's CC, patch it over the api response inside the client" both for the vendor and the others. I guess to put it another way: would wikipedia have to edit out every line and commit a user has interacted with, if they filed a GDPR? How do you begin to back that out on a word by word basis? Every redditor knew their words were going to be public (for the definition of that subreddit, and potentially public according to future changes of that subreddit). They put it on "wikipedia" knowing the organization ultimately was driving there. Reddit chooses not to unwind history and revert. But does Reddit have a license to do so? What about Wikipedia? It seems like in this case the answer may be "probably, if they want to, it's just normally not a problem but we can do it if people get disruptive". People licensed their posts to the community, that's why they're outraged that the community is being torn away from them, it cuts both ways unfortunately. But it might also be legal to reboot Reddit using that data, assuming it's all really CC etc.

yanderekko 3y ago

>They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies. The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. Seems reasonable enough. What does it mean to be "interested in moderating" if the outcome is that you do no actual moderation? >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. For the sake of grandstanding you might want them to come out and say "any of you scabs want to cross the picket line for us?", but only spez would be stupid enough to actually do that.

margalabargala 3y ago
> The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. The implication by Reddit is that prioritizing the latter at any point in time is incompatible with the former. Important distinction/bit of nuance.

zedadex 3y ago

> 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 It's transparent, sure, but it doesn't mean it won't be effective. They're counting on a few people's greed plus most people's apathy. reddit seems happy to go all in on the low-effort content mill market, and those users are the kind to get more upset over the protest than losing nice third-party apps or tools.