It's wild to me how this is a great litmus test of the morals and beliefs of the moderators of reddit. Like, I found out from this whole thing that while /r/gaming is the bare minimum of content,...
It's wild to me how this is a great litmus test of the morals and beliefs of the moderators of reddit.
Like, I found out from this whole thing that while /r/gaming is the bare minimum of content, at least the mods are shutting it down. Meanwhile, /r/games has went full "ACTUALLY IT'S NOT ENOUGH SO WE'RE DOING NOTHING" and it's just like... alright, well, that's one sub not worth supporting at any point ever again.
That’s interesting considering Deimos started /r/games to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/gaming. I don’t sub to either though, so I can’t speak to the current culture or mod...
That’s interesting considering Deimos started /r/games to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/gaming. I don’t sub to either though, so I can’t speak to the current culture or mod teams. Or am I remembering wrong?
And then somebody started /r/truegaming to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/games. The excuse of "there's news coming out so we can't shut down" is so fucking weak, too.
And then somebody started /r/truegaming to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/games.
The excuse of "there's news coming out so we can't shut down" is so fucking weak, too.
I've taken 3 of my subs private already (I'm sole mod of these since they're small). For the last one, the largest of the subs I mod, we're planning to do the 48hr. I need to talk with my co-mod...
I've taken 3 of my subs private already (I'm sole mod of these since they're small). For the last one, the largest of the subs I mod, we're planning to do the 48hr. I need to talk with my co-mod if we want to extend indefinitely; I'd like to, but we'll see.
In that largest one, someone brought up that "but this subreddit is an important service." If it's so important, then why are admins limiting the ways people can access our sub?
The argument came up in /r/sysadmin, as well. "This site is basically mission critical to my job!" If you're relying that heavily on reddit for your job, you've got bigger problems, people...
r/povertyfinance decided that crisis intervention was more important than the protest and I don't really blame them. I would feel the same way about r/stopdrinking, or if there was a suicide...
r/povertyfinance decided that crisis intervention was more important than the protest and I don't really blame them. I would feel the same way about r/stopdrinking, or if there was a suicide prevention subreddit. But it's a high bar.
I admit, I forgot about subreddits like that. That definitely makes sense in those cases. I saw someone who was a mod of a mental health subreddit talking about how they supported the protests,...
I admit, I forgot about subreddits like that. That definitely makes sense in those cases. I saw someone who was a mod of a mental health subreddit talking about how they supported the protests, but couldn't take the sub private. People were very supportive of that. These particular subreddits and communities are providing real services and help to people where it might literally be a matter of life or death.
But for news & discussion subreddits? Entertainment subreddits? Conversational subreddits? Adult content subreddits? There's no real reason to not go dark. I mod news subreddits; we're going dark.
I don't want to exactly castigate mods and communities who choose not to go private. I do think it's a decision that every subreddit needs to make on their own, either by the mods, the community, or both.
But like someone else in this thread said, it reeks of ego and self-importance when they say "We can't shut down! People need their news!" when the news is gaming/entertainment related or even it if is more important like politics. As if other media outlets don't exist on the Internet. If communities don't want to participate because they think it's dumb, it's not the right fight, it's performative, admins are giving us what we want/need, etc, then say that. They'll still piss people off, but you'll never satisfy everyone. Might as well be truthful about it.
There are certain subs that have very good reasons for not shutting down, and r/ukraine is certainly one of them. I hadn't thought of r/povertyfinance or r/stopdrinking, but those would make sense...
There are certain subs that have very good reasons for not shutting down, and r/ukraine is certainly one of them. I hadn't thought of r/povertyfinance or r/stopdrinking, but those would make sense too.
The amount of times I google a product and add "reddit" after it to get actual reviews and discussion about it really speaks to the fact that it's so integral to grassroots genuine internet...
"This site is basically mission critical to my job!" If you're relying that heavily on reddit for your job, you've got bigger problems, people...
The amount of times I google a product and add "reddit" after it to get actual reviews and discussion about it really speaks to the fact that it's so integral to grassroots genuine internet discussion. It sucks.
It feels like we're seeing a trend where some of the places that traffic consolidated to on the internet (Twitter, Reddit) are fraying. Would YouTube be next?
It feels like we're seeing a trend where some of the places that traffic consolidated to on the internet (Twitter, Reddit) are fraying. Would YouTube be next?
Unlikely as video hosting is actually very expensive. Alternative content platforms, like Nebula and CuriosityStream, exist but they’re very niche and even many of the people on them still post...
Unlikely as video hosting is actually very expensive. Alternative content platforms, like Nebula and CuriosityStream, exist but they’re very niche and even many of the people on them still post content to YouTube because that’s where most of the traffic is.
Reddit and Twitter and the like are easily substitutable with other time wastes. But YouTube is somewhat unique and hard to replicate.
IIRC Youtube STILL isn't directly profitable. I'm sure it's a huge boon for other sectors, but it says something when you have traffic in the trillions and you still can't break even on ads (and a...
IIRC Youtube STILL isn't directly profitable. I'm sure it's a huge boon for other sectors, but it says something when you have traffic in the trillions and you still can't break even on ads (and a few subscriptions).
The other factor is monetizing creators. I don't think any other (English) video hosting site could even afford that, let alone has it as a feature. Only streaming platforms (which don't store anywhere near as much long term data). Many creators do it full time and I don't think their other channels of monetization could justify a move off YT, even if by some miracle all their audience was elsewhere.
It's hard finding exact figures, but my source for that is very old. a 2015 WSJ article had an employee says that YT breaks even. Then in 2021 I don't explicitly see any source saying it's...
It's hard finding exact figures, but my source for that is very old. a 2015 WSJ article had an employee says that YT breaks even.
Then in 2021 I don't explicitly see any source saying it's proitable, but many saying it's profit margins rose to +30%. So I guess in the last 5 years or so there was a point where it really made profit. But it was noted that YT's profit margins are lower than other huge sites. FB for example as +80%.
I agree. You don't solve an abusive relationship by walking away for two days. You leave forever. If the mods of several thousand subreddits all did this... Turn off all spam filtering Disable...
I agree. You don't solve an abusive relationship by walking away for two days. You leave forever.
If the mods of several thousand subreddits all did this...
Turn off all spam filtering
Disable minimum karma requirements
Allow all posts, disable all rules
Unban all banned users
Purge all allowed submitters
Turn off AutoModerator, Scrub all configs
Delete all CSS and uploaded images/maps
Blank all sidebars, Delete all flairs
Allow NSFW content, Enable sub's content on /all
Disable and permanently remove all third party mod tools and bots
Set the sub's color scheme on mobile to something vomit-inducing
Vandalize all of the text options such as the sub's topic listing
That would cripple reddit for months while they try to put it all back together, and they couldn't manage to do that even with divine intervention and a map. The spammers and trolls and brigades would eat them alive. The problem is, that won't save reddit. It'll just kill it. Frankly I think it is well past saving. The userbase rot is terminal regardless of what mods and admins do.
I say let them have their free speech paradise. It'll teach the internet a lesson.
AutoMod config, CSS, and old reddit sidebar all have wiki-style version control, so those could all be rolled back with relative ease. Tedious, but not starting from scratch and they could also...
AutoMod config, CSS, and old reddit sidebar all have wiki-style version control, so those could all be rolled back with relative ease. Tedious, but not starting from scratch and they could also probably automate the roll-backs on their end, if they needed to.
It would still be a huge hassle, but I also wouldn't be surprised if reddit did some snapshot backups of subreddit configs prior to this weekend (especially after that AMA).
I'm not sure that spez will let anything stand between him and that IPO, at this point, no matter how many bridges he has to burn to get there. Once the IPO happens, spez will cash out and all of it will be someone else's problem.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I thought there was a delete option for the revisions in the wiki. In fact I know one can purge wiki pages - I just don't know if it can be done for Automod's page, as...
Maybe I'm misremembering but I thought there was a delete option for the revisions in the wiki. In fact I know one can purge wiki pages - I just don't know if it can be done for Automod's page, as that's a special case. One could also load up sabotaged configs and leave reddit's staff wondering which one to restore, would've worked better with more lead time. Rollbacks take time, and the trolls won't waste any putting the worst content right at the top of the site. They are going to have to manage that and putting it all back together at the same time, and trolls could do this outside of normal business hours for peak pain. They can't fix things if they are all home asleep. All of that is a lot worse than a harmless little blackout.
If your users revolt, there is nothing you can do in the end though - nothing at all. You are along for the ride when that happens, because the social effect is stronger, smarter, and faster to move than any tech component of a social software system. The system will always be at the mercy of the users.
That's the real question, isn't it? Does this bother the users enough to provoke that kind of activity? We'll know soon.
Thinking that the volatility of the sites user base will certainly hurt the valuation for the IPO. I wonder how investors feel about it. Stock market is all about feelings (mostly).
Thinking that the volatility of the sites user base will certainly hurt the valuation for the IPO. I wonder how investors feel about it. Stock market is all about feelings (mostly).
I keep imagining a guy in a nice suit trying to perform well in a job interview, with 1000 screaming children behind him throwing shit on the walls and lighting fires. Like...sir, why do your...
I keep imagining a guy in a nice suit trying to perform well in a job interview, with 1000 screaming children behind him throwing shit on the walls and lighting fires. Like...sir, why do your children hate you so much, and seem to want you to fail? It's a situation that inspires questions.
That's true, but people have really short memories and I'm sure Elon will do something else controversial before reddit's IPO. I'm pretty sure they timed this announcement so that most of it will...
That's true, but people have really short memories and I'm sure Elon will do something else controversial before reddit's IPO. I'm pretty sure they timed this announcement so that most of it will have blown over and it won't be a concern for investors.
Reddit has actually done a pretty good job of staying out of the headlines for quite a while, and they can spin this to investors as people being upset about reddit no longer giving away free lunches to third-party apps.
And I think investors will look more kindly at this than they would at how reddit was supporting their own app's direct competitors.
No worries! And I wholeheartedly agree. The 3 subs I mod solely are dark indefinitely. But they have like 500-2000 subscribers each. We don't even get daily posts in any of those, so like your...
No worries! And I wholeheartedly agree. The 3 subs I mod solely are dark indefinitely. But they have like 500-2000 subscribers each. We don't even get daily posts in any of those, so like your sub, it's not going to have a huge impact.
Over at r/missouripolitics, which is already private and is the "big" sub where I am top mod of 2 mods, I'd very much like to go indefinite. But my co-mod and I haven't talked about going indefinitely. I did put something in the stickied announcement that it could go on longer. So the community and my co-mod are aware that the option is available. But, it too, is a smaller subreddit. Only like 6300 subscribers. There's daily activity, but still. I doubt there's even a single user who comes solely or even mainly for our sub.
I've also signed out of the site and on Apollo already. Trying to not use reddit for the next couple of days; we'll see how that goes.
The largest subreddits need to stay dark indefinitely. It seems that some are planning to do that, or at least beyond the initial two days. Adopting a wait and see approach. And that's heartening. Hopefully more will, even if causes reddit admins to force the issue. As you said, reddit is the admins' site. They can throw open the gates of any sub that's indefinitely dark and remove and replace the mods. Let them do it. I think it's a bad idea for admins to do that, but we've seen that admins love pursuing bad ideas!
r/sysadmin is usually about complaining about work. It's great for career advice from old hands, and for commiseration. r/networking and r/cisco occasionally have really interesting technical...
r/sysadmin is usually about complaining about work. It's great for career advice from old hands, and for commiseration. r/networking and r/cisco occasionally have really interesting technical topics and industry gossip.
Out of all communities, the technical groups should support accessibility and open communication.
None of them would cause any problems by going offline for a day. But supporting open communication is fundamental to the internet.
Like I said, litmus test. It's obviously not the end-all be-all, but it proves that people high-in-power in certain subreddits aren't willing to do the bare minimum. Look at /r/baseball, they're...
Like I said, litmus test. It's obviously not the end-all be-all, but it proves that people high-in-power in certain subreddits aren't willing to do the bare minimum.
Look at /r/baseball, they're not shutting down and I imagine there's some behind-the-scenes drama about it. There's a huge protest for the Oakland Athletics that they're using their sub to coordinate, and /r/baseball shutting down and redirecting everyone to the A's sub would be incredible, but they're not. And now at least one mod who has been around for forever is stepping down.
I’m hugely into all the sports subreddits, and sadly, most of them are taking a very weak stance on this situation. Even when I was mod, those mod teams existed more in isolation from the rest of...
I’m hugely into all the sports subreddits, and sadly, most of them are taking a very weak stance on this situation. Even when I was mod, those mod teams existed more in isolation from the rest of the mod community, so I’m not exactly surprised.
It makes sense from the fact that a lot of reddit's core interests 10-15 years ago, when most subreddits were created, was around things like technology and "old school" internet mentality. And...
It makes sense from the fact that a lot of reddit's core interests 10-15 years ago, when most subreddits were created, was around things like technology and "old school" internet mentality. And most of those people had no interest in sports. So between the "casual" communities and uninterested-in-hard-moral-stances moderators, the end result is no one on them really cares.
And I guess that's good for reddit, because those people are the ones that will consume reddit's content without questioning anything. The "casual" users.
Just using /r/soccer as an example, they put it to a community vote rather than taking a stance, and the user base is strongly in favor of an indefinite protest.
Ha! The sport has pretty strong working class roots. Most of the time when a club raises their ticket prices or does something that's a blatant cash grab, fans will protest. It seems like there's...
But as a counterpoint, r/woodworking has shut down entirely for the foreseeable future. Reddit admin could install new mods and open it, but they are losing that history and expertise.
But as a counterpoint, r/woodworking has shut down entirely for the foreseeable future. Reddit admin could install new mods and open it, but they are losing that history and expertise.
I missed the thread that said they were shutting down, so I'm not sure where everyone migrated. Is it just discord? The woodworking communities on Lemmy are pretty dead
I missed the thread that said they were shutting down, so I'm not sure where everyone migrated. Is it just discord? The woodworking communities on Lemmy are pretty dead
/r/truegaming actually existed before /r/Games, but it was self-post-only and only allowed a narrow set of topics. The original reason for /r/Games was to have a "general" gaming subreddit that...
/r/truegaming actually existed before /r/Games, but it was self-post-only and only allowed a narrow set of topics. The original reason for /r/Games was to have a "general" gaming subreddit that wasn't completely dominated by memes, "DAE remember this gem?" and so on.
I'm not in this instance criticizing Deimos at all, as /r/games far predates my arrival on reddit, but during my brief attempt (years ago) to engage with that community it always felt to me to...
I'm not in this instance criticizing Deimos at all, as /r/games far predates my arrival on reddit, but during my brief attempt (years ago) to engage with that community it always felt to me to have a remarkably unfriendly vibe, and to be endemic with people arguing and behaving in bad faith. I chose at the time not to stay subscribed. /r/truegaming has been my subreddit of choice for the occasional game-related ramble (the only other gaming subreddit I subscribe to is /r/patientgamers , and I'm happy to see both of them are joining this protest). They aren't perfect, but they always felt to me like the people running it have genuinely been trying over the years to stay true to the community's principles.
Lol, meanwhile /r/satisfactorygame has a major update coming out tomorrow, and they're still shutting down. Tbf they still have their discord and their own site, but still lol.
Lol, meanwhile /r/satisfactorygame has a major update coming out tomorrow, and they're still shutting down. Tbf they still have their discord and their own site, but still lol.
I don't frequent that subreddit, but I have to admit that I was curious what their reasoning was and I was reminded again of just how easy it is for corporations to simply lean back and wait....
I don't frequent that subreddit, but I have to admit that I was curious what their reasoning was and I was reminded again of just how easy it is for corporations to simply lean back and wait. People are people. They can tolerate being taken advantage of to an incredible degree. They want what they want and you can push their limits futher and further with little consequence. I really don't want to be so cynical, but it seems I'm human too.
the community is still kind of like that, yes. Gaming is pretty much the grab bag sub and accepts anything from memes to fanart to news to shitposts. There's a lot of the latter Games is a bit...
the community is still kind of like that, yes.
Gaming is pretty much the grab bag sub and accepts anything from memes to fanart to news to shitposts. There's a lot of the latter
Games is a bit more serious and bans memes/shitposts, as well as editorializing titles. It's front page skews more towards new, and in particular industry news behind the scenes of the game itself.
then TrueGaming is almost purely focused on community discussion. It does not even allow links as top level posts. It tends to skew more towards talking about game mechanics and occasionally gamedev tangential kinds of topics.
But that is about the users. Fro moderating, TrueGaming is relatively quiet and the mods are careful to remove for common questions or intentionally incendiary stuff. Gaming seems like a complete dumping ground, but I know subs that big have an absolute torrent of posts being removed by necessity. Games... well, let's just say they have on more than one occasion have made explicitly clear their disdain for their community. I'm not surprised on their stance here, once again against many of their vocal community's wishes
That's intentional - r/gaming is a shit shield where anyone can dump their shit tier gaming related memes and not clutter up the more focused gaming subs. Source: me.
Gaming seems like a complete dumping ground, but I know subs that big have an absolute torrent of posts being removed by necessity.
That's intentional - r/gaming is a shit shield where anyone can dump their shit tier gaming related memes and not clutter up the more focused gaming subs.
Since /r/anime (where I mod) is the only large general-purpose anime subreddit, for a long time I've wanted a companion sub so we could have a similar kind of split where a lot of the...
Since /r/anime (where I mod) is the only large general-purpose anime subreddit, for a long time I've wanted a companion sub so we could have a similar kind of split where a lot of the easy-to-consume content like screenshots could be directed there while /r/anime itself could remain more focused on news and discussion. Even got to the point of discussing whether or not we should make that other sub ourselves, but this current debacle has killed any motivation on my end to do more free labor for reddit like that.
I always felt like r/animemes (and whatever splitoffs happened there) was that "general purposes anime subreddit". But maybe you were thinking of something more in control of the r/anime hub. Sort...
I always felt like r/animemes (and whatever splitoffs happened there) was that "general purposes anime subreddit". But maybe you were thinking of something more in control of the r/anime hub. Sort of like how several of the hentai subs are mostly under one collective mod group.
If those ever included more than memes I wouldn't know, I didn't visit them that often. I don't think they'd allow things like "check out this classic anime OP" but I could be wrong. Also not...
If those ever included more than memes I wouldn't know, I didn't visit them that often. I don't think they'd allow things like "check out this classic anime OP" but I could be wrong.
Also not necessarily about having another sub under our umbrella, as long as we got along with the other mod team it didn't have to be controlled indirectly by us. There are a few subreddit collectors in charge of large swaths of anime-related subs that I don't know if we could work with though.
No, not: in its current state I guess it's only 80% of the way towards a dumping ground if that was part of what you envisioned in such a sub. Nothing stops them from making discussion threads in...
I don't think they'd allow things like "check out this classic anime OP" but I could be wrong.
No, not: in its current state
Rule 2 - No Unedited media: Anime clips, screenshots, manga pages, panels, plain text, non-OC fanart, comics, etc. will be removed.
I guess it's only 80% of the way towards a dumping ground if that was part of what you envisioned in such a sub.
Nothing stops them from making discussion threads in the same way nothing stops r/gaming from making a review discussion. But the culture in both cases are much more skewed towards memes and you'd need to preface a "discussion" with a meme.
There are a few subreddit collectors in charge of large swaths of anime-related subs that I don't know if we could work with though.
Oh I can imagine. If the users can be savory, I can only imagine with talking with mods are like.
To be honest, /r/games is a cesspool, there's so much censorship, astroturfing and deleting/silencing there it's absurd and it's only gotten worse. Quite frankly I don't have any respect for the...
To be honest, /r/games is a cesspool, there's so much censorship, astroturfing and deleting/silencing there it's absurd and it's only gotten worse. Quite frankly I don't have any respect for the people running that circus and I didn't expect any better of them, they've only ever shutdown once and it was purely to troll people and nothing else.
That's the thing, 7 years in Reddit and I never knew! The guys at gaming also discussed news along with the memes (in the comment section), and I always thought that was the expected place to go...
That's the thing, 7 years in Reddit and I never knew! The guys at gaming also discussed news along with the memes (in the comment section), and I always thought that was the expected place to go for games related content on Reddit (with places like truegaming mimicking the format of their name). I even thought it was weird (for me) to see ~games instead of ~gaming here, but now I understand it was a lack of knowledge from my part. It's a funny tale about how big Reddit really is (because we can get lost there).
It should say something that the one time people ever mention r/Games participating in some kind of event was a "joke" or "troll", and so their refusal to participate here is somehow some kind of...
It should say something that the one time people ever mention r/Games participating in some kind of event was a "joke" or "troll", and so their refusal to participate here is somehow some kind of corrupt moderation ever.
The thing is: their one blackout was neither a joke nor a troll. It was the moderators' way of highlighting how bad the gaming community had gotten:
At r/Games, our community is becoming increasingly responsible for perpetuating a significant amount of these combative and derogatory schools of thought. We remove those comments, we ban the perpetrators, but the issue still persists at a fundamental level: the notion that it’s okay or acceptable to ridicule and demonize traditionally disenfranchised and marginalized members in the gaming community. This is not just an issue in r/Games or on Reddit alone; this is an issue deeply embedded in the ranging depths of the internet, frequently in communities that center around the discussion of games.
r/Gamesnever participates in reddit-wide events. They've opted out of r/all and refused to be a default multiple times. The intention was that if only people that seek a place for better general games discussion go there, it could theoretically result in a more elevated gaming subreddit. Of course that's proven to be false but they still do no participate in wider reddit things. The one time they did a blackout was not for fun or for a reddit-wide event, it was to bring to attention something rotten in its own community.
Except nobody remembers it this way because the narrative has been purposefully changed by the exact kinds of people this was meant to be calling out.
I'd dare say that moderating gaming subreddits is worse than most other subreddits, including many default ones. Gamers are a whole other breed of toxic, ungrateful types because (thanks to GamerGate) they also have a templated pipeline to change the truth of a matter and perpetuate a false version of events immediately, to the point that it gets regurgitated for years as "fact".
This doesn't just happen with reddit moderation concerns. Even nonsense like "Polygon sent someone who can't play a game to review it!" when it was just a fun video they uploaded of their non-gaming writer fumbling around in a game.
By literally trolling people during April's fools (oh the irony) and having a laugh at their backs on their discord server that you can join and go see for yourself. And even if that wasn't their...
their one blackout was neither a joke nor a troll. It was the moderators' way of highlighting how bad the gaming community had gotten
By literally trolling people during April's fools (oh the irony) and having a laugh at their backs on their discord server that you can join and go see for yourself. And even if that wasn't their intention, their shared incompetence cemented that as the actual narrative, especially when they're already infamous for their draconian moderation.
And none of that excuses them from completely abstaining from this, even if it doesn't accomplish anything at least it sends a message, shows some solidarity, other subs that are opted out of r/all are also participating so they have no excuse. They could've at least shown some basic awareness of the issue, instead at best they come off as defeatist cynics, at worst they come off as power tripping cowards and possible shills for Reddit corporate.
Your point is based on a lie though. Even in this comment, you doubled down on your initial false assumptions and provided another falsitude: It was not trolling. I just showed you it wasn't, and...
Your point is based on a lie though. Even in this comment, you doubled down on your initial false assumptions and provided another falsitude:
By literally trolling people during April's fools (oh the irony) and having a laugh at their backs on their discord server that you can join and go see for yourself.
It was not trolling. I just showed you it wasn't, and you described it as that again. Why?
I've been in their Discord for years. This is as false as the idea that they shut down the subreddit as a joke or a prank when they had a long, detailed explanation that was more than explicitly serious. Their Discord is extremely different from the subreddit and doesn't even have the same userbase—where the subreddit users skew to social converatism in the way that "Gamers" do, the Discord is very socially left. The moderators are very professional when it comes to actual subreddit matters there and never discuss them in much capacity on the Discord. What I do remember are plenty of the exact kinds of "gamers" that caused this jumping into the Discord for the first time to complain, the Discord users telling them to take it to the official channels (in the various ways an online chat room would), and then many of those users describing the interaction in very uncharitable or downright false ways in more drama and disingenuity communities.
But beyond this, you somehow claimed it was the moderators' fault for not having the truth be sexy enough to beat a lie. How is it their fault that you chose to perpetuate this false information because you never sought to verify if any of what you heard or assumed was true in the first place? You'd actually prefer if they did some kind of PR or marketing that would somehow get in front of your eyeballs to explain their side? The responsibility of people like yourself spreading the wrong information isn't on them, it's on you.
You're right that it does not excuse them from not participating in this particular protest. But to suggest that it's all just the fault of a terrible moderation team based on these lies above? You can continue to remain silent if you felt you've said your piece. But your comment is exactly the kind of disinformative thing that dragged reddit down. There should be no room for outrage manufacturing.
I was there for that blackout, and all I remember was r/games trying to highlight already downvoted or otherwise ignored comments as "represenative of bigotry". I'm sure mods see that all the...
Except nobody remembers it this way because the narrative has been purposefully changed by the exact kinds of people this was meant to be calling out.
I was there for that blackout, and all I remember was r/games trying to highlight already downvoted or otherwise ignored comments as "represenative of bigotry".
I'm sure mods see that all the time, and that it can take a toll moderating it, but I don't think anyone on the internet is surprised that there are annoying to outright dangerous comments online. For a gaming sub (which is ultimately a space of media for unnecessary, premium entertainment) to try and highlight that and make it sound like the worst thing possible seems like virtue signaling rather than trying to champion for change.
There's been this undercurrent of the community (both professional and consumer wise) that seem to think games as a medium is childish and the key to making people "take the medium seriously" is to use games to tackle serious issues. And this move above just seems to be yet another attempt. If that's your prerogative, that's great. But they should also realize that games is a huge medium and not everyone will be on board, and trying to force everyone in your vision will simply result in conflict, not a better image. Just like every other medium, games are going to have their versions of pop culture sitcoms, their young adult fiction, and their anime smut. To each their own.
Heck the message says it itself:
This is not just an issue in r/Games or on Reddit alone; this is an issue deeply embedded in the ranging depths of the internet
But I don't believe that it happens more often in games in particular unlike the rest of that phrase.
Gamers are a whole other breed of toxic, ungrateful types because (thanks to GamerGate) they also have a templated pipeline to change the truth of a matter and perpetuate a false version of events immediately, to the point that it gets regurgitated for years as "fact".
With all due respect, that's exactly what I'm talking about. This isn't some unique strategy created by gamers. The only interesting thing about games is that it rose in popularity alongside the internet; in the 90's, in a time where technical innovations exploded, in a time where wordwide communication was becoming very cheap, in a generation where there started to be a computer in every household (and ending when everyone had an internet enabled cell phone in their household). So it has a new generation of tech saavy users and special interests will always go where the crowds are.
If it wasn't games that would get this stigma, it'd be some other hobby. Maybe the anime community (ironically enough), maybe video creators, maybe even books as e-books rose. And to some extent if you go deep enough you will see similar comments to yours by other impassioned community members. There's nothing inherently more political nor toxic about games than any of the aforementioned topics. Simply more eyes.
If GamerGate wasn't already a proven and acknowledged testbed for what would become MAGA and Trumpism when Bannon and the crew at Breitbart noticed that the video game community is especially...
If GamerGate wasn't already a proven and acknowledged testbed for what would become MAGA and Trumpism when Bannon and the crew at Breitbart noticed that the video game community is especially susceptible in many toxic and problematic ways, then this would hold a lot more water.
But the fact is that video game communities were the ones specifically identified to have enough of a population that was actually willing to be deeply mistrustful of authority, would coordinate in offensives, and not verify or fact-check information throws a wrench in the idea that it's just a few bad apples. It has not disappeared. People frown on r/games and pretty much most other gaming subreddits because the gaming communities are still full of outrage manufacturers and merchants, creating hostile spaces for others.
And sure, maybe it could have been other communities... but it wasn't. It was already attempted in other hobbies like comics and it did not go far because GamerGate changed everything for nerdy hobby communities and the overall wariness of them. Again, the misinformation pipeline I identified above is still the GamerGate template of misinformation spread and distillation. The hostile GamerGate places are still up and around, and they still invade regular gaming places regularly. The votes on r/Games have never, ever returned to pre-GamerGate levels, and you can tell because not a single article that speaks about examining or talking about games and social issues gets over 5 net positive votes.
And then when it comes to their collective response, immaturity is always a huge part. Just look at the response to them blacking out the subreddit once. How would you describe how so many of the community decided to lie about the reason so they could file it away as a bad troll and not a genuine flag of incivility in the community? How would you describe the many people who refuse to take a step back and ask the hard questions about the culture of hostility but jump at the opportunity to hurl insults as soon as someone finds a way to make mods the bad guys even if it's based on a lie? It is this willful lack of self-awareness that keeps the stereotype of gamers being immature going, not the people in a position to flag how bad things are simply trying to address how bad it has gotten.
The gaming community dug itself a big hole and has done little to nothing to get themselves out of it after all this time. The community as a whole is no more mature than it was ten years ago.
It's the same thing at the end of the day. Maybe the Hugo controversy wasn't as large and divisive as Gamergate, but again: book readers have adjusted to not having the internet (nor award shows)...
If GamerGate wasn't already a proven and acknowledged testbed for what would become MAGA and Trumpism when Bannon and the crew at Breitbart noticed that the video game community is especially susceptible in many toxic and problematic ways, then this would hold a lot more water.
It's the same thing at the end of the day. Maybe the Hugo controversy wasn't as large and divisive as Gamergate, but again: book readers have adjusted to not having the internet (nor award shows) for centuries. The Andrew Tate kind of stuff stuff may have happened earlier if Gamergate "failed" (in the sense that it didn't flare into a fiery inferno), and it's not like the whole PUA scene wasn't a thing until late 2022. As you said, comics was another potential tipping point. Need I go on?
Do you think Banner cracked some special formula for gamers, or that they simply saw "lots of people in a single community" and exacted what they would have done if they picked any other medium? Strategies I've seen before and afterwards in pretty much every other scene?
And sure, maybe it could have been other communities... but it wasn't
If I may be honest, Gamergate didn't ruin gaming communities, The_Donald did. And not just gaming communities. That issue you point out to in r/games again happened pretty much all across reddit. every kind of media communities, non-American country subs, Porn, even some professional technical communities where you wouldn't expect such divisive discussion. Every single community was talking about the 2016 elections and then about Trump's presidency. Because as you'd expect, everything in traditional media was talking about Trump. Some subs put their foot down and had to explicitly ban discussions about American elections. Some did it de facto through votes as you mentioned, where ANYTHING political in a hobby that isn't primarily about politics was down-voted. Reddit has always had a counter culture side to it, and that was exemplified in 2016/7.
That + the previous blackouts tell me that this was a matter of when, not "if we stopped Gamergate we coulda saved reddit".
The only coincidence here is that GG and the elections basically happened at the same time (and if you want to try to convince me that Gamergate got Donald Trump elected... we may be talking past each other).
I'd go as far as it also being a sign of the stereotypical mod power trip. There are more than a few mods that are, if unadmitted-ly, flat out afraid of being removed from their posts if they...
I think the subs that aren't shutting down is more about the cynicism in the Reddit subculture rather than beliefs/morals.
I'd go as far as it also being a sign of the stereotypical mod power trip. There are more than a few mods that are, if unadmitted-ly, flat out afraid of being removed from their posts if they actually go fully private which would lose the illusion of power they have over their little domains.
Ding ding ding. The ego-driven moderators will say and do anything necessary to maintain their green usernames. In most cases, that means kissing reddit's corporate ring and they won't hesitate to...
Ding ding ding. The ego-driven moderators will say and do anything necessary to maintain their green usernames. In most cases, that means kissing reddit's corporate ring and they won't hesitate to do it for one second. In fact, reddit might even draft these people to take over for the tens of thousands of mods they are about to lose. All it'll take is sending them another useless free anti-stress app, that worked last time.
You'd think it would be illegal to exploit people suffering from rampant narcissism like this, but the internet is a strange place.
17 years on reddit, they can feel free to remove me and hand it off to someone else. I've watched it spiral the drain for far too long, been through the early days, the "free speech haven" era,...
17 years on reddit, they can feel free to remove me and hand it off to someone else. I've watched it spiral the drain for far too long, been through the early days, the "free speech haven" era, and hubris that is Steve Huffman. My 1.5M strong sub is gone.
I left it under the control of the older mods and they are still there. In particular the current top mod is the guy who runs /r/metal and /r/vintageobscura, which takes most of his time, but he...
I left it under the control of the older mods and they are still there. In particular the current top mod is the guy who runs /r/metal and /r/vintageobscura, which takes most of his time, but he keeps the /r/listentothis mod team in line and I trust him implicitly. The music mods are a tight knit community themselves, and one of the few good mod cliques left on reddit. Frankly, if it hadn't been him at the #2 spot, I'd have done one hell of a reshuffle on the way out. That's his problem now though. :)
I pitched ditching the bots for an invite only model - approved submitters only, fight club style, all one has to do is ask for permission. At least then I'd know the submitters who asked understand that it is for less well known music and I can ban (de-approve) people who don't follow that rule. It prevents bots and spammers from posting too, just like here - I learned that technique on Tildes from Deimos. The team wasn't into it (too much like work I suspect - and I can respect that, fuck reddit), so I dipped out for good.
The problem is the strict format, the bots make for a very hard submission process and they have created an antiseptic community with zero culture. Bots remove 7 out of 10 submissions to listentothis and they make submitting from mobile an endurance trial thanks to the title format rules. There are more than 30 automated rule checks in place, and reddit can only check one at a time, so there is just no possible way to tell people everything that is wrong with their submission at once. That means they correct it, then it gets removed for another rule, they correct it again, it gets removed for a different rule... this goes on until the submitter says fuck this and leaves for good.
That system does keep the popular music out, but it's become total overkill.
If it were approved submitters only, I think we could ditch all of the other rules and all of the bots completely. The sub has no community of any kind left, and very little discussion ever happens. It's become an automated track archive, rather than a real music community where people talk to each other and share tracks organically. It's dead as fuck, from a community perspective at least, and it's been that way a very long time.
For folks who want to see which subs are now private, without going over there, https://reddark.untone.uk/ ---> Lost tilderino moment there, that's the link posted oops It's like a little LED map...
For folks who want to see which subs are now private, without going over there,
disappointed sure, but I'm not "surprised" back when hong kongers were protesting, a bunch of places one would think would be sympathetic turned out to not be, and vice versa. You really don't...
disappointed sure, but I'm not "surprised"
back when hong kongers were protesting, a bunch of places one would think would be sympathetic turned out to not be, and vice versa. You really don't know until something is close to you.
I did the same, really cleaned out my sub list. I was saddened to find just how many subs i enjoyed were staying silent. I don't really expect to spend any more time there at this point.
I did the same, really cleaned out my sub list. I was saddened to find just how many subs i enjoyed were staying silent. I don't really expect to spend any more time there at this point.
For news subs like anime_titties I could understand it insofar that reddit as a website is "smaller" than someone consuming bigger news about the world, and hence the latter should take priority....
(most of the big political / news subs, WorldNews, GeoPolitics, Technology)
For news subs like anime_titties I could understand it insofar that reddit as a website is "smaller" than someone consuming bigger news about the world, and hence the latter should take priority.
It's like the suicide/addiction subs not going private to not remove an avenue of outreach for people.
But those are a handful of exceptions, so the general rule still stands.
Never underestimate the dev community on Reddit. There are a lot of passionate and dedicated devs, which is just one of the countless reasons why this API change (a) sucks so much and (b) is...
Never underestimate the dev community on Reddit. There are a lot of passionate and dedicated devs, which is just one of the countless reasons why this API change (a) sucks so much and (b) is probably going to end badly for Reddit. I would not have used Reddit for more than a month without third-party clients and browser extensions.
Yeah, /r/programmerhumor already had some talks about web scraping. Reddit's not in for a fun time if someone decides to go that route. Consumes more data from Reddit when they could have just......
Yeah, /r/programmerhumor already had some talks about web scraping. Reddit's not in for a fun time if someone decides to go that route. Consumes more data from Reddit when they could have just... used the API instead.
It looks like this link is broken now. It forwards to a twitch moderator page that you have to be logged in to view, and says I don’t have access. Is there a new url?
It looks like this link is broken now. It forwards to a twitch moderator page that you have to be logged in to view, and says I don’t have access. Is there a new url?
My two cents from the peanut gallery is that reddit will survive in a diminished form like Twitter or Facebook. Regardless I'm happy to be here. I'm not completely disengaged there, but my use...
My two cents from the peanut gallery is that reddit will survive in a diminished form like Twitter or Facebook. Regardless I'm happy to be here. I'm not completely disengaged there, but my use will dwindle with time.
it really does seem like loads of users—probably mostly new users—in reddit do not understand the point of the protest, because they’ve been using the official reddit app for ages
it really does seem like loads of users—probably mostly new users—in reddit do not understand the point of the protest, because they’ve been using the official reddit app for ages
I did a quick search for Android. The largest 3rd party app I noticed was RIF at 5m downloads. Others were in the 1m or lower amount. The official app has over 100m downloads.
I did a quick search for Android. The largest 3rd party app I noticed was RIF at 5m downloads. Others were in the 1m or lower amount. The official app has over 100m downloads.
Two are me. Accidentally ended up with it when following a Reddit link from Firefox. Then reinstalled to see just how bad it was. I've got it installed still but will keep using RIF until its...
Two are me. Accidentally ended up with it when following a Reddit link from Firefox. Then reinstalled to see just how bad it was. I've got it installed still but will keep using RIF until its death. After that, I'm expecting we'll start seeing 3rd party apps just web scrape Reddit rather than use the API.
I'm not /u/gnoop but web scraping refers to using bots that will visit a webpage as if they were a regular human user, and then "scrape"/parse the actual HTML of the page to get the data they...
I'm not /u/gnoop but web scraping refers to using bots that will visit a webpage as if they were a regular human user, and then "scrape"/parse the actual HTML of the page to get the data they want. This can be error prone and tedious to set up (and will break any time the site changes its layout/structure), but is essentially unblockable without also making the site unusable to humans.
IIUC, the apps for tildes that are currently in development use this method because 1) there's no tildes API yet, and 2) the tildes website is pretty simple and easy to parse in this manner.
You typically have two ways to get data from a website. The primary method used today is API or Application Programming Interface. This is a way for simple commands and data to be sent. Rather...
You typically have two ways to get data from a website. The primary method used today is API or Application Programming Interface. This is a way for simple commands and data to be sent. Rather than a 3rd party taking in the whole website and discarding all the website graphics, videos, and javascript, it just gets the data needed. This saves on bandwidth.
If there isn't an API, you would do what's called web scraping. That is, you visit the regular website and take all that data. This will be more data than the API would have sent. Get enough people using apps that web scrape Reddit and you impact Reddit's performance. Reddit can update their site to create problems for web scrapers but those developers can just go and update their apps and tools yet again. It becomes a cat and mouse game.
Basically, if this ends up happening Reddit's site will become worse and they'll have essentially done it to themselves.
They seem to be after every dollar they can get. Get rid of the 3rd party apps and that's more potential eyes on your ads, not someone else's. Of course, they could be making money off 3rd party...
They seem to be after every dollar they can get. Get rid of the 3rd party apps and that's more potential eyes on your ads, not someone else's. Of course, they could be making money off 3rd party apps with reasonable pricing and a better 3rd party API policy but this seems more about IPO prep to show value. Dumb thing is, they could have kicked this particular can down the road to try and show growth in some future quarter.
I used to be a free software nerd, so ive been using infinity on fdroid since I got my first phone 2 years ago, I downloaded the official app because chat dosnt work in my app, but I found it...
I used to be a free software nerd, so ive been using infinity on fdroid since I got my first phone 2 years ago, I downloaded the official app because chat dosnt work in my app, but I found it horrendous, and supposedly it uses gigabites of data, and I have to pay for data Im never on wifi
I haven't tested how much data the official app uses but I'm not surprised. It's definitely slower than using RIF. The hilarity is, someone will probably write a new app that scrapes Reddit and is...
I haven't tested how much data the official app uses but I'm not surprised. It's definitely slower than using RIF.
The hilarity is, someone will probably write a new app that scrapes Reddit and is still faster than the official app.
I've been checking on those accounts out of curiosity and because a mouse-over tells the whole story with the right mod tools installed. Awful lot of accounts with that sentiment are less than a...
I've been checking on those accounts out of curiosity and because a mouse-over tells the whole story with the right mod tools installed. Awful lot of accounts with that sentiment are less than a week old, and many of them delete after a day or two. This does not smell like an actual human to me. Paid shilling trying to get ahead of the bad PR and reprogram users by repeatedly stating the same sentiments - and it will not work.
I'm so glad that at least on this website, I can automatically assume 'human' when dealing with someone. Can't do that anywhere else, really.
Yeah I manually clicked on a lot of the shill posts and they were very suspicious. Accounts only a few weeks old, very little karma, often either quite toxic or with very short...
Yeah I manually clicked on a lot of the shill posts and they were very suspicious. Accounts only a few weeks old, very little karma, often either quite toxic or with very short low-effort/generated replies.
Generously it's just new users or kids who don't see what the fuss is because they haven't been there long enough to know any better.
Cynically it's a pathetic attempt at astro turfing by reddit / other groups who would benefit from reddit losing their longest standing community members.
I'm so glad that at least on this website, I can automatically assume 'human' when dealing with someone.
Yeah this site is such a breath of fresh air. Reminds me of the high quality discourse you used to be able to find everywhere on reddit back in the day after sifting through crappy rage comics.
In terms of reddit shooting themselves in the foot, I consider the blackout only to be a minor problem. The moderators who act as unpaid volunteers are the ones who use 3rd party apps and api...
In terms of reddit shooting themselves in the foot, I consider the blackout only to be a minor problem. The moderators who act as unpaid volunteers are the ones who use 3rd party apps and api services. Even if 48hrs pass and all subreddits come back, many of the moderators won't. Those that stay are likely to reduce their commitment.
Their CEO, CTO and other staff have repeatedly expressed belief in their ownership of all well moderated reddit content and comments. That third parties are stealing from them and are worthless leeches. They fundamentally don't seem to accept that well written comments and moderation stemming from third party services are actually giving them value to "monetise".
I'm ambivalent. I agree that Reddit isn't big because it out qualified its competition. But due to its size, it did attract a lot of users, and these users are going to mostly be casual ones. As a...
I think these couldn't be more wrong. Reddit has put themselves in a very dangerous situation by thinking they are too big to fail and that the site/technology itself is the reason people are there and it's irreplaceable.
I'm ambivalent. I agree that Reddit isn't big because it out qualified its competition. But due to its size, it did attract a lot of users, and these users are going to mostly be casual ones. As a business, as long as those casual users aren't inconvenienced too much, not much will change.
I do also agree that there currently is not a good Reddit alternative. Again, not because there aren't better websites from a technical perspective, but because it's really hard gaining users these days as a new site. Keep in mind the activity here as an invite-only community and note that other full public alternatives are even quieter. They can't handle a big migration from reddit, even if people were ready to move.
Yeah I know Lemmy actually put out a statement asking people to spread out amongst their different servers as they could not handle all the Reddit people coming in at once.
Yeah I know Lemmy actually put out a statement asking people to spread out amongst their different servers as they could not handle all the Reddit people coming in at once.
I guess what could happen, considering just how many subs are now dark (5500 out of 7000, including all but 1 of the big ones) is that the investors interested in the IPO withdraw the money...
I think these couldn't be more wrong. Reddit has put themselves in a very dangerous situation by thinking they are too big to fail and that the site/technology itself is the reason people are there and it's irreplaceable.
I guess what could happen, considering just how many subs are now dark (5500 out of 7000, including all but 1 of the big ones) is that the investors interested in the IPO withdraw the money they've put aside for it and invest it elsewhere, thinking their investment is too risky with a site that can be "sabotaged" in a concerted effort as easily.
That would actually have an effect, IMO.
They absolutely cannot do this for all of them though
I mean they could, but then they'd also probably lose investors for the sharp rise in labor cost. >.>
I don't see them as pointless -- all these moderators are both self-selected and other-selected because they understand Reddit culture and expectations. Even if I hold a different view, I still...
I see a lot of apathetic comments on Reddit suggesting the blackouts are pointless
I don't see them as pointless -- all these moderators are both self-selected and other-selected because they understand Reddit culture and expectations. Even if I hold a different view, I still have to respect their take that this step of blackout is necessary. Blacking out a subreddit isn't defeat but hope for change, else they would just leave and nuke their data on the way out (which they still can ultimately do if change doesn't come).
I have apathy because what of what Reddit was already becoming due to the influx of mobile and the tolerance for lower-quality content contributed mainly by mobile users who -- understandably -- weren't as conversational or interesting to read.
I also have apathy because Reddit Inc. has always confused the company and technology with Reddit (the users and the content). The latter of which was always empowered by 3rd-party software to get around the limitations of the company-provided technology. They keep spending their money and employee hours on reinventing a wheel that its users have already invented. They've always been poorly managed and that poor management has been the subject of very public gossip on Reddit for years.
We should expect nothing good to come out of chaos, and that's what we're seeing here.
All things must and will end. If it began, it will end. If I'm frustrated about that, it's because I forgot that it must go this way, I forgot that nothing good can be expected to come out of chaos outside of dumb luck, and that Reddit Inc. has never understood what Reddit really is (or was).
I’ve spent the past few days taking a look at reddit alternatives and tildes is the one that most resonated with me. Their mission statement and core beliefs is exactly what I wish reddit had....
I’ve spent the past few days taking a look at reddit alternatives and tildes is the one that most resonated with me. Their mission statement and core beliefs is exactly what I wish reddit had. Hope it goes completely public soon to not miss out on this wave of new people potentially coming over.
I still don't understand this whole protest. Users want their third-party applications back which is good, but the real issue that Reddit is becoming like TikTok will not be reversed. Also I don't...
I still don't understand this whole protest. Users want their third-party applications back which is good, but the real issue that Reddit is becoming like TikTok will not be reversed. Also I don't think Spez will change his mind, he didn't talk about the "content made by the users" in his AMA, and even if subreddits go dark for more than a few days, he can kick the mods and appoint new ones. Last but not least, even if Spez is fired, it won't stop the IPO.
I looked at the list of subreddits and it confirmed my opinion. I may be wrong, but I don't believe that this meme machine can ignore /r/funny or /r/aww for more than a few days. That's why I think the mods could be changed. After all, they already have the same "powermods" as Digg which control hundreds of subreddits.
Here's the thing...Reddit is now as popular, if not moreso, as Digg was in it's heyday. That's a massive amount of free labour moderating an even more massive amount of users. The content...
Here's the thing...Reddit is now as popular, if not moreso, as Digg was in it's heyday. That's a massive amount of free labour moderating an even more massive amount of users. The content generators are merely the seeds that feed the user base. It's the actual discussions that bring people to the site. Superusers are just a tool used by the users, not the other way around. They may post a lot of content, but they have to be aware of what people actually want to talk about. Superusers are at the whim of whatever the users want.
Mods are important because they are a part of the community and actually care about it. They don't get paid, so their only motivation is to maintain the community so it doesn't devolve into bots and spamlinks. They have to give the users of that community what they want, or they will be removed as mods. And to someone that enjoys having power over a community, no matter how small or virtual that community is, they'll do whatever it takes to remain in control. Mods are at the whim of whatever the users what.
The users are what bring other users to the site. It's the discussions around the articles and random picutes of cute animals are what generate revenue. Go look at Digg...seriously, take a minute and look at what Digg became. If you remember what it was back in 2009/2010, with the lively discussions in each post and a nice interface to talk to other people, you'll be appalled at what you find now. It's a generic tiled column of posts, with most being posted by a single user that's obviously an SEO bot. And the discussions are gone...most posts don't have comments, and the ones that do only have 1 or 2. The site is dead from a user perspective. You can't generate revenue if no one is looking at your content.
Reddit is at a dangerous crossroad right now. I've seen my own posts be removed for mentioning this site as an alternative. Admins are nervous, which is making mods nervous, which is starting to have a chilling effect on discussions. They can turn it around by admitting fault and reversing course, but that AMA with spez was their FARK "You'll get over it" moment. They seem to be doubling down on the changes, just like Digg 4.0. I don't see this working out well. Sure, they may survive in some sense, possibly becoming like FARK and not falling all the way to Digg levels. But I think Reddit is on its way down. Which is why I'm here. And I finally got my username back on one of these platforms.
This is a specific example of the wider question of "what is the point of protesting"? Aside from (1) venting personal frustrations, (2) finding support through a hard time among like-minded...
This is a specific example of the wider question of "what is the point of protesting"?
Aside from (1) venting personal frustrations, (2) finding support through a hard time among like-minded folks, and even aside from (3) "actually being able to make a change", there is the aspect of (4) informational transfer
For every day there's stuff being posted, there's NEW people who had only heard about it from that day.
Which then snowballs into (5) spread.
For every day protest continues, more "oh what's the use" type folks might re-consider their position and change from passive sad to active mad.
For every major action, the news media will write about it, which will affect how their sponsors need to maintain their image.
For every sponsor pausing spending, their bottom line shrinks.
Sometimes the benefit of the power of the people isn't going towards the direct oppressors, but as a warning to other would-be bullies.
Concrete example: two hours ago Reddark reports just under 5000 subs committed to going private. Right now they're at 5279.
Completely agree. I mod a few very large subreddits, one being in the top 10. We are predicting the protest won't get reddit corporate to change. But the more people can come together as a...
Completely agree. I mod a few very large subreddits, one being in the top 10. We are predicting the protest won't get reddit corporate to change. But the more people can come together as a movement, the more likelihood that something alternative will be created.
I've always found this sentiment confusing. I've been boycotting Nestle since the 90's due to their baby formula actions in Africa that killed babies. I didn't start because I thought I would...
"what is the point of protesting"
I've always found this sentiment confusing. I've been boycotting Nestle since the 90's due to their baby formula actions in Africa that killed babies. I didn't start because I thought I would change the world and stop Nestle, simply because I didn't want to support a company like that.
I had a thought twenty years ago on voting, my vote means so little why bother, it won't change anything. Then I thought to myself, I'm not unique and special. The views I hold are shared by many others and they will be having that same thought. If I choose not to vote, it in a way represents that much larger number of people who thought it was pointless. If I do vote, then actually there will be thousands of like minded people who came to the same conclusion. Suddenly it isn't one vote, it is thousands, all the people like you who decided to make a stand.
I’m reminded of a cartoon I’ve seen, with two groups of people. The largest group has a speech bubble above saying “we didn’t vote because it won’t make a difference anyway”. There is power in...
I’m reminded of a cartoon I’ve seen, with two groups of people. The largest group has a speech bubble above saying “we didn’t vote because it won’t make a difference anyway”.
I'm a "oh what's the use" type. Not mad. Won't get mad. Reddit was already on the way to being less interesting due to the influx of terse and meme-y mobile-only users. All things end. Reddit Inc....
For every day protest continues, more "oh what's the use" type folks might re-consider their position and change from passive sad to active mad.
I'm a "oh what's the use" type. Not mad. Won't get mad. Reddit was already on the way to being less interesting due to the influx of terse and meme-y mobile-only users. All things end. Reddit Inc. just is hastening Reddit's demise. I won't rage-quit because I have no rage, but I do and naturally will lose interest in the growing mediocrity of a site losing its best contributors.
Reddit and Reddit Inc. are two different things and neither understand the other very well. Add to that the fact that Reddit Inc.'s management is a fascinating-to-watch shit-show and it's hard to expect anything good will come out of a shit-show.
Also, consider for a moment the position the newly appointed mods would be in. There is basically no way to stop an angry mob on reddit other than locking the whole thing. A single dedicated...
Also, consider for a moment the position the newly appointed mods would be in. There is basically no way to stop an angry mob on reddit other than locking the whole thing. A single dedicated malicious user can cause enough chaos that it takes vigilance to keep them in check. Now imagine a subreddit with over a million subscribers, of which you just pissed off a good part of the active userbase. They'll lock it down voluntarily again after a day.
More importantly: Are their imposed mods being paid? For how long? Have they the responsibility to mod for 24/7, or just 8 hours a day? Will the new appointed mods have to mod using their official...
More importantly:
Are their imposed mods being paid? For how long?
Have they the responsibility to mod for 24/7, or just 8 hours a day?
Will the new appointed mods have to mod using their official app? Will they charge more because of that?
I think even if Reddit ends up doing this, then they will have to clean cat shit for the rest of their lives. They'll soon will find out they don't wanna do it. I personally worry about their poor new mods, the official mod tools sound like a nightmare.
Really seems like this is going to be a slow hemorrhage of everything the site uses. Currently they feel the tools use the site, but it feels like the site uses the tools with how much this change...
Really seems like this is going to be a slow hemorrhage of everything the site uses. Currently they feel the tools use the site, but it feels like the site uses the tools with how much this change is purported to affect. Reddit the site will remain and probably morph into TikTok 2: Electric Boogaloo or something Either way, this seems like a real tipping point for an impressive number of long time users.
As I mentioned in the other thread, while Reddit can remove mods and put new ones in place in some cases, if the outright shutdown is large enough, they don't have the resources to replace...
he can kick the mods and appoint new ones.
As I mentioned in the other thread, while Reddit can remove mods and put new ones in place in some cases, if the outright shutdown is large enough, they don't have the resources to replace everyone with competent/experienced scrubs. Add to it there are multiple subs, like /r/music, that have home grown bots, being run on servers the mods pay for because reddit won't provide the tools, that leave with those mods.
For me it was just the straw that broke the camels back. Reddits content has been declining for years. The same posts make it to the front page regularly. Losing RIF made me realize I wasn't...
For me it was just the straw that broke the camels back. Reddits content has been declining for years. The same posts make it to the front page regularly. Losing RIF made me realize I wasn't enjoying it anymore. After I got my invite here I deleted my account on Reddit and will not be going back even if they do decide to keep the third party apps, which they won't.
This has been super interesting. I've never seen communities listed in this manner. I'd be interested in this kind of sort for other services as well. Really hoping to see major players go dark...
This has been super interesting. I've never seen communities listed in this manner. I'd be interested in this kind of sort for other services as well.
Really hoping to see major players go dark soon and wishing they would stay that way, like r/videos plans to. Oh, what the world would be like if corporations actually cared about the people they profit from.
I'll second your last point. I feel like we need more non-profit services like Tildes or even Cohost in the world. While I believe the Fediverse has a lot of potential, I think design flaws (such...
I'll second your last point. I feel like we need more non-profit services like Tildes or even Cohost in the world. While I believe the Fediverse has a lot of potential, I think design flaws (such as how hard it can be to find people on Mastodon, for example) are hindering its ability to reach a critical mass.
Agree 100%. I have a Mastodon account, but found it to be very kludgy to find and curate the thing I'm really interested in. The fediverse is an awesome concept that jist hasn't come to fruition...
Agree 100%. I have a Mastodon account, but found it to be very kludgy to find and curate the thing I'm really interested in. The fediverse is an awesome concept that jist hasn't come to fruition yet.
That said I'm hopeful here. For now I have gone back to using an RSS reader for news. What was great about reddit is you would often get people who's expertise pertained to something very particuar and they would expound on an article or comments. They often linked to sources or provided context.
Yeah for me personally after I delete my reddit account I will still likely use teddit.net to lurk r/talesfromtechsupport and r/anime_titties (world politics). On the up side I've used Lemmy for...
On the up side I've used Lemmy for the past couple days and while it has some of the same flaws as mastodon for discoverability (especially for communities that exist on different instances), I think it seems fairly promising as a federated Reddit.
My issue is the goalposts keep moving in regards to what is "true" protest. The sub I moderate is fairly niche, has a modest user base of 24k. We did a poll, and the users overwhelmingly chose to...
My issue is the goalposts keep moving in regards to what is "true" protest. The sub I moderate is fairly niche, has a modest user base of 24k. We did a poll, and the users overwhelmingly chose to go dark for a 48 hour period. The mod team is under no illusion that our smallish sub about a tattoo reality TV competition show being private is gonna shut down Reddit, but we thought it was ethical to stand with fellow sub mods, 3rd party admin, and others affected by the changes.
However, now I'm skimming some talk here and on discord, and I see that there are those who think this is stupid, ineffectual, that you're not really protesting unless you shut down forever. On a level I can understand that, but I am worried that we're reaching a point where we're no longer in 2 camps, for or against. We're in several camps of 48, 72, indefinite, account purge, account deletion, and we're gonna turn on each other and achieve exactly fuck all and in fact make things worse.
Just make it two groups: I don't care, and do what's effective to make an effect. The second group has different ideas about what would be effective, but they only want results. The first group...
Just make it two groups: I don't care, and do what's effective to make an effect.
The second group has different ideas about what would be effective, but they only want results.
The first group only wants dopamine and they want it right now.
I hear you. I also hear them. The cynicism in me has a lot to say... But I don't like what it has to say... Seeing the blacked out subreddits increase in number reminds me that people really do...
I hear you. I also hear them.
The cynicism in me has a lot to say...
But I don't like what it has to say...
Seeing the blacked out subreddits increase in number reminds me that people really do have more power than they realize. We can affect change if we choose. How much? I really don't know.
We've seen examples of how some CEOs will burn things to the ground knowing that they can still capitalize on the embers. somehow that's still enough for them. But what if we snuffed the fire so thoroughly, that they were forced compromise and concede in some areas...?
I don't know if everyone's ready and willing to snuff it out. Without a third party mobile client though, I know that I wont be able to engage in any meaningful way any longer. But that's just me.
I'm sure this is unpopular, but how much are people really thinking about what's going on with this blackout? Flipping this on its head: why do you think most of the "serious" subreddits aren't...
I'm sure this is unpopular, but how much are people really thinking about what's going on with this blackout?
Flipping this on its head: why do you think most of the "serious" subreddits aren't blacking out?
Maybe 3rd party apps isn't the right hill to die on, considering the other glaring issues with reddit: unverified porn, covid disinfo, dangerous hate speech etc. that for some odd reason mods aren't willing to go to bat for?
This isn't a blackout for mod tools that make it possible to safely moderate these huge communities, commitments admin have made for a decade, but never delivered on.
Redditors don't seem to care about the big issues with reddit, but take their 3rd party apps, and they're down for a 2 day stint of slacktivism.
My final straw was not the convenience of third party apps, but that reddit was completely disregarding their blind users. After a huge stink, redreader was designated as the accessible android...
My final straw was not the convenience of third party apps, but that reddit was completely disregarding their blind users. After a huge stink, redreader was designated as the accessible android app, but the decision to not serve NSFW content to third parties is still in place and will be going forward. Blind people want porn also. Also the way they treated the dev from apolloapp was unconscionable. 30 days is an insanely tight timeline designed to put all of those apps out of business.
That was what brought me from having typical disgust of reddit's actions to full outrage. How dare they. I have only ever used the official app for a couple of hours, I had no idea how horrific it...
That was what brought me from having typical disgust of reddit's actions to full outrage. How dare they. I have only ever used the official app for a couple of hours, I had no idea how horrific it was for accessibility.
The fact they didn't realise how bad accessibility was and had to be told after announcing the changes is astonishing. At that point they should have immediately postponed their plans. I think the only reason they have even scrambled to put out loads of PR on accessibility is due to learning the massive legal liability.
For some, it is about mod tools. I used to moderate for a living, and worked for some large companies - one was much larger than Reddit. It is abysmal how much disdain Reddit has shown for the...
For some, it is about mod tools. I used to moderate for a living, and worked for some large companies - one was much larger than Reddit. It is abysmal how much disdain Reddit has shown for the people who do this work for them for free. The fact that people were dependent on third party apps and tools to get things done in the first place was not great, but these API changes and that AMA with spez is a huge fuck you to the people who make Reddit run. Also, just kind of a stupid move overall from a business standpoint. Not going to be very advertiser friendly if all the people who actually moderate out the CSAM and spambots don't have the ability to do that effectively, is it?
I probably would have just kept using reddit from the browser with old.reddit until they nuked that too if they took away my third party app, because I can't stand algorithmic content suggestions or the format of the new interface. But I have no interest in hanging out in a place where moderators get a big middle finger from the platform, especially when those moderators are working for free. Even getting paid to do it, that job sucks.
I've moderated large subreddits for years. None of our third party tools have ever been in jeopardy because of the API changes. That's always been clearly communicated, both in public and directly...
I've moderated large subreddits for years. None of our third party tools have ever been in jeopardy because of the API changes. That's always been clearly communicated, both in public and directly to us in closed mod/developer areas.
Yes, reddit have always treated mods terribly. It's a travesty that we don't have feature parity with internet forum software anno 2005 for moderating the site. It's an absolute joke.
A two-day time-limited blackout? That's not how going on strike works to encourage change. It's worse than doing nothing because people will go "we did it reddit!", pat themselves on the back and forget about mod tools. The push for a safe standard of mod tools on the site will be worse off after this stunt.
A number of moderators have decided to stay dark indefinitely, which is an action I fully support. I agree that a time limited blackout is not sufficient in this case, though time limited strikes...
A number of moderators have decided to stay dark indefinitely, which is an action I fully support. I agree that a time limited blackout is not sufficient in this case, though time limited strikes are a tool that have been utilized in labor movements to great. In those cases, like recent nurse and medical resident strikes, it was a tool to show people how bad things could get, a warning shot to get people to come to the table and discuss things in earnest. At least publicly, Reddit appears to have no interest in doing any of that, instead of coming up with concrete timelines to improvements to their official tools or real compromises they're sticking to wishy-washy "we'll do better" statements. Maybe they're doing more in the private conversations, but that information isn't making it to the public.
I am not a Reddit moderator, so I am not in those discussions, but given that every statement from moderators before your comment I've seen indicates they feel that their ability to moderate will be impacted by these changes, that's where my opinion currently lies.
I'm sure a lot of people haven't heard about the recent downsizing of 5% of reddit's staff (about 90 employees). They fired several of the mod point-people, including the AMA-liaison. The firing...
I'm sure a lot of people haven't heard about the recent downsizing of 5% of reddit's staff (about 90 employees).
They fired several of the mod point-people, including the AMA-liaison. The firing of these community managers is going to impact my modding and that of the rest of our team way, way more than losing 3rd party mobile apps. Again, the API-changes won't affect mod tooling at all.
A tiny, tiny percentage of mod actions are made on mobile because even with the third party apps, the moderation functionality is so bad.
The first major mod blackout years ago was solely because the AMA point-person was fired. This time most people haven't even heard about it. Most of the pro blackout mods won't have heard about it either because, well, who they are and how they moderate their communities.
This is an example of how poor reddit is at getting across information from the non-majority.
Most people won't have seen a majority of relevant facts in the current situation. You're only hearing from those who want to black out. Many of them have been itching (and agitating) for new blackouts continuously since the last time it happened in a major way.
It partially is, actually. Some mods compromise by using mod tools available in 3rd party apps that the native tools don't have. I've ready many talk about how not having their preferred 3rd party...
This isn't a blackout for mod tools that make it possible to safely moderate these huge communities,
It partially is, actually. Some mods compromise by using mod tools available in 3rd party apps that the native tools don't have. I've ready many talk about how not having their preferred 3rd party app would make it difficult or outright impossible to properly moderate and joined the blackout for that reason.
Redditors don't seem to care about the big issues with reddit
in all fairness there were protests against COVID disinformation. IMO it wasn't that impactful because the biggest change was leading to a 20k subreddit about some weird "alternative treatement" being banned. Proportionately speaking I think moderators did a good job there raising awareness of the issue.
The fact is that that sorts of misinformation is inevitable on any website in the history of websites. I didn't see it as a "reddit problem" so much as a internet problem. So I didn't see it worth leaving reddit over given that any other sizeable community would probably have it worse, especially since users can't do "soft moderation" on most other sites.
While internet points aren't a good thing to worry over, pretty much every COVID disinfor comment I saw back in the heyday were downvoted into all oblivion. If the mods themselves didn't come in quickly enough to remove it themselves. It seemed to be a self correcting problem.
Personally, I think this protest will achieve exactly nothing. The subreddits will re-open after 48 hours, and the Reddit executives will continue to do what they always planned to do: keep...
I think that is more out of cynicism than a lack of caring.
Personally, I think this protest will achieve exactly nothing. The subreddits will re-open after 48 hours, and the Reddit executives will continue to do what they always planned to do: keep monetising reddit.com any way they can think of.
Also, in one subreddit, the mod team decided to poll the users about whether to shut down, and one user responded with "my impression is that you want to punish the users of this subreddit in order to help third party businesses". That's how some users see this issue. And it's not hard to see how it can come across that way.
oh, ouch :( if I were a mod (erh, I quit a long time ago because it was too hard) I would be very hurt to hear someone say that about the unthanked hard work that mods do. Hm, maybe I should go...
oh, ouch :( if I were a mod (erh, I quit a long time ago because it was too hard) I would be very hurt to hear someone say that about the unthanked hard work that mods do.
Hm, maybe I should go bump the mental health post in two days -- a lot of users have deep deep roots there, and this kind of thing might be fun to watch while it burns, but afterwards when everybody goes back to their lives, those who invested the most might have more to work through than others.
in just about any website with mods, they are constantly derided, so it wasn’t the biggest surprise for me
oh, ouch :( if I were a mod (erh, I quit a long time ago because it was too hard) I would be very hurt to hear someone say that about the unthanked hard work that mods do.
in just about any website with mods, they are constantly derided, so it wasn’t the biggest surprise for me
I meant that i would have thought that reddit had "bought" enough mods in big subs that at least the big subs would be in protected from this kind of protests.
I meant that i would have thought that reddit had "bought" enough mods in big subs that at least the big subs would be in protected from this kind of protests.
This is just speculation and i don't want to accuse anyone and have neither proof nor knowledge about that any such thing is happening. Payroll could happen or something like establishing contacts...
This is just speculation and i don't want to accuse anyone and have neither proof nor knowledge about that any such thing is happening.
Payroll could happen or something like establishing contacts to firms/advertisers to allow/push certain things and thus get rewards from a third party. Or it's simply to stay in the position with official backing.
Or maybe this is just paranoia on my part and all the big subs are independent and such a thing wouldn't be able to stay hidden.
I think the site just kept going down so they gave up and just redirected to the stream (which I also believe started before the site went down for good). Regardless, it's amazing, and I'm excited...
I think the site just kept going down so they gave up and just redirected to the stream (which I also believe started before the site went down for good). Regardless, it's amazing, and I'm excited to be witnessing this history!
I have to admit, I'm impressed by how many of the smaller subs are going dark... especially the NSFW ones. The thing for me is, I have no horse in this race. I will never use an app for browsing...
I have to admit, I'm impressed by how many of the smaller subs are going dark... especially the NSFW ones.
The thing for me is, I have no horse in this race. I will never use an app for browsing ANY site (unless you're forced to use an app, like Discord), so I admit I'm in the group that's heavily inconvenienced by this. Which is the point, I suppose. Ultimately though, I really don't care one way or the other about this.
I'm more interested in how many of these subs will STAY blacked out though- I expect that of the 5,000 going dark, at least half of them may possibly be back online after the two days.
A large focus and main public point of the blackout currently is the 3rd party apps, as it's the most high profile and easiest to understand. The visually impaired have it especially rough, as...
A large focus and main public point of the blackout currently is the 3rd party apps, as it's the most high profile and easiest to understand. The visually impaired have it especially rough, as Reddit's site and official app are practically useless in terms of accessibility -- they have to rely on third-party apps to be able to browse Reddit at all.
Putting aside 3rd party apps now, the API change affects tools other than just 3rd party apps. Anything that uses the API a decent amount will be affected, examples of this are the API-intensive utility bots and moderation bots. Moderation bots are used by the larger subs to offload some of the workload in dealing with spammers, advertising bots, etc. If those are lost (Reddit says they'll "work with the devs" to make sure they stay functional, but they have a history of making empty promises) then existing mod teams who are already (a) overwhelmed and (b) are doing all of this work in their free time (for free), will have it a lot rougher. It's likely this will reflect on the quality of comments in subs as well, as mod teams will have it harder. Utility bots may also get affected to some degree -- I'm not extremely sure on this one, so I won't comment much.
Reddit also recently banned Pushshift from the Reddit API (although this news has been overtaken by the API change news), which aggregates and archives posts/comments for preservation. Reveddit, unddit, and other similar tools that allow users to see deleted content all make use of the Pushshift API to access this. Mods very commonly use this data to be able to act on disruptive users who have deleted their comments (say, if a comment was reported, but a mod didn't see it in time). It's common for users to use this functionality as well, for various legitimate purposes. Reddit has since been in talks with Pushshift, and is said to be restoring the functionality for moderators only, but that's still up in the air right now.
especially the NSFW ones.
A large reason the NSFW subs especially are blacking out is because the API change affects NSFW subs. After it goes into place, NSFW content would be inaccessible through the API at all. This means bots, third-party clients (if some dev somehow has the pockets to pay for it), and other API-reliant tools would not be able to view, comment, or do anything on NSFW subs/posts.
Now, the largest one for me, is that Reddit is going down a bad path. What's to stop them from removing old reddit, removing/charging for other features, etc? They started out as a fairly user-friendly company, they actually listened to feedback, treated developers well, etc. That's (from what I hear) a large part of the reason why Digg refugees went to Reddit and staid for so long. I, along with many others, believe that this is a critical turning point. It might be the last chance we get to do something before we've already gone too far (Reddit is going public soon as well).
In summary, yes, the loss of third-party apps is especially devastating (for both users and the development community), but the API change brings about more than just the loss of third-party apps. It is also showing the direction that Reddit is going currently, and the future looks grim if things continue they way they're going now. This may just well be the last chance we get to turn things around.
I'm more interested in how many of these subs will STAY blacked out though- I expect that of the 5,000 going dark, at least half of them may possibly be back online after the two days.
Many large subs have decided to go dark indefinitely until things get better, my conservative guess is 1/4. A large majority of the remainder have expressed interest in continuing to participate in coordinated blackouts (this 2 day blackout will definitely not be the last if things don't go well) as needed.
It's incredible to me how badly reddit are handling this. The site seems like it could just implode. Some of the sport related subs are not going dark due to ongoing championship games (Stanley...
It's incredible to me how badly reddit are handling this. The site seems like it could just implode.
Some of the sport related subs are not going dark due to ongoing championship games (Stanley cup final game 5 is on Tuesday for example) so there is huge reluctance to go dark.
I'll be curious to see what r/all looks like during the blackout. I assume the massive subs like r/news and r/politics that aren't going dark will have a large presence but will be interested to...
I'll be curious to see what r/all looks like during the blackout. I assume the massive subs like r/news and r/politics that aren't going dark will have a large presence but will be interested to see what it looks like in real-time compared to a "usual" day.
Me too, but I'd rather not bring them any engagement. I've logged out everywhere and don't plan to go back, even logged out, except to shutter my account before the end of the month.
Me too, but I'd rather not bring them any engagement. I've logged out everywhere and don't plan to go back, even logged out, except to shutter my account before the end of the month.
Looks like I can't edit the post any longer.l to add this. The website was down for a bit and as an alternative, you can also check out a live stream they set up. https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Looks like I can't edit the post any longer.l to add this.
The website was down for a bit and as an alternative, you can also check out a live stream they set up.
Probably could have been a temporary hiccup on their side. I imagine there's a lot of traffic heading that way and I'm not sure how they designed the site itself. I think it was a 403 error I had...
Probably could have been a temporary hiccup on their side. I imagine there's a lot of traffic heading that way and I'm not sure how they designed the site itself. I think it was a 403 error I had seen earlier.
As a very much unanticipated side effect of subreddits going dark, it's gotten more difficult to gauge users' character. I'm still participating in a few subs that are still on, mostly to do with...
As a very much unanticipated side effect of subreddits going dark, it's gotten more difficult to gauge users' character. I'm still participating in a few subs that are still on, mostly to do with the protests itself.
All the posts to dark subreddits have now been hidden from people's post histories. As a result, there often isn't an awful lot of stuff to go off of.
Also, you can't access those parts of your own post history either.
That's a bit concerning. I'd hoped to archive my comment history before nuking my account. If some subs are permanently dark, I've missed my chance to do that for those comments.
Also, you can't access those parts of your own post history either.
That's a bit concerning. I'd hoped to archive my comment history before nuking my account. If some subs are permanently dark, I've missed my chance to do that for those comments.
If you're a European citizen, I think a bit of GDPR terrorizing should sort it right out. I don't think they have a leg to stand on to deny you your own posts.
If you're a European citizen, I think a bit of GDPR terrorizing should sort it right out. I don't think they have a leg to stand on to deny you your own posts.
Since the subs are just set to private, you should still be able to archive your comment history as CSV using Reddit's data request system (thanks to GDPR & co). I'm not sure what happens when a...
Since the subs are just set to private, you should still be able to archive your comment history as CSV using Reddit's data request system (thanks to GDPR & co). I'm not sure what happens when a sub is banned or actually removed, but at least for private subs Reddit can still show the comments/posts to someone, so the data has to be kept around.
It won't let you get context for the comments, but it will get you the text and other direct info. (Though I think it just gives you the post id for that, so you might not be able to get the post titles in private subs.)
None of the investing subreddits are participating, as far as I have noticed. I know WSB used to go dark at the drop of a hat back in the day, do they still do that?
None of the investing subreddits are participating, as far as I have noticed.
I know WSB used to go dark at the drop of a hat back in the day, do they still do that?
When Jarket brought on board his mates as mods, then things started going crazy, they started going dark randomly, like they thought it was funny. I guess this isn't funny.
When Jarket brought on board his mates as mods, then things started going crazy, they started going dark randomly, like they thought it was funny.
It’s definitely interesting to see what happens. I think this will create an opportunity for other reddit-like platforms to reach the critical mass that attracts “average internet users” rather...
It’s definitely interesting to see what happens. I think this will create an opportunity for other reddit-like platforms to reach the critical mass that attracts “average internet users” rather than just enthusiasts. Lemmy and Tildes come to mind.
Is there a way to see how traffic to the site is affected or is that something only owners of a website can do? Most interesting would be to see how long each user stays on the site compared with...
Is there a way to see how traffic to the site is affected or is that something only owners of a website can do? Most interesting would be to see how long each user stays on the site compared with a few days ago. (I’m not a techy person, please forgive if I’m using terms wrong!)
It's wild to me how this is a great litmus test of the morals and beliefs of the moderators of reddit.
Like, I found out from this whole thing that while /r/gaming is the bare minimum of content, at least the mods are shutting it down. Meanwhile, /r/games has went full "ACTUALLY IT'S NOT ENOUGH SO WE'RE DOING NOTHING" and it's just like... alright, well, that's one sub not worth supporting at any point ever again.
That’s interesting considering Deimos started /r/games to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/gaming. I don’t sub to either though, so I can’t speak to the current culture or mod teams. Or am I remembering wrong?
And then somebody started /r/truegaming to be a higher-effort, discussion-based version of /r/games.
The excuse of "there's news coming out so we can't shut down" is so fucking weak, too.
I've taken 3 of my subs private already (I'm sole mod of these since they're small). For the last one, the largest of the subs I mod, we're planning to do the 48hr. I need to talk with my co-mod if we want to extend indefinitely; I'd like to, but we'll see.
In that largest one, someone brought up that "but this subreddit is an important service." If it's so important, then why are admins limiting the ways people can access our sub?
The argument came up in /r/sysadmin, as well. "This site is basically mission critical to my job!" If you're relying that heavily on reddit for your job, you've got bigger problems, people...
r/povertyfinance decided that crisis intervention was more important than the protest and I don't really blame them. I would feel the same way about r/stopdrinking, or if there was a suicide prevention subreddit. But it's a high bar.
I admit, I forgot about subreddits like that. That definitely makes sense in those cases. I saw someone who was a mod of a mental health subreddit talking about how they supported the protests, but couldn't take the sub private. People were very supportive of that. These particular subreddits and communities are providing real services and help to people where it might literally be a matter of life or death.
But for news & discussion subreddits? Entertainment subreddits? Conversational subreddits? Adult content subreddits? There's no real reason to not go dark. I mod news subreddits; we're going dark.
I don't want to exactly castigate mods and communities who choose not to go private. I do think it's a decision that every subreddit needs to make on their own, either by the mods, the community, or both.
But like someone else in this thread said, it reeks of ego and self-importance when they say "We can't shut down! People need their news!" when the news is gaming/entertainment related or even it if is more important like politics. As if other media outlets don't exist on the Internet. If communities don't want to participate because they think it's dumb, it's not the right fight, it's performative, admins are giving us what we want/need, etc, then say that. They'll still piss people off, but you'll never satisfy everyone. Might as well be truthful about it.
/r/ukraine is also not closing down for similar reasons.
There are certain subs that have very good reasons for not shutting down, and r/ukraine is certainly one of them. I hadn't thought of r/povertyfinance or r/stopdrinking, but those would make sense too.
r/games... does not enjoy that exception.
The bar can be met by some, but I don't think r/sysadmin is one of them. I like your take here.
The amount of times I google a product and add "reddit" after it to get actual reviews and discussion about it really speaks to the fact that it's so integral to grassroots genuine internet discussion. It sucks.
It feels like we're seeing a trend where some of the places that traffic consolidated to on the internet (Twitter, Reddit) are fraying. Would YouTube be next?
Unlikely as video hosting is actually very expensive. Alternative content platforms, like Nebula and CuriosityStream, exist but they’re very niche and even many of the people on them still post content to YouTube because that’s where most of the traffic is.
Reddit and Twitter and the like are easily substitutable with other time wastes. But YouTube is somewhat unique and hard to replicate.
IIRC Youtube STILL isn't directly profitable. I'm sure it's a huge boon for other sectors, but it says something when you have traffic in the trillions and you still can't break even on ads (and a few subscriptions).
The other factor is monetizing creators. I don't think any other (English) video hosting site could even afford that, let alone has it as a feature. Only streaming platforms (which don't store anywhere near as much long term data). Many creators do it full time and I don't think their other channels of monetization could justify a move off YT, even if by some miracle all their audience was elsewhere.
Are you certain youtube isn't profitable? They have ads running non stop
It's hard finding exact figures, but my source for that is very old. a 2015 WSJ article had an employee says that YT breaks even.
Then in 2021 I don't explicitly see any source saying it's proitable, but many saying it's profit margins rose to +30%. So I guess in the last 5 years or so there was a point where it really made profit. But it was noted that YT's profit margins are lower than other huge sites. FB for example as +80%.
I agree. You don't solve an abusive relationship by walking away for two days. You leave forever.
If the mods of several thousand subreddits all did this...
That would cripple reddit for months while they try to put it all back together, and they couldn't manage to do that even with divine intervention and a map. The spammers and trolls and brigades would eat them alive. The problem is, that won't save reddit. It'll just kill it. Frankly I think it is well past saving. The userbase rot is terminal regardless of what mods and admins do.
I say let them have their free speech paradise. It'll teach the internet a lesson.
AutoMod config, CSS, and old reddit sidebar all have wiki-style version control, so those could all be rolled back with relative ease. Tedious, but not starting from scratch and they could also probably automate the roll-backs on their end, if they needed to.
It would still be a huge hassle, but I also wouldn't be surprised if reddit did some snapshot backups of subreddit configs prior to this weekend (especially after that AMA).
I'm not sure that spez will let anything stand between him and that IPO, at this point, no matter how many bridges he has to burn to get there. Once the IPO happens, spez will cash out and all of it will be someone else's problem.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I thought there was a delete option for the revisions in the wiki. In fact I know one can purge wiki pages - I just don't know if it can be done for Automod's page, as that's a special case. One could also load up sabotaged configs and leave reddit's staff wondering which one to restore, would've worked better with more lead time. Rollbacks take time, and the trolls won't waste any putting the worst content right at the top of the site. They are going to have to manage that and putting it all back together at the same time, and trolls could do this outside of normal business hours for peak pain. They can't fix things if they are all home asleep. All of that is a lot worse than a harmless little blackout.
If your users revolt, there is nothing you can do in the end though - nothing at all. You are along for the ride when that happens, because the social effect is stronger, smarter, and faster to move than any tech component of a social software system. The system will always be at the mercy of the users.
That's the real question, isn't it? Does this bother the users enough to provoke that kind of activity? We'll know soon.
Thinking that the volatility of the sites user base will certainly hurt the valuation for the IPO. I wonder how investors feel about it. Stock market is all about feelings (mostly).
I keep imagining a guy in a nice suit trying to perform well in a job interview, with 1000 screaming children behind him throwing shit on the walls and lighting fires. Like...sir, why do your children hate you so much, and seem to want you to fail? It's a situation that inspires questions.
That's true, but people have really short memories and I'm sure Elon will do something else controversial before reddit's IPO. I'm pretty sure they timed this announcement so that most of it will have blown over and it won't be a concern for investors.
Reddit has actually done a pretty good job of staying out of the headlines for quite a while, and they can spin this to investors as people being upset about reddit no longer giving away free lunches to third-party apps.
And I think investors will look more kindly at this than they would at how reddit was supporting their own app's direct competitors.
This is definitely the way. Cripple them at the knees, let them build everything up again themselves.
Reddit admins could undo those changes within a day
No worries! And I wholeheartedly agree. The 3 subs I mod solely are dark indefinitely. But they have like 500-2000 subscribers each. We don't even get daily posts in any of those, so like your sub, it's not going to have a huge impact.
Over at r/missouripolitics, which is already private and is the "big" sub where I am top mod of 2 mods, I'd very much like to go indefinite. But my co-mod and I haven't talked about going indefinitely. I did put something in the stickied announcement that it could go on longer. So the community and my co-mod are aware that the option is available. But, it too, is a smaller subreddit. Only like 6300 subscribers. There's daily activity, but still. I doubt there's even a single user who comes solely or even mainly for our sub.
I've also signed out of the site and on Apollo already. Trying to not use reddit for the next couple of days; we'll see how that goes.
The largest subreddits need to stay dark indefinitely. It seems that some are planning to do that, or at least beyond the initial two days. Adopting a wait and see approach. And that's heartening. Hopefully more will, even if causes reddit admins to force the issue. As you said, reddit is the admins' site. They can throw open the gates of any sub that's indefinitely dark and remove and replace the mods. Let them do it. I think it's a bad idea for admins to do that, but we've seen that admins love pursuing bad ideas!
I totally agree with you. I deleted my account on Reddit this morning.
r/sysadmin is usually about complaining about work. It's great for career advice from old hands, and for commiseration. r/networking and r/cisco occasionally have really interesting technical topics and industry gossip.
Out of all communities, the technical groups should support accessibility and open communication.
None of them would cause any problems by going offline for a day. But supporting open communication is fundamental to the internet.
Yea that actually seems like the perfect time to protest. It would be very disruptive during a time when they expect an influx of users.
Like I said, litmus test. It's obviously not the end-all be-all, but it proves that people high-in-power in certain subreddits aren't willing to do the bare minimum.
Look at /r/baseball, they're not shutting down and I imagine there's some behind-the-scenes drama about it. There's a huge protest for the Oakland Athletics that they're using their sub to coordinate, and /r/baseball shutting down and redirecting everyone to the A's sub would be incredible, but they're not. And now at least one mod who has been around for forever is stepping down.
I’m hugely into all the sports subreddits, and sadly, most of them are taking a very weak stance on this situation. Even when I was mod, those mod teams existed more in isolation from the rest of the mod community, so I’m not exactly surprised.
It makes sense from the fact that a lot of reddit's core interests 10-15 years ago, when most subreddits were created, was around things like technology and "old school" internet mentality. And most of those people had no interest in sports. So between the "casual" communities and uninterested-in-hard-moral-stances moderators, the end result is no one on them really cares.
And I guess that's good for reddit, because those people are the ones that will consume reddit's content without questioning anything. The "casual" users.
Just using /r/soccer as an example, they put it to a community vote rather than taking a stance, and the user base is strongly in favor of an indefinite protest.
I have never been more interested in Soccer as a sport than I am at this very moment.
Ha! The sport has pretty strong working class roots. Most of the time when a club raises their ticket prices or does something that's a blatant cash grab, fans will protest. It seems like there's always some ongoing protest every season - this year, it was Everton fans protesting mismanagement.
But as a counterpoint, r/woodworking has shut down entirely for the foreseeable future. Reddit admin could install new mods and open it, but they are losing that history and expertise.
I missed the thread that said they were shutting down, so I'm not sure where everyone migrated. Is it just discord? The woodworking communities on Lemmy are pretty dead
There was a discord community that they mentioned, yes. I don't remember anything else.
/r/truegaming actually existed before /r/Games, but it was self-post-only and only allowed a narrow set of topics. The original reason for /r/Games was to have a "general" gaming subreddit that wasn't completely dominated by memes, "DAE remember this gem?" and so on.
...huh, never knew that. I stand incredibly corrected.
I'm not in this instance criticizing Deimos at all, as /r/games far predates my arrival on reddit, but during my brief attempt (years ago) to engage with that community it always felt to me to have a remarkably unfriendly vibe, and to be endemic with people arguing and behaving in bad faith. I chose at the time not to stay subscribed. /r/truegaming has been my subreddit of choice for the occasional game-related ramble (the only other gaming subreddit I subscribe to is /r/patientgamers , and I'm happy to see both of them are joining this protest). They aren't perfect, but they always felt to me like the people running it have genuinely been trying over the years to stay true to the community's principles.
Lol, meanwhile /r/satisfactorygame has a major update coming out tomorrow, and they're still shutting down. Tbf they still have their discord and their own site, but still lol.
I don't frequent that subreddit, but I have to admit that I was curious what their reasoning was and I was reminded again of just how easy it is for corporations to simply lean back and wait. People are people. They can tolerate being taken advantage of to an incredible degree. They want what they want and you can push their limits futher and further with little consequence. I really don't want to be so cynical, but it seems I'm human too.
the community is still kind of like that, yes.
But that is about the users. Fro moderating, TrueGaming is relatively quiet and the mods are careful to remove for common questions or intentionally incendiary stuff. Gaming seems like a complete dumping ground, but I know subs that big have an absolute torrent of posts being removed by necessity. Games... well, let's just say they have on more than one occasion have made explicitly clear their disdain for their community. I'm not surprised on their stance here, once again against many of their vocal community's wishes
That's intentional - r/gaming is a shit shield where anyone can dump their shit tier gaming related memes and not clutter up the more focused gaming subs.
Source: me.
Since /r/anime (where I mod) is the only large general-purpose anime subreddit, for a long time I've wanted a companion sub so we could have a similar kind of split where a lot of the easy-to-consume content like screenshots could be directed there while /r/anime itself could remain more focused on news and discussion. Even got to the point of discussing whether or not we should make that other sub ourselves, but this current debacle has killed any motivation on my end to do more free labor for reddit like that.
I always felt like r/animemes (and whatever splitoffs happened there) was that "general purposes anime subreddit". But maybe you were thinking of something more in control of the r/anime hub. Sort of like how several of the hentai subs are mostly under one collective mod group.
If those ever included more than memes I wouldn't know, I didn't visit them that often. I don't think they'd allow things like "check out this classic anime OP" but I could be wrong.
Also not necessarily about having another sub under our umbrella, as long as we got along with the other mod team it didn't have to be controlled indirectly by us. There are a few subreddit collectors in charge of large swaths of anime-related subs that I don't know if we could work with though.
No, not: in its current state
I guess it's only 80% of the way towards a dumping ground if that was part of what you envisioned in such a sub.
Nothing stops them from making discussion threads in the same way nothing stops r/gaming from making a review discussion. But the culture in both cases are much more skewed towards memes and you'd need to preface a "discussion" with a meme.
Oh I can imagine. If the users can be savory, I can only imagine with talking with mods are like.
To be honest, /r/games is a cesspool, there's so much censorship, astroturfing and deleting/silencing there it's absurd and it's only gotten worse. Quite frankly I don't have any respect for the people running that circus and I didn't expect any better of them, they've only ever shutdown once and it was purely to troll people and nothing else.
It's such a shame because it's the de facto place on reddit to discuss game news.
I thought that was r/gaming. I didn't even know r/games existed, and I'm subscribed to r/patientgamers, which is smaller.
I'll miss /r/patientgamers. The discussions there were quality.
Far as I knew, the recent few years
gamingwas game memes,gameswas game news.That's the thing, 7 years in Reddit and I never knew! The guys at
gamingalso discussed news along with the memes (in the comment section), and I always thought that was the expected place to go for games related content on Reddit (with places liketruegamingmimicking the format of their name). I even thought it was weird (for me) to see ~games instead of ~gaming here, but now I understand it was a lack of knowledge from my part. It's a funny tale about how big Reddit really is (because we can get lost there).It should say something that the one time people ever mention r/Games participating in some kind of event was a "joke" or "troll", and so their refusal to participate here is somehow some kind of corrupt moderation ever.
The thing is: their one blackout was neither a joke nor a troll. It was the moderators' way of highlighting how bad the gaming community had gotten:
No Fooling: Reddit r/Games Subreddit Goes Dark to Highlight Bigotry Online
Popular games subreddit shuts down for a day with frank post about ‘awful comments’; It’s apparently not an April Fools’ joke
https://www.eurogamer.net/r-games-subreddit-shuts-for-april-fools-to-highlight-toxicity-in-game-communities
...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/b7ubwm/rgames_is_closed_for_april_fools_find_out_why_in/
r/Games never participates in reddit-wide events. They've opted out of r/all and refused to be a default multiple times. The intention was that if only people that seek a place for better general games discussion go there, it could theoretically result in a more elevated gaming subreddit. Of course that's proven to be false but they still do no participate in wider reddit things. The one time they did a blackout was not for fun or for a reddit-wide event, it was to bring to attention something rotten in its own community.
Except nobody remembers it this way because the narrative has been purposefully changed by the exact kinds of people this was meant to be calling out.
I'd dare say that moderating gaming subreddits is worse than most other subreddits, including many default ones. Gamers are a whole other breed of toxic, ungrateful types because (thanks to GamerGate) they also have a templated pipeline to change the truth of a matter and perpetuate a false version of events immediately, to the point that it gets regurgitated for years as "fact".
This doesn't just happen with reddit moderation concerns. Even nonsense like "Polygon sent someone who can't play a game to review it!" when it was just a fun video they uploaded of their non-gaming writer fumbling around in a game.
By literally trolling people during April's fools (oh the irony) and having a laugh at their backs on their discord server that you can join and go see for yourself. And even if that wasn't their intention, their shared incompetence cemented that as the actual narrative, especially when they're already infamous for their draconian moderation.
And none of that excuses them from completely abstaining from this, even if it doesn't accomplish anything at least it sends a message, shows some solidarity, other subs that are opted out of r/all are also participating so they have no excuse. They could've at least shown some basic awareness of the issue, instead at best they come off as defeatist cynics, at worst they come off as power tripping cowards and possible shills for Reddit corporate.
I've made my point and not arguing further.
Your point is based on a lie though. Even in this comment, you doubled down on your initial false assumptions and provided another falsitude:
It was not trolling. I just showed you it wasn't, and you described it as that again. Why?
I've been in their Discord for years. This is as false as the idea that they shut down the subreddit as a joke or a prank when they had a long, detailed explanation that was more than explicitly serious. Their Discord is extremely different from the subreddit and doesn't even have the same userbase—where the subreddit users skew to social converatism in the way that "Gamers" do, the Discord is very socially left. The moderators are very professional when it comes to actual subreddit matters there and never discuss them in much capacity on the Discord. What I do remember are plenty of the exact kinds of "gamers" that caused this jumping into the Discord for the first time to complain, the Discord users telling them to take it to the official channels (in the various ways an online chat room would), and then many of those users describing the interaction in very uncharitable or downright false ways in more drama and disingenuity communities.
But beyond this, you somehow claimed it was the moderators' fault for not having the truth be sexy enough to beat a lie. How is it their fault that you chose to perpetuate this false information because you never sought to verify if any of what you heard or assumed was true in the first place? You'd actually prefer if they did some kind of PR or marketing that would somehow get in front of your eyeballs to explain their side? The responsibility of people like yourself spreading the wrong information isn't on them, it's on you.
You're right that it does not excuse them from not participating in this particular protest. But to suggest that it's all just the fault of a terrible moderation team based on these lies above? You can continue to remain silent if you felt you've said your piece. But your comment is exactly the kind of disinformative thing that dragged reddit down. There should be no room for outrage manufacturing.
I was there for that blackout, and all I remember was r/games trying to highlight already downvoted or otherwise ignored comments as "represenative of bigotry".
I'm sure mods see that all the time, and that it can take a toll moderating it, but I don't think anyone on the internet is surprised that there are annoying to outright dangerous comments online. For a gaming sub (which is ultimately a space of media for unnecessary, premium entertainment) to try and highlight that and make it sound like the worst thing possible seems like virtue signaling rather than trying to champion for change.
There's been this undercurrent of the community (both professional and consumer wise) that seem to think games as a medium is childish and the key to making people "take the medium seriously" is to use games to tackle serious issues. And this move above just seems to be yet another attempt. If that's your prerogative, that's great. But they should also realize that games is a huge medium and not everyone will be on board, and trying to force everyone in your vision will simply result in conflict, not a better image. Just like every other medium, games are going to have their versions of pop culture sitcoms, their young adult fiction, and their anime smut. To each their own.
Heck the message says it itself:
But I don't believe that it happens more often in games in particular unlike the rest of that phrase.
With all due respect, that's exactly what I'm talking about. This isn't some unique strategy created by gamers. The only interesting thing about games is that it rose in popularity alongside the internet; in the 90's, in a time where technical innovations exploded, in a time where wordwide communication was becoming very cheap, in a generation where there started to be a computer in every household (and ending when everyone had an internet enabled cell phone in their household). So it has a new generation of tech saavy users and special interests will always go where the crowds are.
If it wasn't games that would get this stigma, it'd be some other hobby. Maybe the anime community (ironically enough), maybe video creators, maybe even books as e-books rose. And to some extent if you go deep enough you will see similar comments to yours by other impassioned community members. There's nothing inherently more political nor toxic about games than any of the aforementioned topics. Simply more eyes.
If GamerGate wasn't already a proven and acknowledged testbed for what would become MAGA and Trumpism when Bannon and the crew at Breitbart noticed that the video game community is especially susceptible in many toxic and problematic ways, then this would hold a lot more water.
But the fact is that video game communities were the ones specifically identified to have enough of a population that was actually willing to be deeply mistrustful of authority, would coordinate in offensives, and not verify or fact-check information throws a wrench in the idea that it's just a few bad apples. It has not disappeared. People frown on r/games and pretty much most other gaming subreddits because the gaming communities are still full of outrage manufacturers and merchants, creating hostile spaces for others.
And sure, maybe it could have been other communities... but it wasn't. It was already attempted in other hobbies like comics and it did not go far because GamerGate changed everything for nerdy hobby communities and the overall wariness of them. Again, the misinformation pipeline I identified above is still the GamerGate template of misinformation spread and distillation. The hostile GamerGate places are still up and around, and they still invade regular gaming places regularly. The votes on r/Games have never, ever returned to pre-GamerGate levels, and you can tell because not a single article that speaks about examining or talking about games and social issues gets over 5 net positive votes.
And then when it comes to their collective response, immaturity is always a huge part. Just look at the response to them blacking out the subreddit once. How would you describe how so many of the community decided to lie about the reason so they could file it away as a bad troll and not a genuine flag of incivility in the community? How would you describe the many people who refuse to take a step back and ask the hard questions about the culture of hostility but jump at the opportunity to hurl insults as soon as someone finds a way to make mods the bad guys even if it's based on a lie? It is this willful lack of self-awareness that keeps the stereotype of gamers being immature going, not the people in a position to flag how bad things are simply trying to address how bad it has gotten.
The gaming community dug itself a big hole and has done little to nothing to get themselves out of it after all this time. The community as a whole is no more mature than it was ten years ago.
It's the same thing at the end of the day. Maybe the Hugo controversy wasn't as large and divisive as Gamergate, but again: book readers have adjusted to not having the internet (nor award shows) for centuries. The Andrew Tate kind of stuff stuff may have happened earlier if Gamergate "failed" (in the sense that it didn't flare into a fiery inferno), and it's not like the whole PUA scene wasn't a thing until late 2022. As you said, comics was another potential tipping point. Need I go on?
Do you think Banner cracked some special formula for gamers, or that they simply saw "lots of people in a single community" and exacted what they would have done if they picked any other medium? Strategies I've seen before and afterwards in pretty much every other scene?
If I may be honest, Gamergate didn't ruin gaming communities, The_Donald did. And not just gaming communities. That issue you point out to in r/games again happened pretty much all across reddit. every kind of media communities, non-American country subs, Porn, even some professional technical communities where you wouldn't expect such divisive discussion. Every single community was talking about the 2016 elections and then about Trump's presidency. Because as you'd expect, everything in traditional media was talking about Trump. Some subs put their foot down and had to explicitly ban discussions about American elections. Some did it de facto through votes as you mentioned, where ANYTHING political in a hobby that isn't primarily about politics was down-voted. Reddit has always had a counter culture side to it, and that was exemplified in 2016/7.
That + the previous blackouts tell me that this was a matter of when, not "if we stopped Gamergate we coulda saved reddit".
The only coincidence here is that GG and the elections basically happened at the same time (and if you want to try to convince me that Gamergate got Donald Trump elected... we may be talking past each other).
I'd go as far as it also being a sign of the stereotypical mod power trip. There are more than a few mods that are, if unadmitted-ly, flat out afraid of being removed from their posts if they actually go fully private which would lose the illusion of power they have over their little domains.
Ding ding ding. The ego-driven moderators will say and do anything necessary to maintain their green usernames. In most cases, that means kissing reddit's corporate ring and they won't hesitate to do it for one second. In fact, reddit might even draft these people to take over for the tens of thousands of mods they are about to lose. All it'll take is sending them another useless free anti-stress app, that worked last time.
You'd think it would be illegal to exploit people suffering from rampant narcissism like this, but the internet is a strange place.
17 years on reddit, they can feel free to remove me and hand it off to someone else. I've watched it spiral the drain for far too long, been through the early days, the "free speech haven" era, and hubris that is Steve Huffman. My 1.5M strong sub is gone.
My 18M sub died five years ago, it's just that no one really noticed. :P
Sizeable, did it not get taken via /r/redditrequest?
I left it under the control of the older mods and they are still there. In particular the current top mod is the guy who runs /r/metal and /r/vintageobscura, which takes most of his time, but he keeps the /r/listentothis mod team in line and I trust him implicitly. The music mods are a tight knit community themselves, and one of the few good mod cliques left on reddit. Frankly, if it hadn't been him at the #2 spot, I'd have done one hell of a reshuffle on the way out. That's his problem now though. :)
I pitched ditching the bots for an invite only model - approved submitters only, fight club style, all one has to do is ask for permission. At least then I'd know the submitters who asked understand that it is for less well known music and I can ban (de-approve) people who don't follow that rule. It prevents bots and spammers from posting too, just like here - I learned that technique on Tildes from Deimos. The team wasn't into it (too much like work I suspect - and I can respect that, fuck reddit), so I dipped out for good.
The problem is the strict format, the bots make for a very hard submission process and they have created an antiseptic community with zero culture. Bots remove 7 out of 10 submissions to listentothis and they make submitting from mobile an endurance trial thanks to the title format rules. There are more than 30 automated rule checks in place, and reddit can only check one at a time, so there is just no possible way to tell people everything that is wrong with their submission at once. That means they correct it, then it gets removed for another rule, they correct it again, it gets removed for a different rule... this goes on until the submitter says fuck this and leaves for good.
That system does keep the popular music out, but it's become total overkill.
If it were approved submitters only, I think we could ditch all of the other rules and all of the bots completely. The sub has no community of any kind left, and very little discussion ever happens. It's become an automated track archive, rather than a real music community where people talk to each other and share tracks organically. It's dead as fuck, from a community perspective at least, and it's been that way a very long time.
For folks who want to see which subs are now private, without going over there,
https://reddark.untone.uk/ ---> Lost tilderino moment there, that's the link posted oops
It's like a little LED map and you can see each one light up as they go private
edit: https://lr.riverside.rocks/
disappointed sure, but I'm not "surprised"
back when hong kongers were protesting, a bunch of places one would think would be sympathetic turned out to not be, and vice versa. You really don't know until something is close to you.
I did the same, really cleaned out my sub list. I was saddened to find just how many subs i enjoyed were staying silent. I don't really expect to spend any more time there at this point.
For news subs like
anime_tittiesI could understand it insofar that reddit as a website is "smaller" than someone consuming bigger news about the world, and hence the latter should take priority.It's like the suicide/addiction subs not going private to not remove an avenue of outreach for people.
But those are a handful of exceptions, so the general rule still stands.
/r/technology's top mod hasn't posted in 6 years, and the second mod is an admin.
That’s interesting, im seeing /r/technology as private now. Was it not earlier?
I was surprised Wallstreetbets is not participating, makes me wonder about the mods and their actual goals vs stated goals!
Did they say why they aren't? I figured there would be sticky posts on both subs explaining their decision but no.
And it makes alerts as they happen?!! I find it so cool that someone can spin something like this up so quick
Never underestimate the dev community on Reddit. There are a lot of passionate and dedicated devs, which is just one of the countless reasons why this API change (a) sucks so much and (b) is probably going to end badly for Reddit. I would not have used Reddit for more than a month without third-party clients and browser extensions.
Yeah, /r/programmerhumor already had some talks about web scraping. Reddit's not in for a fun time if someone decides to go that route. Consumes more data from Reddit when they could have just... used the API instead.
It looks like this link is broken now. It forwards to a twitch moderator page that you have to be logged in to view, and says I don’t have access. Is there a new url?
yeah I guess it got too much for the one guy - he put up another link
https://lr.riverside.rocks/
This is cool, you may consider sharing this as a post because I am sure many Reddit refugees want to follow the blackout without accessing reddit
My two cents from the peanut gallery is that reddit will survive in a diminished form like Twitter or Facebook. Regardless I'm happy to be here. I'm not completely disengaged there, but my use will dwindle with time.
it really does seem like loads of users—probably mostly new users—in reddit do not understand the point of the protest, because they’ve been using the official reddit app for ages
I did a quick search for Android. The largest 3rd party app I noticed was RIF at 5m downloads. Others were in the 1m or lower amount. The official app has over 100m downloads.
Four of those are me. Hoping it was good, tried it, it sucked (or it still sucks), so I deleted it and kept RiF.
Two are me. Accidentally ended up with it when following a Reddit link from Firefox. Then reinstalled to see just how bad it was. I've got it installed still but will keep using RIF until its death. After that, I'm expecting we'll start seeing 3rd party apps just web scrape Reddit rather than use the API.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
I'm not /u/gnoop but web scraping refers to using bots that will visit a webpage as if they were a regular human user, and then "scrape"/parse the actual HTML of the page to get the data they want. This can be error prone and tedious to set up (and will break any time the site changes its layout/structure), but is essentially unblockable without also making the site unusable to humans.
IIUC, the apps for tildes that are currently in development use this method because 1) there's no tildes API yet, and 2) the tildes website is pretty simple and easy to parse in this manner.
You typically have two ways to get data from a website. The primary method used today is API or Application Programming Interface. This is a way for simple commands and data to be sent. Rather than a 3rd party taking in the whole website and discarding all the website graphics, videos, and javascript, it just gets the data needed. This saves on bandwidth.
If there isn't an API, you would do what's called web scraping. That is, you visit the regular website and take all that data. This will be more data than the API would have sent. Get enough people using apps that web scrape Reddit and you impact Reddit's performance. Reddit can update their site to create problems for web scrapers but those developers can just go and update their apps and tools yet again. It becomes a cat and mouse game.
Basically, if this ends up happening Reddit's site will become worse and they'll have essentially done it to themselves.
Then it begs the question, why reddit is trying to kill third party apps, if they have so few users compared to the official app.
They seem to be after every dollar they can get. Get rid of the 3rd party apps and that's more potential eyes on your ads, not someone else's. Of course, they could be making money off 3rd party apps with reasonable pricing and a better 3rd party API policy but this seems more about IPO prep to show value. Dumb thing is, they could have kicked this particular can down the road to try and show growth in some future quarter.
I used to be a free software nerd, so ive been using infinity on fdroid since I got my first phone 2 years ago, I downloaded the official app because chat dosnt work in my app, but I found it horrendous, and supposedly it uses gigabites of data, and I have to pay for data Im never on wifi
I haven't tested how much data the official app uses but I'm not surprised. It's definitely slower than using RIF.
The hilarity is, someone will probably write a new app that scrapes Reddit and is still faster than the official app.
I've been checking on those accounts out of curiosity and because a mouse-over tells the whole story with the right mod tools installed. Awful lot of accounts with that sentiment are less than a week old, and many of them delete after a day or two. This does not smell like an actual human to me. Paid shilling trying to get ahead of the bad PR and reprogram users by repeatedly stating the same sentiments - and it will not work.
I'm so glad that at least on this website, I can automatically assume 'human' when dealing with someone. Can't do that anywhere else, really.
Yeah I manually clicked on a lot of the shill posts and they were very suspicious. Accounts only a few weeks old, very little karma, often either quite toxic or with very short low-effort/generated replies.
Generously it's just new users or kids who don't see what the fuss is because they haven't been there long enough to know any better.
Cynically it's a pathetic attempt at astro turfing by reddit / other groups who would benefit from reddit losing their longest standing community members.
Yeah this site is such a breath of fresh air. Reminds me of the high quality discourse you used to be able to find everywhere on reddit back in the day after sifting through crappy rage comics.
In terms of reddit shooting themselves in the foot, I consider the blackout only to be a minor problem. The moderators who act as unpaid volunteers are the ones who use 3rd party apps and api services. Even if 48hrs pass and all subreddits come back, many of the moderators won't. Those that stay are likely to reduce their commitment.
Their CEO, CTO and other staff have repeatedly expressed belief in their ownership of all well moderated reddit content and comments. That third parties are stealing from them and are worthless leeches. They fundamentally don't seem to accept that well written comments and moderation stemming from third party services are actually giving them value to "monetise".
I'm ambivalent. I agree that Reddit isn't big because it out qualified its competition. But due to its size, it did attract a lot of users, and these users are going to mostly be casual ones. As a business, as long as those casual users aren't inconvenienced too much, not much will change.
I do also agree that there currently is not a good Reddit alternative. Again, not because there aren't better websites from a technical perspective, but because it's really hard gaining users these days as a new site. Keep in mind the activity here as an invite-only community and note that other full public alternatives are even quieter. They can't handle a big migration from reddit, even if people were ready to move.
Yeah I know Lemmy actually put out a statement asking people to spread out amongst their different servers as they could not handle all the Reddit people coming in at once.
I guess what could happen, considering just how many subs are now dark (5500 out of 7000, including all but 1 of the big ones) is that the investors interested in the IPO withdraw the money they've put aside for it and invest it elsewhere, thinking their investment is too risky with a site that can be "sabotaged" in a concerted effort as easily.
That would actually have an effect, IMO.
I mean they could, but then they'd also probably lose investors for the sharp rise in labor cost. >.>
I don't see them as pointless -- all these moderators are both self-selected and other-selected because they understand Reddit culture and expectations. Even if I hold a different view, I still have to respect their take that this step of blackout is necessary. Blacking out a subreddit isn't defeat but hope for change, else they would just leave and nuke their data on the way out (which they still can ultimately do if change doesn't come).
I have apathy because what of what Reddit was already becoming due to the influx of mobile and the tolerance for lower-quality content contributed mainly by mobile users who -- understandably -- weren't as conversational or interesting to read.
I also have apathy because Reddit Inc. has always confused the company and technology with Reddit (the users and the content). The latter of which was always empowered by 3rd-party software to get around the limitations of the company-provided technology. They keep spending their money and employee hours on reinventing a wheel that its users have already invented. They've always been poorly managed and that poor management has been the subject of very public gossip on Reddit for years.
We should expect nothing good to come out of chaos, and that's what we're seeing here.
All things must and will end. If it began, it will end. If I'm frustrated about that, it's because I forgot that it must go this way, I forgot that nothing good can be expected to come out of chaos outside of dumb luck, and that Reddit Inc. has never understood what Reddit really is (or was).
I’ve spent the past few days taking a look at reddit alternatives and tildes is the one that most resonated with me. Their mission statement and core beliefs is exactly what I wish reddit had. Hope it goes completely public soon to not miss out on this wave of new people potentially coming over.
I still don't understand this whole protest. Users want their third-party applications back which is good, but the real issue that Reddit is becoming like TikTok will not be reversed. Also I don't think Spez will change his mind, he didn't talk about the "content made by the users" in his AMA, and even if subreddits go dark for more than a few days, he can kick the mods and appoint new ones. Last but not least, even if Spez is fired, it won't stop the IPO.
I looked at the list of subreddits and it confirmed my opinion. I may be wrong, but I don't believe that this meme machine can ignore /r/funny or /r/aww for more than a few days. That's why I think the mods could be changed. After all, they already have the same "powermods" as Digg which control hundreds of subreddits.
Here's the thing...Reddit is now as popular, if not moreso, as Digg was in it's heyday. That's a massive amount of free labour moderating an even more massive amount of users. The content generators are merely the seeds that feed the user base. It's the actual discussions that bring people to the site. Superusers are just a tool used by the users, not the other way around. They may post a lot of content, but they have to be aware of what people actually want to talk about. Superusers are at the whim of whatever the users want.
Mods are important because they are a part of the community and actually care about it. They don't get paid, so their only motivation is to maintain the community so it doesn't devolve into bots and spamlinks. They have to give the users of that community what they want, or they will be removed as mods. And to someone that enjoys having power over a community, no matter how small or virtual that community is, they'll do whatever it takes to remain in control. Mods are at the whim of whatever the users what.
The users are what bring other users to the site. It's the discussions around the articles and random picutes of cute animals are what generate revenue. Go look at Digg...seriously, take a minute and look at what Digg became. If you remember what it was back in 2009/2010, with the lively discussions in each post and a nice interface to talk to other people, you'll be appalled at what you find now. It's a generic tiled column of posts, with most being posted by a single user that's obviously an SEO bot. And the discussions are gone...most posts don't have comments, and the ones that do only have 1 or 2. The site is dead from a user perspective. You can't generate revenue if no one is looking at your content.
Reddit is at a dangerous crossroad right now. I've seen my own posts be removed for mentioning this site as an alternative. Admins are nervous, which is making mods nervous, which is starting to have a chilling effect on discussions. They can turn it around by admitting fault and reversing course, but that AMA with spez was their FARK "You'll get over it" moment. They seem to be doubling down on the changes, just like Digg 4.0. I don't see this working out well. Sure, they may survive in some sense, possibly becoming like FARK and not falling all the way to Digg levels. But I think Reddit is on its way down. Which is why I'm here. And I finally got my username back on one of these platforms.
This is a specific example of the wider question of "what is the point of protesting"?
Aside from (1) venting personal frustrations, (2) finding support through a hard time among like-minded folks, and even aside from (3) "actually being able to make a change", there is the aspect of (4) informational transfer
For every day there's stuff being posted, there's NEW people who had only heard about it from that day.
Which then snowballs into (5) spread.
For every day protest continues, more "oh what's the use" type folks might re-consider their position and change from passive sad to active mad.
For every major action, the news media will write about it, which will affect how their sponsors need to maintain their image.
For every sponsor pausing spending, their bottom line shrinks.
Sometimes the benefit of the power of the people isn't going towards the direct oppressors, but as a warning to other would-be bullies.
Concrete example: two hours ago Reddark reports just under 5000 subs committed to going private. Right now they're at 5279.
Completely agree. I mod a few very large subreddits, one being in the top 10. We are predicting the protest won't get reddit corporate to change. But the more people can come together as a movement, the more likelihood that something alternative will be created.
I've always found this sentiment confusing. I've been boycotting Nestle since the 90's due to their baby formula actions in Africa that killed babies. I didn't start because I thought I would change the world and stop Nestle, simply because I didn't want to support a company like that.
I had a thought twenty years ago on voting, my vote means so little why bother, it won't change anything. Then I thought to myself, I'm not unique and special. The views I hold are shared by many others and they will be having that same thought. If I choose not to vote, it in a way represents that much larger number of people who thought it was pointless. If I do vote, then actually there will be thousands of like minded people who came to the same conclusion. Suddenly it isn't one vote, it is thousands, all the people like you who decided to make a stand.
I’m reminded of a cartoon I’ve seen, with two groups of people. The largest group has a speech bubble above saying “we didn’t vote because it won’t make a difference anyway”.
There is power in numbers!
I'm a "oh what's the use" type. Not mad. Won't get mad. Reddit was already on the way to being less interesting due to the influx of terse and meme-y mobile-only users. All things end. Reddit Inc. just is hastening Reddit's demise. I won't rage-quit because I have no rage, but I do and naturally will lose interest in the growing mediocrity of a site losing its best contributors.
Reddit and Reddit Inc. are two different things and neither understand the other very well. Add to that the fact that Reddit Inc.'s management is a fascinating-to-watch shit-show and it's hard to expect anything good will come out of a shit-show.
Also, consider for a moment the position the newly appointed mods would be in. There is basically no way to stop an angry mob on reddit other than locking the whole thing. A single dedicated malicious user can cause enough chaos that it takes vigilance to keep them in check. Now imagine a subreddit with over a million subscribers, of which you just pissed off a good part of the active userbase. They'll lock it down voluntarily again after a day.
More importantly:
I think even if Reddit ends up doing this, then they will have to clean cat shit for the rest of their lives. They'll soon will find out they don't wanna do it. I personally worry about their poor new mods, the official mod tools sound like a nightmare.
Really seems like this is going to be a slow hemorrhage of everything the site uses. Currently they feel the tools use the site, but it feels like the site uses the tools with how much this change is purported to affect. Reddit the site will remain and probably morph into TikTok 2: Electric Boogaloo or something Either way, this seems like a real tipping point for an impressive number of long time users.
As I mentioned in the other thread, while Reddit can remove mods and put new ones in place in some cases, if the outright shutdown is large enough, they don't have the resources to replace everyone with competent/experienced scrubs. Add to it there are multiple subs, like /r/music, that have home grown bots, being run on servers the mods pay for because reddit won't provide the tools, that leave with those mods.
For me it was just the straw that broke the camels back. Reddits content has been declining for years. The same posts make it to the front page regularly. Losing RIF made me realize I wasn't enjoying it anymore. After I got my invite here I deleted my account on Reddit and will not be going back even if they do decide to keep the third party apps, which they won't.
Can you please explain what IPO means in this context?
This has been super interesting. I've never seen communities listed in this manner. I'd be interested in this kind of sort for other services as well.
Really hoping to see major players go dark soon and wishing they would stay that way, like r/videos plans to. Oh, what the world would be like if corporations actually cared about the people they profit from.
I'll second your last point. I feel like we need more non-profit services like Tildes or even Cohost in the world. While I believe the Fediverse has a lot of potential, I think design flaws (such as how hard it can be to find people on Mastodon, for example) are hindering its ability to reach a critical mass.
Agree 100%. I have a Mastodon account, but found it to be very kludgy to find and curate the thing I'm really interested in. The fediverse is an awesome concept that jist hasn't come to fruition yet.
That said I'm hopeful here. For now I have gone back to using an RSS reader for news. What was great about reddit is you would often get people who's expertise pertained to something very particuar and they would expound on an article or comments. They often linked to sources or provided context.
Yeah for me personally after I delete my reddit account I will still likely use teddit.net to lurk r/talesfromtechsupport and r/anime_titties (world politics).
On the up side I've used Lemmy for the past couple days and while it has some of the same flaws as mastodon for discoverability (especially for communities that exist on different instances), I think it seems fairly promising as a federated Reddit.
My issue is the goalposts keep moving in regards to what is "true" protest. The sub I moderate is fairly niche, has a modest user base of 24k. We did a poll, and the users overwhelmingly chose to go dark for a 48 hour period. The mod team is under no illusion that our smallish sub about a tattoo reality TV competition show being private is gonna shut down Reddit, but we thought it was ethical to stand with fellow sub mods, 3rd party admin, and others affected by the changes.
However, now I'm skimming some talk here and on discord, and I see that there are those who think this is stupid, ineffectual, that you're not really protesting unless you shut down forever. On a level I can understand that, but I am worried that we're reaching a point where we're no longer in 2 camps, for or against. We're in several camps of 48, 72, indefinite, account purge, account deletion, and we're gonna turn on each other and achieve exactly fuck all and in fact make things worse.
Edit: errant apostrophe
Just make it two groups: I don't care, and do what's effective to make an effect.
The second group has different ideas about what would be effective, but they only want results.
The first group only wants dopamine and they want it right now.
I hear you. I also hear them.
The cynicism in me has a lot to say...
But I don't like what it has to say...
Seeing the blacked out subreddits increase in number reminds me that people really do have more power than they realize. We can affect change if we choose. How much? I really don't know.
We've seen examples of how some CEOs will burn things to the ground knowing that they can still capitalize on the embers. somehow that's still enough for them. But what if we snuffed the fire so thoroughly, that they were forced compromise and concede in some areas...?
I don't know if everyone's ready and willing to snuff it out. Without a third party mobile client though, I know that I wont be able to engage in any meaningful way any longer. But that's just me.
I'm sure this is unpopular, but how much are people really thinking about what's going on with this blackout?
Flipping this on its head: why do you think most of the "serious" subreddits aren't blacking out?
Maybe 3rd party apps isn't the right hill to die on, considering the other glaring issues with reddit: unverified porn, covid disinfo, dangerous hate speech etc. that for some odd reason mods aren't willing to go to bat for?
This isn't a blackout for mod tools that make it possible to safely moderate these huge communities, commitments admin have made for a decade, but never delivered on.
Redditors don't seem to care about the big issues with reddit, but take their 3rd party apps, and they're down for a 2 day stint of slacktivism.
This is a very strange hill to die on.
My final straw was not the convenience of third party apps, but that reddit was completely disregarding their blind users. After a huge stink, redreader was designated as the accessible android app, but the decision to not serve NSFW content to third parties is still in place and will be going forward. Blind people want porn also. Also the way they treated the dev from apolloapp was unconscionable. 30 days is an insanely tight timeline designed to put all of those apps out of business.
That was what brought me from having typical disgust of reddit's actions to full outrage. How dare they. I have only ever used the official app for a couple of hours, I had no idea how horrific it was for accessibility.
The fact they didn't realise how bad accessibility was and had to be told after announcing the changes is astonishing. At that point they should have immediately postponed their plans. I think the only reason they have even scrambled to put out loads of PR on accessibility is due to learning the massive legal liability.
For some, it is about mod tools. I used to moderate for a living, and worked for some large companies - one was much larger than Reddit. It is abysmal how much disdain Reddit has shown for the people who do this work for them for free. The fact that people were dependent on third party apps and tools to get things done in the first place was not great, but these API changes and that AMA with spez is a huge fuck you to the people who make Reddit run. Also, just kind of a stupid move overall from a business standpoint. Not going to be very advertiser friendly if all the people who actually moderate out the CSAM and spambots don't have the ability to do that effectively, is it?
I probably would have just kept using reddit from the browser with old.reddit until they nuked that too if they took away my third party app, because I can't stand algorithmic content suggestions or the format of the new interface. But I have no interest in hanging out in a place where moderators get a big middle finger from the platform, especially when those moderators are working for free. Even getting paid to do it, that job sucks.
I've moderated large subreddits for years. None of our third party tools have ever been in jeopardy because of the API changes. That's always been clearly communicated, both in public and directly to us in closed mod/developer areas.
Yes, reddit have always treated mods terribly. It's a travesty that we don't have feature parity with internet forum software anno 2005 for moderating the site. It's an absolute joke.
A two-day time-limited blackout? That's not how going on strike works to encourage change. It's worse than doing nothing because people will go "we did it reddit!", pat themselves on the back and forget about mod tools. The push for a safe standard of mod tools on the site will be worse off after this stunt.
A number of moderators have decided to stay dark indefinitely, which is an action I fully support. I agree that a time limited blackout is not sufficient in this case, though time limited strikes are a tool that have been utilized in labor movements to great. In those cases, like recent nurse and medical resident strikes, it was a tool to show people how bad things could get, a warning shot to get people to come to the table and discuss things in earnest. At least publicly, Reddit appears to have no interest in doing any of that, instead of coming up with concrete timelines to improvements to their official tools or real compromises they're sticking to wishy-washy "we'll do better" statements. Maybe they're doing more in the private conversations, but that information isn't making it to the public.
I am not a Reddit moderator, so I am not in those discussions, but given that every statement from moderators before your comment I've seen indicates they feel that their ability to moderate will be impacted by these changes, that's where my opinion currently lies.
I'm sure a lot of people haven't heard about the recent downsizing of 5% of reddit's staff (about 90 employees).
They fired several of the mod point-people, including the AMA-liaison. The firing of these community managers is going to impact my modding and that of the rest of our team way, way more than losing 3rd party mobile apps. Again, the API-changes won't affect mod tooling at all.
A tiny, tiny percentage of mod actions are made on mobile because even with the third party apps, the moderation functionality is so bad.
The first major mod blackout years ago was solely because the AMA point-person was fired. This time most people haven't even heard about it. Most of the pro blackout mods won't have heard about it either because, well, who they are and how they moderate their communities.
This is an example of how poor reddit is at getting across information from the non-majority.
Most people won't have seen a majority of relevant facts in the current situation. You're only hearing from those who want to black out. Many of them have been itching (and agitating) for new blackouts continuously since the last time it happened in a major way.
It partially is, actually. Some mods compromise by using mod tools available in 3rd party apps that the native tools don't have. I've ready many talk about how not having their preferred 3rd party app would make it difficult or outright impossible to properly moderate and joined the blackout for that reason.
in all fairness there were protests against COVID disinformation. IMO it wasn't that impactful because the biggest change was leading to a 20k subreddit about some weird "alternative treatement" being banned. Proportionately speaking I think moderators did a good job there raising awareness of the issue.
The fact is that that sorts of misinformation is inevitable on any website in the history of websites. I didn't see it as a "reddit problem" so much as a internet problem. So I didn't see it worth leaving reddit over given that any other sizeable community would probably have it worse, especially since users can't do "soft moderation" on most other sites.
While internet points aren't a good thing to worry over, pretty much every COVID disinfor comment I saw back in the heyday were downvoted into all oblivion. If the mods themselves didn't come in quickly enough to remove it themselves. It seemed to be a self correcting problem.
Personally, I think this protest will achieve exactly nothing. The subreddits will re-open after 48 hours, and the Reddit executives will continue to do what they always planned to do: keep monetising reddit.com any way they can think of.
Also, in one subreddit, the mod team decided to poll the users about whether to shut down, and one user responded with "my impression is that you want to punish the users of this subreddit in order to help third party businesses". That's how some users see this issue. And it's not hard to see how it can come across that way.
oh, ouch :( if I were a mod (erh, I quit a long time ago because it was too hard) I would be very hurt to hear someone say that about the unthanked hard work that mods do.
Hm, maybe I should go bump the mental health post in two days -- a lot of users have deep deep roots there, and this kind of thing might be fun to watch while it burns, but afterwards when everybody goes back to their lives, those who invested the most might have more to work through than others.
in just about any website with mods, they are constantly derided, so it wasn’t the biggest surprise for me
It could also be an indicator which mods aren't acting independent anymore.
Still I'm surprised how many default subs are going dark
I meant that i would have thought that reddit had "bought" enough mods in big subs that at least the big subs would be in protected from this kind of protests.
This is just speculation and i don't want to accuse anyone and have neither proof nor knowledge about that any such thing is happening.
Payroll could happen or something like establishing contacts to firms/advertisers to allow/push certain things and thus get rewards from a third party. Or it's simply to stay in the position with official backing.
Or maybe this is just paranoia on my part and all the big subs are independent and such a thing wouldn't be able to stay hidden.
Looks like the site went down so they started a live stream on twitch
I think the site just kept going down so they gave up and just redirected to the stream (which I also believe started before the site went down for good). Regardless, it's amazing, and I'm excited to be witnessing this history!
This is legit cool.
I have to admit, I'm impressed by how many of the smaller subs are going dark... especially the NSFW ones.
The thing for me is, I have no horse in this race. I will never use an app for browsing ANY site (unless you're forced to use an app, like Discord), so I admit I'm in the group that's heavily inconvenienced by this. Which is the point, I suppose. Ultimately though, I really don't care one way or the other about this.
I'm more interested in how many of these subs will STAY blacked out though- I expect that of the 5,000 going dark, at least half of them may possibly be back online after the two days.
A large focus and main public point of the blackout currently is the 3rd party apps, as it's the most high profile and easiest to understand. The visually impaired have it especially rough, as Reddit's site and official app are practically useless in terms of accessibility -- they have to rely on third-party apps to be able to browse Reddit at all.
Putting aside 3rd party apps now, the API change affects tools other than just 3rd party apps. Anything that uses the API a decent amount will be affected, examples of this are the API-intensive utility bots and moderation bots. Moderation bots are used by the larger subs to offload some of the workload in dealing with spammers, advertising bots, etc. If those are lost (Reddit says they'll "work with the devs" to make sure they stay functional, but they have a history of making empty promises) then existing mod teams who are already (a) overwhelmed and (b) are doing all of this work in their free time (for free), will have it a lot rougher. It's likely this will reflect on the quality of comments in subs as well, as mod teams will have it harder. Utility bots may also get affected to some degree -- I'm not extremely sure on this one, so I won't comment much.
Reddit also recently banned Pushshift from the Reddit API (although this news has been overtaken by the API change news), which aggregates and archives posts/comments for preservation. Reveddit, unddit, and other similar tools that allow users to see deleted content all make use of the Pushshift API to access this. Mods very commonly use this data to be able to act on disruptive users who have deleted their comments (say, if a comment was reported, but a mod didn't see it in time). It's common for users to use this functionality as well, for various legitimate purposes. Reddit has since been in talks with Pushshift, and is said to be restoring the functionality for moderators only, but that's still up in the air right now.
A large reason the NSFW subs especially are blacking out is because the API change affects NSFW subs. After it goes into place, NSFW content would be inaccessible through the API at all. This means bots, third-party clients (if some dev somehow has the pockets to pay for it), and other API-reliant tools would not be able to view, comment, or do anything on NSFW subs/posts.
Now, the largest one for me, is that Reddit is going down a bad path. What's to stop them from removing old reddit, removing/charging for other features, etc? They started out as a fairly user-friendly company, they actually listened to feedback, treated developers well, etc. That's (from what I hear) a large part of the reason why Digg refugees went to Reddit and staid for so long. I, along with many others, believe that this is a critical turning point. It might be the last chance we get to do something before we've already gone too far (Reddit is going public soon as well).
In summary, yes, the loss of third-party apps is especially devastating (for both users and the development community), but the API change brings about more than just the loss of third-party apps. It is also showing the direction that Reddit is going currently, and the future looks grim if things continue they way they're going now. This may just well be the last chance we get to turn things around.
Many large subs have decided to go dark indefinitely until things get better, my conservative guess is 1/4. A large majority of the remainder have expressed interest in continuing to participate in coordinated blackouts (this 2 day blackout will definitely not be the last if things don't go well) as needed.
It's incredible to me how badly reddit are handling this. The site seems like it could just implode.
Some of the sport related subs are not going dark due to ongoing championship games (Stanley cup final game 5 is on Tuesday for example) so there is huge reluctance to go dark.
I'll be curious to see what r/all looks like during the blackout. I assume the massive subs like r/news and r/politics that aren't going dark will have a large presence but will be interested to see what it looks like in real-time compared to a "usual" day.
Me too, but I'd rather not bring them any engagement. I've logged out everywhere and don't plan to go back, even logged out, except to shutter my account before the end of the month.
Unrelated. Just wanna say that I like like your username. 😁
Thank you very much.
Looks like I can't edit the post any longer.l to add this.
The website was down for a bit and as an alternative, you can also check out a live stream they set up.
https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
That's weird, because it's still working fine for me. Maybe a CDN issue?
Probably could have been a temporary hiccup on their side. I imagine there's a lot of traffic heading that way and I'm not sure how they designed the site itself. I think it was a 403 error I had seen earlier.
You can’t CDN a live site like this. Well, the assets you can. But the breaking point will be the websocket server.
I like some of the subs on Reddit, but can do without it for two-three days, or longer, if necessary.
As a very much unanticipated side effect of subreddits going dark, it's gotten more difficult to gauge users' character. I'm still participating in a few subs that are still on, mostly to do with the protests itself.
All the posts to dark subreddits have now been hidden from people's post histories. As a result, there often isn't an awful lot of stuff to go off of.
Also, you can't access those parts of your own post history either.
That's a bit concerning. I'd hoped to archive my comment history before nuking my account. If some subs are permanently dark, I've missed my chance to do that for those comments.
If you're a European citizen, I think a bit of GDPR terrorizing should sort it right out. I don't think they have a leg to stand on to deny you your own posts.
Since the subs are just set to private, you should still be able to archive your comment history as CSV using Reddit's data request system (thanks to GDPR & co). I'm not sure what happens when a sub is banned or actually removed, but at least for private subs Reddit can still show the comments/posts to someone, so the data has to be kept around.
It won't let you get context for the comments, but it will get you the text and other direct info. (Though I think it just gives you the post id for that, so you might not be able to get the post titles in private subs.)
Does anyone know if r/wallstreetbets is participating? I couldn’t find a definitive answer.
None of the investing subreddits are participating, as far as I have noticed.
I know WSB used to go dark at the drop of a hat back in the day, do they still do that?
Yeah, I am surprised they’re not.
When Jarket brought on board his mates as mods, then things started going crazy, they started going dark randomly, like they thought it was funny.
I guess this isn't funny.
They are not.
It’s definitely interesting to see what happens. I think this will create an opportunity for other reddit-like platforms to reach the critical mass that attracts “average internet users” rather than just enthusiasts. Lemmy and Tildes come to mind.
Is there a way to see how traffic to the site is affected or is that something only owners of a website can do? Most interesting would be to see how long each user stays on the site compared with a few days ago. (I’m not a techy person, please forgive if I’m using terms wrong!)
There are certainly metrics, but they are maintained by reddit. Unless it's leaked, I don't think we'll get to know the true measure of impact.