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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
- sersi 3y agoThis reminds me of Digg's death throes and the massive exodus to reddit. It's as if Spez wants the same to happen to reddit and for everyone to migrate to discord.
- timbit42 3y agoDiscord is worse. Like Reddit, it's owned by a corporation and unlike Reddit, search engines can't index it so the conversations effectively go into a black hole. Also, Discord is live chat so unless you're there 24/7, you might miss a conversation you are interested in, where on Reddit, you can still read and participate in older conversations you missed when they occurred.
- interestica 3y agoNot much stopping Reddit from ‘keeping’ the mods and replacing who runs those user accounts. …
- rpbiwer2 3y agoThat would be a really dumb idea, so I wouldn't be surprised if it happens.
- madars 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seydor 3y agoWhat took them so long. Moderators are clearly coordinating with each other to close down reddit's website, that s malicious intent, not just a "protest". They should have rules that does not allow that behaviour. Reddit is so poorly ran
- flangola7 3y agoProtests are most effective when highly coordinated. Reddit is free to change their attitude and have the website back at any time, it's their choice to continue down this path.
- Simulacra 3y agoI'm getting whiplash. First Axios said they are not going to remove moderators, then someone on Reddit said they will, then someone here said they won't, which is it? I really don't think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that's a narrow subset
- x86x87 3y agoHN readers are 1-2-5 years ahead what happens in the market. you can tell a lot of things that are coming down the pipe if you pay attention on HN. Once the "nerds" give up on reddit it will be an uphill battle to keep the site viable.
- phs318u 3y agoThis exactly. There have been a few tech waves where nerd behaviour was the leading indicator by a few years. Search engine move from AltaVista to Google (yes, I'm old). Laptop move to Macbook Pro's. Ignore the nerds at your peril.
- x86x87 3y agolol. you're not that old. remember the days when Intel was kicking AMD's ass and AMD was mostly building a worse Intel clone? Raise your hand if any of the following say anything to you: K5, K6, Duron. If you raised your hand and can go back even further in time tell me at what frequency did a Z80 run. hahahahaah
- Skunkleton 3y agoYou’re so old that your username has a stand alone FPU >:)
- x86x87 3y agoyou're so old that you use discrete transistors in your CPUs. hahaahahaha
- 3y ago
- diogenescynic 3y ago[flagged]
- x86x87 3y agolol. who do you think does the hard work of keeping the subs clean? agree that some mods could be scumbags but to generalize to all mods is a stretch. reddit without good mods is a guaranteed shit show
- Sai_ 3y ago+1. See Twitter for a live example of said sh*tshow
- kazinator 3y agoDesignated moderation is a pretty poor system. Everyone knows who the dickheads are; you just have to leverage that communal knowledge---but in a way that avoids oppressive majorities. Have a system whereby any user can indicate zero or more other users to be their personal moderators. This is kept secret by the site; nobody has any idea of how many other people have selected them as one of their personal moderators, other than by leaking that information. Then have a rule like this: if some (configurable) number of your personal moderators block some post or account, you also automatically block that post or account. The automatic block doesn't count as a moderating action on your behalf, with respect to those who have selected you as their personal moderator; it's a second-order block. This could result in a reasonable blend between the classic opposites: someone else deciding for you what you shouldn't read, or else you having to do all the work. The former model represented by moderated forums like Reddit, or moderated mailing lists or Usenet newsgroups, and the latter represented by unmoderated Usenet newsgroups where it's just you and your personal killfile. Users should have some sort of statistics dashboard to determine roughly much they are not seeing due to which personal moderators. Personal moderators could be divided into classes. If someone is your class 1 personal moderator, then if they block something, you don't see it. If three class 2 moderators of yours block something, you don't see it. And if seven class 3 moderators block something, you don't see it. On any user you see, you can pick them to be your class 1, 2 or 3 moderator. These designations could have an expiry date, otherwise people will "set and forget", and popular users will amass a lot of power to block. E.g. if everyone in a forum chooses you as a personal class 1 mod, you basically decide what that forum doesn't read. That could be a poorly informed choice on their behalf, which would be somewhat mitigated by expiry. There could be some expiry workflow. On your first visit to the site on a given day, you're reminded of expired personal moderators: would you like to grant them an extension or drop them?
- kristopolous 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they've put themselves on the radar of Harvard Business Review for having the ball in their court and somehow phenomenally fumbling it at every opportunity
- aeorgnoieang 3y agoI'm kinda curious why none of the third party app developers considered selling Reddit requests as in-app purchases – just charge the rate Reddit charges.
- unclekev 3y agoSome of them are trying to figure something out. https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/update_how_the_current_api_changes_would_impact/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd... > There's no possibility to continue the free version of Relay; a monthly subscription price of $3 (or less) might be achievable. And of that $3 the Developer says in that thread: > Yes there should be a good amount in there for myself. If 3rd party apps are so beloved, then $3/month to support a developer doing good work should not be a issue.
- rpbiwer2 3y agoHonestly $3 isn't bad, I'd gladly pay that to continue using my Reddit app.
- stevenwliao 3y agoIt's $3 today. What happens when Reddit triples the price with 30 day notice?
- adhvaryu 3y agoDon't forget that you alienate all those in poorer parts of the world unless you have regional prices.
- OnlyLys 3y ago
- londgine 3y agoIf this wasn't connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country's subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.
- e2le 3y agoIt's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?
- tho2i3ui3o4234 3y ago[flagged]
- CSMastermind 3y agoI moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy). I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work. And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits. Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs. The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other. For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs. The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.
- jfasi 3y agoHonestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for? The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
- TheMode 3y agoAnd if they didn't do anything you'd have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.
- tomr75 3y agothey are protesting the high/unreasonable API price out of nowhere
- jfasi 3y agoAnd that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.
- tjpnz 3y agoWhy shouldn't they? The mods own nothing. One would think that lesson would be learned by now.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoIf you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.
- Scalene2 3y agoReddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.
- Ekaros 3y agoThis type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.
- themoonisachees 3y agoIt isn't though. Facebook and Twitter have paid moderators that are employees, but since they are uninterested in building communities with quality content, you just end up with what they are today.
- makeitdouble 3y agoAdditionally if you pay for it you're a customer, and it's still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.
- wnkrshm 3y agoIf you pay, your data set is just worth more (Edit: to the company), since it proves you have money and can be made to spend it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- silcoon 3y agoPrevious thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711 554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments => not on the front page. No, it's not the algorithm.
- aqfamnzc 3y agoThanks for the link - I wouldn't have seen that thread had you not brought it up. However, are you implying the original story is being manually supressed? Could it be the discussion there got too heated? There are other factors that determine ranking, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- javajosh 3y agoYC is a Reddit investor, and dang hasn't chimed in connecting the threads, and the other thread was removed from the homepage. It's suggestive but it doesn't prove anything. The guidelines say that HN moderates its own properties less, but that may not always be true, especially pre IPO.
- echelon 3y agoDoes YC still own any stake in Reddit? Didn't Conde Nast acquire 100% back in the day?
- mustacheemperor 3y agoI don’t think it’s suggestive. This came up in an earlier thread[0] and he said it set off the flamewar detector, which likely happened again with this one. He probably just hasn’t seen the threads to merge them yet, it’s nighttime. Thanks for running the asylum dang. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285#36143711 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285#36143711
- Kiro 3y agoIf I was dang I would ban you for talking smack.
- Hamuko 3y agoIs there a long list of people willing to do unpaid labour for Reddit at the moment? Or is Reddit going to make their employees/contractors do the moderating instead? At least then you wouldn't have to deal with dissent.
- abletonlive 3y ago[flagged]
- the100rabh 3y ago[dead]
- susanthenerd 3y agoThanks reddit! I'm going to delete both accounts today and it is over. Also yes you have quality content, but starting today reddit will be totally blocked at dns level on my computers
- janalsncm 3y agoReddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
- jfasi 3y ago> Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.
- justinjlynn 3y agoNon-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
- jjulius 3y agoUhh, not according to mods as of two days ago... https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
- jfasi 3y agohttps://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309 https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
- jjulius 3y agoSo, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided. Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
- jquery 3y agoSo they're getting rid of all their best unpaid workers? Reddit is very, very confused about what makes it a long-term success. I wonder how many free person-hours have been dedicated to curating the website. And then they just treat them like garbage.
- Scalene2 3y agoIf reddit needed to generate income from api access they should have made a subscription a requirement for individual users to access the api.
- Simulacra 3y agoActually that makes a LOT more sense. If a person wants to use an app that connects via an API, let the user pay for it, not the app developer.
- dredmorbius 3y ago<narrator> It's not about who pays, it's about who controls. </narrator>
- est31 3y agoThis strategy would work if the people who disagree with the API closure is just the moderators (who provide free labour to reddit). It's not just them though, it might be felt most strongly by the power users, but people also frequent the app because of those power users.
- jupp0r 3y agoThe vast majority of power users are not a moderator either (although most moderators are power users).
- p-e-w 3y agoThe stickied comment stating that "this contradicts standing policies" is amusing. As if Reddit was somehow contractually bound to abide by random rules that they themselves made up, on their own site. It's astonishing how many people don't seem to understand what it means to be a user today. Especially if you're not paying, but even if you are.
- buildbot 3y agoComments like these are really.... something. It's basically boiling down to don't you plebes know we can smash you like insects whenever we want? Now go enjoy your trickles of piss. People are protesting because they do understand, and they don't like it, and they will probably leave.
- seydor 3y agoI am willing to bet a lot of money that reddit is not losing users out of this, it is gaining
- Capricorn2481 3y agoI'd accept that it's not losing a lot of users, but I can't imagine it's gaining any?
- seydor 3y agopublicity
- seydor 3y agoReddit has trained users and mods to think that way. They branded the site as a free-for-all, then went along with major social crusades etc etc, multiple times over the years. Ultimately, it's reddit leadership that led moderators to think that way, and now they are paying the price for it. They need to create some red lines to make the website functional and also tolerant, even to all political views
- AHOHA 3y agoShockers!! Funny how these mods who work for free thought they have any leverage.. now if they control the instances like a federated nodes, then maybe.
- NovaDudely 3y agoThey did have some leverage but only so long as Reddit was still trying to keep up appearances. They probably did the equation and figured that bad optics for a little while outweighs possible long term gains. At that point all the mods power vanishes.
- senectus1 3y agothey're unpaid volunteers. too bad. I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community. I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez
- AHOHA 3y agoVolunteer means they are doing good for the public, these morons aren’t paid and their only motivation there is to have that sense of power over other users to feel important.
- senectus1 3y agohmmm "Good to the public" maybe not... "Service to the public" yes they are. They're mods. They provide a service. But yeah... closing the community down is willful destruction of a utility. It makes sense for Reddit to rip em out
- pbae 3y agoThe masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they're taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.
- wesapien 3y agoTheir app and site sucks. 3rd party apps exist because of that. They can't accept that its their fault.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> Hope Reddit comes out of this alright. Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don't treat users like shit, the better.
- Klonoar 3y agoOne somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability? I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderators at Reddit, it would be interesting if this discussion was more of a sticking point. I have to wonder if there's not a world where Reddit shouldn't implement a policy of: > Look, you moderate a community above N size, we/your members need to know who you are I'm not entirely sure where my opinion on it even stands but figured it might make for interesting discussion. It does get tricky in the face of subreddits that deal in protest/whistleblower/etc matter though. I don't want to lose the anonymous aspect of the internet, especially when it's been effectively under assault for years - but at the same time, something that powerful and/or manipulate-able seems like it shouldn't get a free pass. Interested to hear what others think. (I am also fully open to being wrong on e.g Reddit themselves not knowing who mods are, and invite someone to correct me if I am - but I've not seen anything to date that suggests otherwise)
- Simulacra 3y agoYes, and they seem to be absolutely 100% unaccountable.
- edgineer 3y agoVarious mods have gotten plenty of heat over the years, like being grilled by andersen on CNN
- hn_thrwn 3y ago[flagged]
- SirSourdough 3y agoIs this supposed to be some kind of takedown? Why would I care that one of the moderators of a subreddit has a normal, common occupation? That article is so petty it deserves no one’s time.
- poisonarena 3y agogood, many of those mods are weird and insane, better for them, and better for reddit
- guywithahat 3y agoAlthough I agree in principle, they're not removing moderators for being power hungry or weird. They're replacing moderators who are protesting the changes with moderators who are under their thumb. I would be surprised if this led to better moderating
- Buttons840 3y agoThere's a power-law at play here. If the top 0.5% of those who participate / moderate / contribute the most leave, that might end the site. Tipping points exist. Interesting times.
- kmeisthax 3y ago"Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation" ...so is Reddit a commons shared by the community, or is it a profit-generating resource? You only get to pick one.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago>profit-generating Lol nope.
- remarkEon 3y agoIt’s been a long time since I payed attention to Reddit drama, but isnt Reddit dominated by maybe a dozen or so power mods that have an enormous amount of influence in what goes on on that site?
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoNo.
- turndown 3y agoNo, and hasn’t been close to as you describe in a long time. Reddit made these people give up some of the subreddits that were on the old defaults list. The truth is that this generation of Reddit user is long gone; see /u/qgyh2 or /u/ManWithoutModem.
- xkbarkar 3y agoyes. Exactly
- variant 3y agoNo issue with this. Subreddits exists for the users, not the moderators - all of which can be replaced.
- chillfox 3y agoonly so long as you can find competent moderators willing to do the job for free while using shitty tools.
- Remmy 3y agoThe subreddit exists because a user created it. I created two subreddits 12 years ago that have a few hundred thousand subscribers today. So do I not have the right to set my subreddit to private? I never told people to join them. I never advertised them. Reddit has given me the built in functions to set it to private and to ban anyone I choose. As a matter of fact, one of them has been private since this started and the other has remained open. They're both gaming related. I let my moderators decide because ultimately, they're the ones who have put the most work into keeping the curated. One group didn't really feel it was necessary while the other felt like it was a slap in the face from spez to essentially say, "I don't care what you think, 12 years of hard work to grow a community or not, you'll do what I say." And I agree with them. They didn't moderate it for power. They did it because they love the specific console they were created for and are really proud to see their hard work pay off after years of investing their time into it. I've become jaded by this whole thing. Reddit no longer cares about its voluntary workforce in the slightest and I'll be handing ownership off to them, deleting my account and that will be the end of it. So yes. In a way, it does belong to the users. But 48 hours of discomfort leading to threats of repossession after 12 years of work? They want it? They can have it.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoSomething I want to ask before: I've noticed that some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT, and it does seem plausible. What's interesting is that Twitter also closed down their API access merely months ago. Are these two occurrences related, or was Twitter's action also a response to ChatGPT/LLM? (Also to be totally fair to them, Twitter and Reddit used to have the most comprehensive free API accesses which I enjoy. Instagram/facebook etc. are always a nightmare to work with in term of scraping.)
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThat weird "conspiracy theory" doesn't make any sense. LLMs are trained off a static dump of example data, and it's trivially easy to build a webscraper of Reddit's historical content.
- buildbot 3y agoIt's trivially easy to build a scraper for the new content too. And I think people really over estimate the relative amount of data reddit has compared to the literal rest of the internet. Like sure, it's nicely categorized and ranked (somewhat), but leaving reddit out of a corpus probably won't drastically effect your final model.
- Accujack 3y ago>some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT Those people really don't have an idea how either of those work, nor how cause and effect work. See also the graph showing that the decrease in the number of pirates in the world's oceans has contributed to climate change because "pirates are cool".
- SirSourdough 3y agoI believe this is more than speculation. Pretty sure that someone from Reddit basically said as much in one of the transcripts or conversations shared by Apollo’s dev. Reddit feels they are getting burned by letting their data be used to train LLMs for free. That said, they were also letting people exceed their API rate limits by massive amounts, so hard for me to put the blame anywhere but with Reddit.
- wnevets 3y agoI just would like to thank the CEOs of Twitter and Reddit for helping to kill my doom scrolling addiction.
- rswail 3y agoI will miss using Apollo, which is one of the best apps on my phone. It works well, complies with all of Apple's HIG rules, and is supported by an enthusiastic and communicative developer. Reddit management are incompetent fools that are looking for the VC cashout of an IPO before the site goes to shit. Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" continues to become more and more prescient of the last few years of internet "development".
- klabb3 3y agoI’m disappointed for the same reasons as everyone else. But there’s definitely a silver lining here. Relying on a corporation for community was never a good idea, and that Reddit’s relative insulation was nothing but an aberration. Recent events is no more than a delayed affirmation of enshittification theory. And the good news is the sooner we collectively realize that the root cause is the business model, the sooner we can fix the problem.
- yreg 3y agoApollo followed Apple design language better than the first party apps.
- aSockPuppeteer 3y agoTrue. When I search for things though, the answers I seek are on Reddit. I’ll look into the archive or Reddit backup of deleted posts sometime but for now I go by the preview search showing me a couple lines of the top answer.
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoSpez is the guy who wipes the street on the block where ppl happen to gather and play music, tell stories. One day he decides to take fees from the ice-cream vendor. The ice-cream is gone. Is there another relatively clean street where nobody would try to setup a shake down the crowd? Reddit execs and such are rent-seekers except in place of land we have human content. The website thingy they have running has become a commodity years ago.
- spazx 3y agoSmelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain. Give it a few months, it'll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off. Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.
- uejfiweun 3y agoIf they remove old reddit, I'm done. The "new" reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.
- spazx 3y agoNew reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.
- quickthrower2 3y agoProtest 2.0: click here for rphotos.io the new home of r/photos. Then teach users about RSS. Reddit via RSS reader is already 10x the better experience. Mixing in other feeds is no deal.
- beloch 3y agoReddit might be able to force mods to keep their subs open, but there's no way to stop volunteers from volunteering somewhere else. Anyone who has ever dreamt of making a reddit competitor, but didn't because reddit is an unstoppable behemoth, should take notice of what's going on. There's a huge opportunity here.
- rjvir 3y agoThe users of a subreddits drive all the value, not the handful of moderators. If a competitor magically got the support of all the moderators, that wouldn't get them very far.
- beloch 3y agoWho's driving the current protest? Who are the primary users of Apollo? Mods. Reddit mods are anonymous and completely unaccountable to users. They decide what users see and what they are allowed to say. Their influence should not be underestimated. If mods defect to another platform en masse, so will a huge proportion of regular users. Take a look at the first page of /r/all. Reddit's brand has already taken a huge hit over something that will have little short term impact on the majority of users. I don't use Apollo, but this kerfuffle is unavoidable for anyone who uses Reddit even casually became of the mods.
- marcell 3y agoMaking a subreddit private is a built in, native reddit feature. If the mods are still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community, how is it breaking any rules? Sounds like they are just making use of a reddit feature.
- jconnop 3y agoFor small subreddits that may work, but for the larger ones Reddit doesn't care, they won't let such technicalities get in the way of their revenue. The only way to really "win" here is to abandon the platform en masse, and delete all your content before you walk out the door.
- AlexandrB 3y agoJust wait a little while, because reddit seems to be actively undeleting stuff right now.
- nearbuy 3y agoI think you're trying to be overly technical about a rule that can be seen different ways. The subreddits that went private are effectively blocking everyone from viewing them. They're not still moderating some smaller community. You can call that vandalism or a legitimate action depending on your perspective, but I don't think you can say it's definitely not against the rules from an objective perspective.
- George83728 3y agoRules written by reddit are interpreted and enforced in whichever way is most convenient to reddit. You can't rules-lawyer your way to a positive resolution in such a scenario, they have all the power. "Stop quoting laws, we carry swords!" - Pompey
- max51 3y agoThey are not " still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community", they are shutting down their community for everyone. If you want to equate legal with morally good, the changes they are making to their API is technically not "breaking any rules" and banning all the mods that are shutting down subs would also not break any rules. Doesn't mean it was a good idea or that we should encourage it
- Loveaway 3y agoThis is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the Internet, to the rear end of the internet. You killed your babies, man. Antagonising your most loyal users, for what? Bit of cash? Are you guys starving or what?? Man idk. I hope San Francisco is doing good. This is supposed to be the city of hippies and love, but lately not so much good news coming out of there. It really makes me sad to see Reddit explode like this.
- Llamamoe 3y agoAll they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.
- JohnBooty 3y agoAll they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, Not a rhetorical question: have any companies done this successfully? It seems like such an obvious solution to me, but I haven't seen it mentioned. One possible shortcoming (from Reddit's perspective) is the fact that the official Reddit app doesn't just show ads, it also collects all sorts of other user behavior data. So for them it might be able more than simply showing ads. That's just a wild guess on my part, though.
- dx034 3y agoCan you really make that much money with behavior data? If that was the case, wouldn't we see more sites with few ads? I believe ads bring in the vast majority of money, behavior data helps ad targeting and can maybe sometimes bring in insignificant amounts as well.
- 3y ago
- celdon25 3y agoSpaz apparently said the opposite of this to the public media - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/reddit-says-it-won-t-overrule-mods-and-force-subreddits-back-open/ar-AA1cBvUP https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/reddit-says-it-won...
- buildbot 3y agoThis has pushed me into deleting all three of my reddit accounts. What a disgusting, yet expected move by the CEO. For what little my actions are worth, I will try very hard to void any products that continue to advertise on reddit as well.
- foreverobama 3y ago[dead]
- Takennickname 3y agoThis whole scuffle is reddit leadership fighting against the 1% Mods that moderate 99% of the subreddits. Everyone else is just a pawn. The mods are just jealous that reddit is gonna be making a lot of money and want a cut. Even though this looks like reddit vs the community, this is actually reddit vs the Mod 1%.
- lamontcg 3y agoNah, the winners will be the paid shills that will take over more subreddits of the idealists. Some of them probably participated in the 3 days or whatever it was of blackout so they look good to the rest of the users, but they're ultimately getting paid by PR corporations and they'll be ready with alts that will take over subreddits that go permanently private.
- goykasi 3y agoHow do we know that the current mods aren't paid shills also? This blackout would make a lot more sense if that were the case. They have to protect their bottom line, and the changes that reddit is enacting threatens their ability to operate.
- lamontcg 3y agoHalf of them are, that's what I'm saying. (And I really doubt that the professional mods won't find solutions to stay in business -- and they'll probably be happy with a certain amount of "regulatory capture" making it more difficult to be a mod if you're not able to pay a hundred bucks a month or so for tooling to make it easier -- they can just pass those costs of doing business on)
- goykasi 3y agoThats my bad. I misread that first part. Interestingly, reddit just released some numbers about bots using the API.[1] > fewer than 100 bots total (including both moderation and non-moderation bots) currently exceed our updated free API Rate ..... out of the thousands of moderation bots that exist, less than 20 exceed the updated rate limits Thats really interesting and shows that automated/bot moderation tools are almost completely unaffected by the API changes. I have a little bit less sympathy for the "free volunteers" of reddit. [1] https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309 https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
- ineedasername 3y agoMaybe it's this is an overdramatic analogy, but this approach is reminiscent of a standard playbook used by a new tyrant when they come to power: Claim to be acting for the greater good and populace as a whole. Decapitate leadership of existing institutions that resist, install willing collaborators in their places, do this in the name of the good of populace even though it's that "good" that the decapitated were attempting to preserve. One difference from the above is that the leadership is existing & simply turning tyrant. Otherwise the dynamic in Reddit is not completely dissimilar from that of any society: There are leaders at the top, sure, but the governing of that society-- and much of its value-- is derived from the consensual implicit social contract between those at the top and everyone on every level beneath that. Can Reddit survive if such actions prevail? Maybe, but other social platform have failed for lesser reasons. And between Reddit and Twitter, there hasn't been a time in more than a decade that could give a rapid acting disruptor such a ready opportunity to sweep in and clear the slate of existing platforms that have lost the plot on what makes them useful and valuable.
- est 3y agoI remember decades ago moderators suing a website (AOL or something?) for unpaid labor. Perhaps this time it's reddit's turn.
- jon_adler 3y agoWhy did reddit choose to charge app developers (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests instead of charging the end-users? By purchasing my own usage and loading an API key into Apollo, I could continue to pay Apollo for the app alone like today, and pay Reddit separately for the API access. At least this way, I could decide if I’m happy with the price for API access. I can only assume Reddit deliberately wanted to ruin the business model for third party apps.
- JohnBooty 3y agoWhy did reddit choose to charge app developers (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests instead of charging the end-users? Selfishly I almost wish this had been their course of action -- restrict API access to Reddit Gold members, or some such. Reddit Gold is $5.99/month, so 5-6x their average monthly income per user. Hell, they could just make it $2 a month. Source, not sure how reliable: https://sacra.com/c/reddit/ https://sacra.com/c/reddit/ One downside to this is that while $5.99/month is affordable to many, for other people (particularly those in other parts of the world) it is completely unaffordable. So, probably a no-go.
- scubadude 3y agoSeriously, brilliant approach. What a missed opportunity.
- Topgamer7 3y ago> I can only assume Reddit deliberately wanted to ruin the business model for third party apps. Yes, that was the only intention.
- raincole 3y agoYou overestimate how tech-savvy an average user is (by a huge margin). No one knows what an API is in real world. And no one is willing to pay just because they sees more than 100 images on r/funny in a short period. By "no one" I meant that kind of userbase is so small that if you design your site around them you can say goodbye to IPO.
- 3y ago
- an-allen 3y agoIts been a week now since I deleted reddit. I have 7.5 hours per week back! Amazing move, highly recommend.
- InCityDreams 3y ago14! I love it. I go for a walk every night now. Its actually a pretty cool world, the big room.
- Sparkyte 3y agoThat is a pretty toxic way. You should be safe voice opinion even if they are stupid. Not all things said are made with ill intentions. Not saying mods were stupid. Just if you have a forum people even mods will have different opinions. That is healthy.
- pacetherace 3y agoI like Reddit but I don’t think I will miss it. Good riddance.
- aaomidi 3y agoIf you're interested in fully saying goodbye to Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request - Request all of your data here. This will give you a copy of everything to have as a backup. This will also allow you to use something like https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit https://github.com/nixfu/reddit-shreddit to fully delete your reddit account (including comments, posts, etc).
- JanneVee 3y agoI have questions: The question for me is are they removing their unpaid labor which they found out can't control? What are they replacing it with more unpaid labor vying for power? Those who have two brain cells to rub together think that this going to end well for Reddit?
- theknocker 3y ago[dead]
- nosebear 3y agoPersonally, I couldn't care less about Reddit itself, but what's really annoying is that half of my Google searches end up in temporarily closed subreddits. Reddit has become some sort of a Stack Overflow lately - I hope all that knowledge will be moved somewhere else.
- Ekaros 3y agoThis really only makes me angry with these power hungry moderators throwing toddler like temper tantrums... Not with Reddit, with them it is the bad web site... I say just kick them out and get someone else. And if those are not good, repeat until it is acceptable.
- rem7 3y agoThis isn’t the moderators going rogue or being power hungry. The members of the community asked the moderators to extend the blackout. 48 hours is nothing. Easy for Reddit to ride it out.
- zuppy 3y agojust add “cache:” before the url (without the quotes, without any extra space), most of the time it works. it should go to google cache in most browsers.
- Aachen 3y agoAren't they on the internet archive?
- dogcomplex 3y agoPosting here to commemorate this moment as the point of no return - they've been downhill for a while. Looking forward to the future where all of their content is strip mined into an open source encrypted blockchain hosted app that gives zero shits about their copyrights and acts as if this never happened. They never deserved to own the communities on there to begin with. Burn in hell, idiots
- Giorgi 3y agoI am trying to care but years of abuse makes me think - go for it!
- guywithahat 3y agoThis has been happening as long as I can remember. The funniest story I'm aware of is r/libertarian, where the admins removed the mod because he supported a laissez-faire moderation method. He'd go days without logging on and wouldn't take on more moderators, insisting people should be free to upvote or downvote as they please
- Daz1 3y agoThe day of the mop is here
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- enachtry 3y agoHow many of Twitter's employees were convinced their company fights some righteous, on-the-right-side-of-history global battle? (Mind you: Global! It wasn't just US.) And then investors cashed out, Musk came in and discarded said employees like they were (less than) nothing. It's the same story here, maybe a bit sadder since these mods are not even employees. They lost their time for nothing. They don't even have human connections with most anyone else since they are all anonymous and physically removed from each other. If Reddit pulls the plug all they are left with is a belief they did the right thing by wasting years to push the agenda of a corporation that showed them in absolute terms they mean nothing. Moderation on Reddit became increasingly extremist after Trump took office in 2016. Sleazy tactics, heavy (shadow)banning of users, obscene mod & admin power trips, all perpetrated away from the public eye. There is no reliable evidence of just how much speech suppression and censorship Reddit does in practice. As someone who's been there for ~15 years, I promise you, if your regular, wide eyed, naive redditor who thinks the "communities" (a feel good word that means next to nothing in context) are all ponies and rainbows, would actually see how much abuse Reddit does day to day, the site would collapse in a week. So now Reddit wipes its feet on some mods to make them toe the line even better than before. So what? If this gigantic Stanford experiment is killed off the world will be a better place without the shadow of a doubt. I'm really sorry so many people take these companies at face value and gladly participate in clobbering the people who've been abused and tell their story. It's utterly disgusting and I'm heavily pro legislation to force social media companies with more than X users to keep public logs of censorship (with ids for both who applied suppression and to whom). This way the situation can be examined by any 3rd party and legal action can be taken more easily against these companies that exert immense influence on societies with zero oversight. If no social company can exist while enduring legal consequences for their actions then none should.
- ummonk 3y agoWell. That’s that for Reddit. Where is the best alternative? Stackexchange?
- timbit42 3y agoLemmy or kbin. There are also web forums.
- ssnistfajen 3y agoReddit has removed rogue moderators from time to time, so the precedents have been set. This was always a clearly visible outcome for any moderator who had paid attention to admin-mod interactions at any point over the last 5-9 years. The seemingly secure status of moderators is a cultural artifact, not a technical one. The moment the liabilty of unpaid community volunteers outweights the benefit, Reddit will not hesitate to remove said volunteers. Ultimately, this platform belongs to Reddit itself, and large communities have been diluted to the point where average users don't care about community ownership long ago.
- speedz007 3y agoAll you 'Web3' people, this is your chance to build something actually useful.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y agoI personally can’t take HN seriously on the topic of reddit because the site loves capitalism, and yet it’s now opposing exactly what a good capitalist would do to boost its own profits and eliminate the competition. What a reactionary echo chamber full of inexpert takes this site has become.
- andresp 3y agoSeems like a reasonable decision to me. Moderators are not owners.
- 1attice 3y agoThe lesson from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit has in each case been identical: Platform ownership matters. If you invest your time into a platform which someone else owns, they can devalue your investment at any time, on whim. Or they could sell it to a billionaire ideologue who is angry at his daughter. I don't know what the future will look like, but I do know this: we will all be much more careful about how we spend our time, and what kind of control we have over the future of that investment. Finally, a quick note of historical precedent: This is not a new problem. Musicians, writers, and artists have been dealing with exploitative contracts for a literal century. What's new is that the 'creator economy' has democratized not just content creation, but also creator exploitation. We are all Ke$ha now, in a sense.
- mjfl 3y agoI laugh, as a conservative who was on the receiving end of these tactics 2 years ago. You reap what you sow.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoFunny seeing everyone who cheered the mass censorship these past few years realize they’re just cattle to the Reddit owners. Had free speech stayed a pillar of Reddit (and the internet in general), a Reddit replacement would have been much easier to come to fruition.
- Roark66 3y agoSeriously, people should've moved their communities to self-hosting already (while they still had control over them). Once the original moderators are booted new ones can simply remove any announcements like this. It is unfortunate we're witnessing the fall of reddit, but at the end of the day it's a private owned site. If they want to destroy it for the few extra bucks it might bring them it's their right to do so.
- onimishra 3y agoIt’s fun to consider this from his perspective. He has essentially pushed all-in on this and now he has no way of backing out. If this is all about getting ready for IPO, then he can’t back out, because that would show potential future investors that he is not in control of policy changes, and that means that when shareholders want to crank up the money making machine, they can’t. At the same time, he needs to show that the site can continue and take a minimal hit to revenue when such protests happen. He will never back down, as this is essentially a battle test to show the strength of the platform for investors after the IPO. It’s an all or nothing play. If revenue takes a hit after all this and doesn’t recover, then Reddit is now worth half. If it does recover, Reddit is much more stable than first anticipated and is now worth double. Right now, he is pretty confident that the outcome will be the latter.
- cheeseface 3y agoAgreed. Seems to me that the whole thing is about getting good growth numbers on paper before the IPO. He’s not interested in the long term success of the platform, but trying to get a successful exit.
- onimishra 3y agoIt’s funny - he is part of the founding team and had been working on Reddit for 18 years. Maybe his just tired of it all and wants to do something else, so the IPO can not come soon enough He must have cared about the user and the platform at some point, or else we wouldn’t have gotten this far Or who knows - maybe there’s been a power shift at Reddit that made what we’re seeing possible…
- seydor 3y agoIf the customers can shut down the company arbitrarily, then what's the point of investing in it? Of course they should make it a rule that mods are not allowed to shut down their main channels. Otherwise, Reddit should IPO and then demand that all users buy a share. Users who don't are deleted. Then let the shareholders-users figure out how to make good on their investment
- blindriver 3y agoIf the moderators really want to take it out on reddit, they should "quiet quit" and start letting in more spam, brigading, and basically destroy the subreddit from the inside, and recreate it on another site.
- AlexandrB 3y agoYup, this would have been an interesting approach. Just let everything through and let god sort it out.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThe referenced "Moderator Code of Conduct", apparently effective as of 8 September 2022: <https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct>
- gliiics 3y agoThey know they need these communities un-privated asap, because as soon as search engines start reindexing their ranking will take a huge hit (therefore guest users, therefore ad revenue). At the same time they have shown no interest in listening to what the community wants. They are Digg-ing their grave.
- dotcoma 3y agoFacebook trashed $30 B in a ‘metaverse’ nobody gives a shit about and forgot to add legs to avatars. Twitter was sold off to Heil Musk. Reddit after almost 20 years without turning a profit all of a sudden decided to monetise everything and is at war with their community. Am I wrong if I say that the era of social media is at long last coming to a close ?
- paganel 3y agoJust love the mods' meltdown.
- ostenning 3y agoIn my view reddit went down the gurgler years ago. The webapp is slow garbage now and I refuse to install any app because I have a feeling they are trying to extract user data.
- radar1310 3y agoThis reminds of a a bunch of 12 year olds in a school yard taking their ball and going home. The maturity level of this CEO is shocking. And aome of the moderators can’t be much older than 12 in the way they have acted. So unprofessional and so unnecessary.
- wnkrshm 3y agoYour analogy isn't complete. The analogy is more like: 12 year olds playing a soccer tournament that draws a crowd and the people owning the yard are selling drinks and showing ads.
- urbandw311er 3y ago“We’re doing this out of a duty to protect the millions who rely on these subreddits” No you’re not! You’re so obviously not. Just say it’s to protect your business. The profit-driven behaviour I can stomach (it is their company after all) it’s the bullshit spin that upsets me.
- bondolo 3y agoI'm a reddit moderator of subs both enormous and tiny. I've been frustrated for years by the core subs being taken over by various cabals of power users. Some like the power, some do it to push a particular agenda, and I am pretty sure some are doing it for financial gain. Reddit has been hands off (which is why /r/trees is not about trees) and made things worse (which is why mods of top subs is so concentrated among a small group). This is a turn for the much, much worse. I imagine that this will result in even tighter consolidation of moderation of the big subs in an even smaller set of people with a stronger devil's bargain between them. It is going to devolve in to reddit and "pro"-moderators simultaneously loathing, sabotaging and undermining each other and depending on each other at the same time.
- Vayl 3y agoI've been an active Reddit user for at least 13 years now. Now I'm actively looking for an alternative.
- Ringz 3y agoHistory repeats.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iLoveOncall 3y agoGood. Nobody should be able to destroy a community of millions just because they got became moderators years ago, without community consultation.
- jacquesm 3y agoOf course they did. What else did you expect? The thing that I find interesting is that Reddit moderators are apparently not above weaponizing the community but seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. If something doesn't change then Reddit is dead, so from the managements point of view all they've done is increased the problems rather than reduced them. It's super easy to criticize the Reddit management for their inability to articulate what is going on behind the scenes but in my view that only means that there is no good news. Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse. So reducing the ability of the moderators to revolt is a first logical step in the direction of stability, which is where they will need to go. Spez should step down, he's made way too many unforced errors. But the assumption that another manager will be able to dig(g) Reddit out of this hole is quite possibly not valid.
- joshstrange 3y ago> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on the record would be a good start as well. > Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. Bullshit. Reddit is horrible overstaffed and the last numbers we have are from 2021 when they made $350M. If you can’t run a site with an all volunteer mod staff for $350,000,000 a year then you have no business in tech. > Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse. Won’t anyone think of the poor company making over $350M a year? Spare me.
- jacquesm 3y agoThen maybe you should go and run it. Making 350 million per year for a site of this magnitude is pocket change because it's revenue not profit and costs are pretty high. Of course everybody criticizing the team believes they can do a Twitter and run Reddit with 150 people but Reddit is a lot more to a lot more people than Twitter ever was. Those people also probably believe that they can rebuild it in a weekend. Or two. Cutting API costs in half will not change the amount of noise that is being made because for many $0 would be too much. Agreed about the lying though, that shouldn't have happened and it disqualifies the current leadership. But be careful about making too many assumptions about what it's like to run a property at this scale, costs and labor wise.
- progx 3y agoDeleted my account.
- shp0ngle 3y agoThis could be all avoided by doing app that isn't horrible? People use Apollo because the Reddit app is horrible.
- marlanbar 3y agoWith the fall of reddit, the wikis are the last refuge for communities on the internet
- timbit42 3y agoWe could go back to web forums, like phpBB, etc.
- nindalf 3y agoWhat makes me really sad was there was a way around this. Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly , Reddits monthly revenue per user is $0.12 at best. They were demanding $2.50 per user per month from third party apps. A simpler solution - “users who want to use third party apps need to pay Reddit $6/month directly by subscribing to Reddit premium”. That would have raised way more revenue! And people would have understood as well. They can pay for the premium experience of using a third party client or they can use the free official client. Win Win! Except, this isn’t about the cost of running the API for private users (the aforementioned lie). Reddit the company feels aggrieved that they aren’t being paid by OpenAI and others when they’re training models on some of the most high quality, up to date, moderated, on topic training data generated by Reddit users. Which is fair enough, that’s worth waaay more than $6/month. But surely that could be resolved through rate limits and a licensing contract signed by the LLM companies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sebstefan 3y agoI'm not sure how that would work for third party projects that are just front ends hosted on a github page, like reddit as outlook (https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/ https://one-loop.github.io/redlookit/). The requests are made by the users themselves there, we can't give them an api key. We can do a "login with reddit" button approach, show them an iFrame so they can enter their user/password safely and grant us the rights to use their premium to make requests on our web page and such. The iFrame would need to be passed a nonce so we can ask reddit for updates on the user's login process and get a session token at the end, but even then although we've offloaded all the user data handling to reddit, at minima we can leak the session token to some server we own, and get to use their account's session to do whatever the permissions we asked for allow us to do including scrap reddit on their dime We used to just be able to get the read-only stuff for free and we never needed to ask users to log in or to have an account... I wish they could just load ads in their API responses and kindly ask us to load them in the middle of the posts. We would. But I have a feeling that no advertiser would be OK having their product displayed on third party pages
- Corrado 3y agoSo, is it time for Yahoo! 2.0 yet? Years ago I read a blog post talking about the next big ideas (Joel Spolsky?) and the one that stood out was a new search engine. At the time I thought it was a crazy idea; who|what would|could replace Google?! Now, I'm not so sure the idea was crazy at all. The Reddit discussions over the past few days have got me thinking about how a lot of folks interact with it, and not just as a forum. Yahoo! was great in it's time because it was human moderated. Maybe we can get back to that by building a search engine out of Reddit style discussions, kinda like micro "search engines". Or maybe I just described Stack Exchange. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- redog 3y ago> Maybe we can get back to that by building a search engine out of Reddit style discussions, kinda like micro "search engines". dude what rock have you been under? you just described chatGPT
- sylware 3y agoHow do we access reddit with noscript/basic (x)html browsers?
- sharts 3y agoBahahaha! Not your bits, not your rights!
- hakube 3y agoSo the protests are working. Hmmmmm
- amadeuspagel 3y agoSome quotes from "sorted by controversial"[1], an amazing feature that I wish HN had as well: > This is great news. Can Spez replace the r/NBA mods. Those losers need to be taught a lesson. Shutting down a huge sub with 8K votes on a hidden poll during the NBA FINALS. PATHETIC. ### > Mods are free to run their communities the way they see fit within the boundaries of the rules that apply Reddit Wide. > So no, this does not contradict standing policies. Free to run their communities means you as a user can either agree with the rules they state in their communities or not join. > If you want to talk policies, don't forget about this one... Reddit Content Policy: Rule 8 > Don't break the site or do anything that interferes with normal use of the site. Do not interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code onto reddit, (or) make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your actions,...... > https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043512931 https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/36004351293... > Reddit admins would be fully within their rights to remove moderators who don't even want to stop, just for the fact they are blocking users from freely accessing their own content in the communities they participate in. ### > If I can be voted out of my community that I created, and built for almost 10 years I will delete every fucking thing and quit this site for good. I will not stand to be overthrown because reddit administration decided to have a pissing match with mods and give all our control to the community. If I let the community run my sub from the beginning I wouldn’t have a sub. I kept it to a standard and that is largely why it has succeeded. I’m not saying I’m the only one that can moderate that sub, but I am the only one with the original vision. If it comes to this I will delete everything and let the next person create it’s replacement. I found it particularly fascinating that this one got downvoted, when I thought that it was in line with the group think. I guess redditors actually like the idea of voting out mods, but are in too much of an anti-management mood right now? [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin_post_if_a_moderator_team_unanimously/?sort=controversial https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...
- akagusu 3y agoIf people cared about society the same way they care about reddit the world would be a much better place.
- AHOHA 3y agoRight!? Tells you a lot about our current pathetic narrow minded society, “Reddit mods!!” my arse, I need to see the same movement for bigger issues like housing, homelessness, low wages and others.
- someonewhocar3s 3y ago[dead]
- drefinel 3y ago[flagged]
- captainbland 3y agoWith the direction they're going, they'll just get rid of volunteer moderators entirely and instead lean on contract moderator farms like Facebook etc. It's a more expensive option for sure but it gives them the most power and the least pushback against further revenue raising measures.
- toldyouso2022 3y agoForums should be owned by individuals and scattered all around the web. If the State doesn't intervene I think we will go back to a more sane, free internet very soon
- web3-is-a-scam 3y agoPeople trying to cite the reddit policy as if it’s some kind of law or constitution. They will change their policies or just straight up ignore it if they want. Lmfao
- notyourday 3y agoGood for reddit. Subreddits aren't moderators personal fiefdoms.
- gibbonsrcool 3y agoI’ve had such bad experiences with Reddit mods I’m cheering this on.
- atroxone 3y agoIn the end Reddit will be a better place, with less activists deleting all your posts because they don't like them To be honest i think Reddit would be better without mods and an automatic system to remove heavy spam
- Etheryte 3y agoThis makes no sense. Reddit already makes heavy use of automatic systems to limit spam, if they could do without human moderators they would, but they cannot.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoA comment I posted recently about protesting mods transitioning to a quiet quitting approach became far more relevant: Preserve plausible deniability so reddit admins don't have reason to oust you. Quiet quit your moderation essentially. Pressed by an admin? Say "I've found a more hands off moderation style to be more effective" They key is to let things go to crap but to also take away the easiest solution of replacing protester moderators. It should be chaos. Threatened by an admin? Go public, post you no longer support the protest as a sticky, link them to it, 24 hours go private again while they bother the next protestor mod. Nothing would scare advertisers away more than having tons of "rogue" mods across the top 500 subreddits who could "turn protester" at any time (and do).
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoI guess it's too late to say: Don't trust Steve Huffmann.
- voisin 3y agoReddit: You’re fired! Mods: We don’t even work here.
- smashah 3y agoThis is the result of shamelessness seeping into business. That contrarian business thinking that does away with any pretense of putting anything other than money first. Also, this idea of charging for API access is lazy and unimaginative.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ppeetteerr 3y agoI'm surprised to keep hearing that charging for API is lazy and bad for a business. They can do whatever they want with their API and price their services as they see fit. Reddit isn't going anywhere because it's a good product for the end user. It's expensive to run and unfeathered access to their content was part of their acquisition strategy. Now they want to go public and want to be a real business. I'm with Reddit on this decision. OpenAI is a multi-billion dollar company because of them. Does charging for API calls hurt small app developers? Absolutely. Nothing is free forever.
- anaganisk 3y agoSam Altman is on the board of Reddit, with all the peddling he is doing with US congress to limit other companies from building a "competitor", I think he is the one putting pressure on Reddit to stop API access, to hinder others. I wouldn't even be surprised if that was true.
- rndmwlk 3y agoAn ironic sentiment considering Reddit is entirely reliant upon free labor of both moderators and users who upload content to provide any experience whatsoever. Reddit is, at the moment, purposely expensive to run. They could have chosen to be a much smaller operation and act as stewards, but they want to turn a Craigslist into a Facebook. OpenAI will get the data one way or another. Frankly they’ve probably got about as much data from Reddit as they need. The user base isn’t against Reddit moving to monetize and they aren’t sympathetic with OpenAI getting a free ride, these are weak strawmen. There were ways to accomplish both of these goals that wouldn’t involve this change, but their real goal here is to kill off 3PA and it’s very transparent.
- cm2012 3y agoGood! 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.
- 0goel0 3y ago[dead]
- parrellel 3y agoReddit is also undeleting deleted user content. Now I need to burn my account again. I am not pleased.
- jesuspiece 3y agoLol we all knew this would happen
- JaceLightning 3y agoDuh. Reddit owns the code. They can flip on any site they want to. "going dark" has no real power.
- jimmydddd 3y agoSerious question. How much time per week do moderators spend providing free labor for Reddit? Why do they do it? Is it like a fun hobby?
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]
- AwaAwa 3y agoI don't understand why anyone thinks this is surprising at this point. Trust them when they say your opinion means mud.
- loyukfai 3y agoWhat's the best alternative?
- timbit42 3y agoLemmy or kbin
- dtx1 3y agoMy personal guess whats going on: Spez got a fixed target of mobile users he needs to reach to cash out and killing 3rd party apps to force users to migrate might just get him there. This is not substantiated in any way but is my guess why this is happening.
- dcchambers 3y agoHuffman's lack of empathy is jarring.
- cush 3y agoIt's like they're following a playbook on how to burn a company to the ground
- ectospheno 3y agoPeaceful protests are virtue signaling. The appearance of doing something and caring without actual effort or change. That people are astonished at the return of the status quo afterwards shows how little thought is put into their execution or chance of achieving goals.
- iaw 3y agoI think Huffman is falling into a trap that Kanye and Mark Zuckerberg have fallen into: trying to prove he's special. Kanye rose to fame as a young genius rapper/producer/designer and was acclaimed repeatedly. Zuckerberg rose to fame as a brilliant business twenty-something (according to the world around). They spent half their life being praised and told they're important, brilliant, special, prescient, etc. So they are confident they can prove it again. Kanye is doing.... something strange now. Zuckerberg tanked the stock price with VR/Metaverse and then juked it by firing a chunk of the company. They are so confident something intrinsic in them makes their choices special and 'right,' that they can see something no one else can. Huffman et al. were at the right place and right time with a LAMP(?) stack when Digg imploded. Now he wants to prove that it's not "right place right time" but that he is special.
- idkyall 3y agoLook, I'm not the biggest Mark Zuckerberg fan or anything, but I don't think the thus-far questionable business decision to pivot to the metaverse is quite the same level as having an very public mental breakdown and making anti-semitic remarks
- aprdm 3y agoYeah exactly. I have issues with what social media does to people and some of what Mark has done.. but he is nowhere near my level of despise for Musk, Kanye or others in that circle.
- kulahan 3y agoKanye is suffering from mental illness and was off his medication while simultaneously having millions of dollars, adoring fans, and cameras in his face 24/7/365. I think most of us would do something stupid in that situation. I don't really get why you would "despise" someone for being ill.
- aprdm 3y agoI doubt most of us would support exterminating people if we were sick, but who knows
- robotburrito 3y agoLife has been nicer without Reddit. The last few days opened my eyes. I could actually just enjoy SF without having /r/sanfrancisco convince me that I don't live in the pleasant place I see out my window, but rather a mad max style dystopian hell hole that is worse than most war torn nations. The detox has been nice. I think many others may feel the same.
- cand0r 3y agoSame. HN has been my replacement for now. I'll look into Lemmy, but it's nice here.
- aprdm 3y agoI gave up on twitter because of musk, and will now give up on Reddit. What’s left ? I like hacker news for tech and went back to Facebook for city groups, which are way better than all the doom in reddit city subs anyways
- bowenjin 3y agoWhy not just allow 3rd party app usage only for those who have reddit gold active?
- jk_i_am_a_robot 3y agoBuilding a user community of Reddit's size is not something the CEO could reproduce or even repair if severely damaged which is something I think they've lost sight of.
- maxslch 3y agoIt's time we start building/switching to a decentralized social network. I'm an experienced product designer who always aiming for the best there is for a human, open to commit to something like that.
- tristanbvk 3y agoAnother useless website goes to its grave. I am much happier touching grass, always been voluntary - now many more can touch grass with me.
- znxster 3y agoHuffman should have just come out and said "we cannot support third-party apps using our API any more, we are losing money on them, so they need to go". The constant BS is where the issue lies.
- HariPavan 3y agoWhat reddit is doing is crazy and it will face consequences for it.
- null_rout3 3y ago[flagged]
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]