I had a feeling that the blackout wouldn't work unless it was indefinite, and it seems reddit thinks so too. Interesting that they advised "please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public", I...
I had a feeling that the blackout wouldn't work unless it was indefinite, and it seems reddit thinks so too. Interesting that they advised "please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public", I didn't think anyone would go that far.
Additonally, "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor." Expected, but still disappointing. I guess the "typical" redditor doesn't care (or hasn't noticed) about the changes?
It's because this is a prepared statement meant to be leaked, to help garner sympathy for Reddit. The entire thing stinks of PR, but that part in particular, as well as the whole paragraph where...
Exemplary
Interesting that they advised "please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public", I didn't think anyone would go that far.
It's because this is a prepared statement meant to be leaked, to help garner sympathy for Reddit. The entire thing stinks of PR, but that part in particular, as well as the whole paragraph where spez looks at the camera and reiterates that they're working with apps that want to work with them:
While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
It's pretty clear already that they're not actually in talks with any apps people care about, and employees should be even more aware of that—this is using all the same verbiage that he's been using to talk publicly about the changes, it's continuing his DARVO tactics by invoking "people are attacking poor helpless Reddit employees", and it's providing only information that Reddit clearly wants the public to understand.
Sure, this was sent out as an internal memo, but they're not looking for the person who leaked it. This was all strategic.
And I sincerely doubt the strategy is going to work. It's too transparent.
The thing that gets me about this whole thing-- it reeked of "going corporate" with the IPO and it was whatever. spez was doing his due diligence to cash out and retire with enough generational...
It's because this is a prepared statement meant to be leaked, to help garner sympathy for Reddit.
The thing that gets me about this whole thing-- it reeked of "going corporate" with the IPO and it was whatever. spez was doing his due diligence to cash out and retire with enough generational wealth to own a planet or whatever.
But then the shit with the Apollo dev started, and they lied and bullshitted and doubled down. It went from emotionless ideal-state capitalism to something that felt more... sinister. Like, obviously a massive company and the money rolls require asshole-ism, but going after some random dude who did all of this work just feels so incredibly petty.
Like, when spez could retire into obscurity to go be a photographer like Tom from Myspace, disappearing from the annals of internet history as "just another dev gone corporate", he decided to double down on infamy for no reason.
It feels like spez (and the other admins) are scrambling to control the narrative, despite that control slipping further and further from their grasp with every word they say. They know this...
It feels like spez (and the other admins) are scrambling to control the narrative, despite that control slipping further and further from their grasp with every word they say. They know this change has to happen for their IPO, and they know that the media is going to latch on to the poor underdog (Apollo), so they’re trying to make the narrative that Apollo is unreasonable rather than Reddit.
Unfortunately for them, it’s pretty easy to spot DARVO when it’s as obvious as this.
IMO it seems not that they're trying to control the narrative, but they're trying to hide the true intentions. It's a small distinction, but what encapsulates this perspective best to me is the...
IMO it seems not that they're trying to control the narrative, but they're trying to hide the true intentions. It's a small distinction, but what encapsulates this perspective best to me is the question in the AMA and Steve's response.
Question: 'Why is the timeline so strict?'
Steve's Answer: "I acknowledge the timeline is tight."
They have yet to actually provide an answer to this simple question. Why after 10+ years of this API setup, even after they told Apollo dev in January this year they had no plans to make any changes, it it suddenly so important to completely change it so quickly? What answer could there be to this question, that they either can't answer, or don't want to answer? At this point I don't think it's an accident they haven't answered it or that it has been overlooked, they're being very intentional in not providing an answer.
Yeah, the obvious one initially was, they wanted to kill 3rd party apps. Maybe that is it.
Another possible answer is, ChatGPT and LLMs, but if that's the answer, why not just say it? Unlike the 3rd party apps answer that makes them look bad to say out loud, how does this answer reflect poorly on them? Why not expand on what in particular matters about this, because these LLMs already have 15+ years worth of reddit posts and comments, what would be 1 more year if they slowed the rollout?
Then that brings us to the other answer, the IPO. I don't know the legalities behind what they can or cannot say about IPO plans or certain business moves leading up to an IPO. But if this move were because of the IPO, and not about killing 3rd party apps or LLMs, why not roll out API changes gradually or more in advance of the IPO giving people more notice? Why anger and frustrate users and developers all at once, in one big action, rather than slicing up who is affected and by how much into smaller pieces so you don't have this giant tidal wave of protests crashing down on you? You can't argue that Apollo is bad for reddit if they had gradually increased the costs for API to the point where Apollo could continue existing but the only users left on it are paying $10 per month and reddit's getting half of that. Why shut down possible revenue streams and anger people over being unreasonable if the answer is IPO?
Their lack of speaking on that issue is what is not allowing them to control the narrative in my opinion, and for whatever reason they're not wiling to say why.
What if they want to IPO faster? Steve could think the value of Reddit is at it's peak right now and delaying the IPO further back risks reducing his payout.
Why shut down possible revenue streams and anger people over being unreasonable if the answer is IPO?
What if they want to IPO faster? Steve could think the value of Reddit is at it's peak right now and delaying the IPO further back risks reducing his payout.
Absolutely. They wouldn't have done this any earlier than they absolutely had to. They waited at long as they could: with enough time before the IPO that it would mostly be forgotten, but not so...
Absolutely. They wouldn't have done this any earlier than they absolutely had to. They waited at long as they could: with enough time before the IPO that it would mostly be forgotten, but not so much time that any impacts of losing moderators and contributors will start to have a measurable impact on traffic.
That's a cynical take. Are you suggesting spez deliberately sabotaged Reddit to make a quick buck for himself? I can buy that he's looking to maximize profits, but not that he intends to tank the...
That's a cynical take. Are you suggesting spez deliberately sabotaged Reddit to make a quick buck for himself? I can buy that he's looking to maximize profits, but not that he intends to tank the company in the long term.
He's not intending to tank it, but I firmly believe he doesn't care about the site's long-term success beyond the IPO. I think he views post-IPO reddit as someone else's problem. Reaching a...
He's not intending to tank it, but I firmly believe he doesn't care about the site's long-term success beyond the IPO. I think he views post-IPO reddit as someone else's problem.
Reaching a reasonable compromise on the API price point with third-party apps would have been the move to make if he actually cared about the site and communities; reddit would get its fair share, users would have plenty of options for apps, everyone wins.
But he moved to kill third-party apps because it will maximize the price of the IPO, since it will give a big boost to their official apps user base and investors see users as things they can monetize (but they can't do that if their not using their app). He knows there is a risk that it will alienate reddit's oldest users and biggest contributors—not to mention its mods—but any effects of that, if any, won't be immediately measurable by the time of the IPO.
Yeah, agree with this. Short deadlines as a result of short term thinking. Not a long term plan to tank it, but when you're only looking at the near term, you're necessarily not looking at the...
Yeah, agree with this. Short deadlines as a result of short term thinking. Not a long term plan to tank it, but when you're only looking at the near term, you're necessarily not looking at the long term.
I expect the reasoning was along the lines of "ripping off the band-aid," in that the anger (and press coverage) world be bigger, but it would be over more quickly and more likely to fade from...
Why anger and frustrate users and developers all at once, in one big action, rather than slicing up who is affected and by how much into smaller pieces so you don't have this giant tidal wave of protests crashing down on you?
I expect the reasoning was along the lines of "ripping off the band-aid," in that the anger (and press coverage) world be bigger, but it would be over more quickly and more likely to fade from memories once they pull the trigger on the IPO.
A bigger warning would make it might more clear that reddit has no intention of negotiating or accommodating, and it would give people even more time to organize a widespread protest (likely involving more than just blackouts).
Really, though, it's not about the money or the API costs; they want the user browsing data because that's where the real value in reddit will be seen by investors.
But they didn't need to. Just let the clusterfuck run its course, cash out, and be done. There's no amount of narrative control that would make spez seem like "the good guy," so unless he...
It feels like spez (and the other admins) are scrambling to control the narrative
But they didn't need to. Just let the clusterfuck run its course, cash out, and be done. There's no amount of narrative control that would make spez seem like "the good guy," so unless he genuinely wants to be seen the same as Aaron Swartz and is too clueless to realize that will never happen, there's no reason to do any of this.
Spez sold reddit for a total of $10million, so he only netted like $5 million before taxes. MySpace was sold for $580 million. I'm guessing a huge chunk of that went to Tom. Spez is broke as fuck,...
Like, when spez could retire into obscurity to go be a photographer like Tom from Myspace, disappearing from the annals of internet history as "just another dev gone corporate", he decided to double down on infamy for no reason.
Spez sold reddit for a total of $10million, so he only netted like $5 million before taxes.
MySpace was sold for $580 million. I'm guessing a huge chunk of that went to Tom.
Spez is broke as fuck, if you compare him to his tech bro peers.
Yep, Spez and kn0thing sold reddit for that (relatively) low sum back in 2006 as soon as it got popular enough to attract a buyer. He's publicly said he regrets it. And ever since then he's...
Spez sold reddit for a total of $10million
Yep, Spez and kn0thing sold reddit for that (relatively) low sum back in 2006 as soon as it got popular enough to attract a buyer. He's publicly said he regrets it. And ever since then he's watched as the founders of similar platforms of the era held out until they could sell for much higher sums, or like Zuckerberg, retained control and became billionaires in the process. He's got major tech-bro envy and it's been driving his decisions ever since he was rehired as CEO in 2015. I have no doubts he's committed to try and make up for that premature sale at the expense of the community itself. Spez wants what he thinks he's owed for deciding to take a "small bag" 17 years ago.
This doesn't read to me as a letter designed to be intentionally leaked. It reads like somebody trying to reassure his employees who are likely feeling down about the whole situation. I think if...
This doesn't read to me as a letter designed to be intentionally leaked. It reads like somebody trying to reassure his employees who are likely feeling down about the whole situation.
I think if this were designed to be leaked, he wouldn't include statements like "We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday", since that is exposing a weakness. Indeed it's had the opposite effect of firing up some who only planned on going dark for two days. There would be little strategy in that if the goals were simply self-serving.
My assumption is (to the point of “3p apps are profitable, Reddit is not”) that their revenue is primarily ads based, and I doubt they sell out their full inventory every day. Thus the temporary...
My assumption is (to the point of “3p apps are profitable, Reddit is not”) that their revenue is primarily ads based, and I doubt they sell out their full inventory every day. Thus the temporary blackout has had no hit financially.
It’s at least partially an attempt to say “this doesn’t affect us” without lying but also concealing the underlying truth which is the good chance that USAGE and other metrics are way down.
That said, he’s also likely correct that the blackout won’t matter much if it’s only a two-day event. The bigger, harder to measure impact is how many people actually leave vs stay (a la Twitter). Decent bet even if droves leave it doesn’t affect CURRENT revenue (see above re:not selling out inventory), but if power users defect long-term it spells Bad Things for an IPO.
Unfortunately, based on the charts on this site, it doesn't seem like usage metrics have dipped that that heavily either. Which is surprising, honestly, given just how many of the top subreddits...
Unfortunately, based on the charts on this site, it doesn't seem like usage metrics have dipped that that heavily either. Which is surprising, honestly, given just how many of the top subreddits have gone dark. Maybe a much bigger portion of reddit activity than I had previously thought is divided amongst a huge slew of smaller subreddits that aren't blacking out (as much)?
I have to wonder how many comments are being made by bots (which was a huge problem even before the blackout). r/therewasanattempt has Automod set up to respond to almost every comment with...
I have to wonder how many comments are being made by bots (which was a huge problem even before the blackout).
r/therewasanattempt has Automod set up to respond to almost every comment with something about the blackout. So the number of comments has exploded. Other subs are doing one Automod comment on every post.
r/fragrance went unmoderated and the number of posts per day is close to 4 times what it used to be. Quality is way down. I've heard other subs are doing something similar as a form of protest, but I'm not sure which ones.
Bots are huge contributors of "traffic" to reddit's stats. My largest sub, per the monthly community digest, shows 45% of posts and 10% of comments are removed. Looking at the actions by the mods,...
Bots are huge contributors of "traffic" to reddit's stats. My largest sub, per the monthly community digest, shows 45% of posts and 10% of comments are removed. Looking at the actions by the mods, only 5% of those post removals are done by us, the other 40% is my bot filters (because the bots are never creative). 40% of the posts in a 1.5M subscriber sub are bots, I don't even want to know what it looks like in larger subs.
The chart on that site doesn't exactly tell a great picture, and I found that out by following part of it's source. It references "The list of subreddits is based on this website. This list...
The chart on that site doesn't exactly tell a great picture, and I found that out by following part of it's source. It references "The list of subreddits is based on this website. This list includes the top 1000 SFW and 500 NSFW most popular subreddits." which links to this page
You can see a bulk of the posts are from pretty unknown and random subs, which visiting those subs revealed they were banned for spam. Then there's the TEMU ones which might as well be spam as well, seeing as it's some referral scam BS people are getting involved in which isn't reflective of the general user's experience on reddit.
The bulk of the data being monitored there is pure spam. Now it's not entirely clear how the blackout site you linked is acquiring data, seemingly it may have set up its own monitoring and simply decided what subreddits to monitor based on what is listed on the subredditstats.com site, but in that case it would also be monitoring the spam subs.
I also tried to plug that subredditstats site into the wayback machine but and there's plenty of snapshots but none of them load, as I wanted to see historically if those spam subs that were banned were a constant or if they're new.
So without better data and more historical data, it's harder to get a clearer picture of what impact there is.
I moderate a medium-sized niche sub (~163k subscribers) that is private as part of the protest. Apparently, the native Reddit app doesn't show our private message explaining the blackout (like Old...
I moderate a medium-sized niche sub (~163k subscribers) that is private as part of the protest. Apparently, the native Reddit app doesn't show our private message explaining the blackout (like Old Reddit does), so I get tons of join requests.
Most of these are from obvious bot/spam accounts, with minimal karma. Some are old accounts (7-10 years old) with little activity (probably bought). Very few are actual potential users. I've taken to replying to them with a stock message explaining the blackout and that we will not be accepting approved submitters at this time.
Moderation has definitely been slipping, someone made a post about commiting suicide in a Spanish speaking subreddit and it got blasted in the trending section of the site.
Moderation has definitely been slipping, someone made a post about commiting suicide in a Spanish speaking subreddit and it got blasted in the trending section of the site.
Oh, for sure. Like by the raw numbers, most reddit users probably won't be affected by this change, but the important ones are disproportionately affected for sure. The amount of free labor reddit...
Oh, for sure. Like by the raw numbers, most reddit users probably won't be affected by this change, but the important ones are disproportionately affected for sure. The amount of free labor reddit gets each year from unpaid moderators is frankly staggering... so wild to me that they would risk alienating such a key user segment so badly, but, here we are.
Absolutely. I saw a shirt-bot get to the second page of r/all last night with 883 points (and had been up for 2 hours) which never used to happen as the shirt-bots and mug-bots would generally be...
Absolutely. I saw a shirt-bot get to the second page of r/all last night with 883 points (and had been up for 2 hours) which never used to happen as the shirt-bots and mug-bots would generally be removed during the short time they rose up r/top/hour.
The vast majority of the people that visit the site don't interact with anything, so it shouldn't be too surprising that there's a lot of people that are still browsing whatever they're shown.
The vast majority of the people that visit the site don't interact with anything, so it shouldn't be too surprising that there's a lot of people that are still browsing whatever they're shown.
That’s why this was never going to work since Reddit is so fragmented. You could close 60% of the subs and the activity would just shift over to the 40%. Hell, people can just make new subreddits...
That’s why this was never going to work since Reddit is so fragmented. You could close 60% of the subs and the activity would just shift over to the 40%. Hell, people can just make new subreddits to fill in the gaps.
It’s a shame but it’s the reality. I still supported the blackouts, obviously, but I had zero faith it would amount to anything but a firm gesture to the management that we’re not happy. They decided they don’t care, they want that IPO money so Spez can be the next Zuckerberg.
Reddit can just stuff any aggregate pages with content from the subreddits which didn't go private, and this includes content from subreddits that did go read-only...
Reddit can just stuff any aggregate pages with content from the subreddits which didn't go private, and this includes content from subreddits that did go read-only...
reddit just fills the frontpage with content from other subs, and since most people aren't that picky, they won't notice much of a difference. That's why they shouldn't be going private since that...
reddit just fills the frontpage with content from other subs, and since most people aren't that picky, they won't notice much of a difference. That's why they shouldn't be going private since that just silences yourself, and gives you no place to coordinate further actions. They should be locking the sub or restricting it to only posts about reddit like dankmemes is doing, to continue making more noise, which is much more disruptive to the site.
Funnily enough I was looking for help with Transport Fever 2 earlier and clicked on a Reddit link from Google, forgetting all about the blackout, and was quite confused about why that sub of all...
Maybe a much bigger portion of reddit activity than I had previously thought is divided amongst a huge slew of smaller subreddits that aren't blacking out (as much)?
Funnily enough I was looking for help with Transport Fever 2 earlier and clicked on a Reddit link from Google, forgetting all about the blackout, and was quite confused about why that sub of all places was private.
I don't know why they assume this will pass when many subreddits have said they'll protest indefinitely, not just for 2 days. This doesn't magically end tomorrow when subs consider reopening.
I don't know why they assume this will pass when many subreddits have said they'll protest indefinitely, not just for 2 days. This doesn't magically end tomorrow when subs consider reopening.
For the big ones, they’ll just yank ownership. For the smaller ones, they didn’t really matter to Reddit to begin with. Even now, basically for every big sub that’s protesting, there is now an...
For the big ones, they’ll just yank ownership. For the smaller ones, they didn’t really matter to Reddit to begin with.
Even now, basically for every big sub that’s protesting, there is now an alternate sub that does the same thing where all the users went.
They’re not going to moderate. All the alt subs show that there is no lack of appetite for people who want to run subs. They’ll just hand it to whoever is running the alt sub.
They’re not going to moderate. All the alt subs show that there is no lack of appetite for people who want to run subs. They’ll just hand it to whoever is running the alt sub.
Yeah, but that’s not going to affect Reddit itself much. Few of the users are going to care, half of them hate all mods with a burning passion anyway. Things will tick along.
Yeah, but that’s not going to affect Reddit itself much. Few of the users are going to care, half of them hate all mods with a burning passion anyway.
Yeah. I believe there were some (power) mods who explicitly expressed interest in NOT protesting. Likely because they want the admins to hand them more subs to mod when they yank ownership from...
Yeah. I believe there were some (power) mods who explicitly expressed interest in NOT protesting. Likely because they want the admins to hand them more subs to mod when they yank ownership from places that protest indefinitely.
There's even already a system in place -- all they have to do is expand eligibility of requests on /r/redditrequest to include permanently blacked-out subs.
There's even already a system in place -- all they have to do is expand eligibility of requests on /r/redditrequest to include permanently blacked-out subs.
I have a naive analysis but: a lot of the powermods do moderate a lot of subreddits at the same time for free. I don't know if it's really effective but I'm sure they'll find replacements. Those...
I have a naive analysis but: a lot of the powermods do moderate a lot of subreddits at the same time for free. I don't know if it's really effective but I'm sure they'll find replacements. Those mods are ban-happy, but it didn't seem to bother redditors before.
My opinion is that the blackout won't be effective unless people really leave reddit. I still think Spez is focused on the IPO and it shows in his recent letter:
We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday (true one way or another)
We have not seen any significant revenue impact (impossible to verify)
Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations (FUD)
There are plenty of self-interested power mods, but the other reason why people mod so many subs is that it's easier to onboard someone who already uses the same third party apps, browser...
I have a naive analysis but: a lot of the powermods do moderate a lot of subreddits at the same time for free. I don't know if it's really effective but I'm sure they'll find replacements. Those mods are ban-happy, but it didn't seem to bother redditors before.
There are plenty of self-interested power mods, but the other reason why people mod so many subs is that it's easier to onboard someone who already uses the same third party apps, browser extensions, and custom bots necessary to make up for reddit's failures in providing strong native tools. That's the same reason why it's hard to recruit new mods with no mod experience. You basically need full stack dev services on the team, and new people with no programming experience have a massive learning curve.
Also, the subreddits moderated number can be pretty misleading. We used dozens of sandbox/test/storage subs when I did the mod thing. Sometimes camped out subreddits for future expansion plans along the same theme. There's a limit on the number of defaults you can moderate, and the power mod situation has improved since that rule was implemented.
Nail on the head. But I would like to add another factor: Trust. Trust is important. Adding a mod to a sub means giving someone access to power over that sub and its community. A lot of people...
There are plenty of self-interested power mods, but the other reason why people mod so many subs is that it's easier to onboard someone who already uses the same third party apps, browser extensions, and custom bots necessary to make up for reddit's failures in providing strong native tools.
Nail on the head. But I would like to add another factor: Trust.
Trust is important. Adding a mod to a sub means giving someone access to power over that sub and its community. A lot of people want that because they have an axe to grind with the current sub management. Others are just not equipped to deal with the responsibility. Yet others are just trolls. Some may be qualified, but you can't know that beforehand.
It's much easier to give control to people who have experience and a proven track record. They also have something to lose, because they are already invested in reddit and don't want to endanger their other mod jobs.
I disagree with the first statement. Redditors on the whole have distain for (power)mods and how ban happy they can be. I feel like reading through comments any time the topic comes up will tell...
I disagree with the first statement. Redditors on the whole have distain for (power)mods and how ban happy they can be. I feel like reading through comments any time the topic comes up will tell you as much.
As for what spez has said regarding revenue, part of me thinks it is true simply because it may be difficult to measure a revenue drop in such a short period of time. So technically he's telling the truth.
Have you ever read about the 90/10/1 rule? It suggests that 90% of internet users are lurkers who read or observe, 9% of members edit or respond, and 1% of community members create new content. I...
I feel like reading through comments any time the topic comes up will tell you as much.
Have you ever read about the 90/10/1 rule? It suggests that 90% of internet users are lurkers who read or observe, 9% of members edit or respond, and 1% of community members create new content. I only bring it up because it tells me that the individuals complaining about mods (or commenting at all) comprise 10% or less of all users. I doubt redditors as a whole have disdain for mods or even power-mods if mods register on their radar at all.
To me, moderating was like cable news: I was 20x more likely to hear negativity/criticism than praise. If you look at all the reaction threads and votes on whether to protest or not held in various subreddits though, you'll see strong support for the mod protest coming through.
I have heard of the 90/9/1 rule. The 90/10/1 rule would math out to 101% lol. Splitting hairs aside, it only makes sense that only the 10% that interacts with reddit ever complains about the mods...
I have heard of the 90/9/1 rule. The 90/10/1 rule would math out to 101% lol.
Splitting hairs aside, it only makes sense that only the 10% that interacts with reddit ever complains about the mods being ban happy. Since the 90% that doesn't would, by nature of their lurking, never do anything ban worthy. Plus even if the 90% did have an opinion on the matter we don't know what it is because they don't ever express it. So we more or less are forced to remove them from the sample when considering how "reddit" feels about moderators.
It's evident by looking in on subs where mods are striking right now rather than blacking out they are probably a net positive, but I'd hazard a guess that they achieve this by being a bit overly liberal with the ban hammer at times. Just my 2¢.
Excluding the 89% of users who don't voice an opinion just leads to a misleading statistical conclusion based on 11% or less of the population. The only thing we can say for sure is that we don't...
Plus even if the 90% did have an opinion on the matter we don't know what it is because they don't ever express it. So we more or less are forced to remove them from the sample when considering how "reddit" feels about moderators.
Excluding the 90% 89% of users who don't voice an opinion just leads to a misleading statistical conclusion based on 10% 11% or less of the population. The only thing we can say for sure is that we don't know what the vast majority of redditors think about mods, not that redditors on the whole have disdain for (power)mods. That's the only point I wanted to make - any generalization of redditors is going to be skewed heavily by the loudest users. Also users who do comment and participate may have a positive view of mods that they just don’t share.
I may be projecting my desires a bit, but when lurking on Reddit earlier it did seem like the quality of discussion/posts on frontpage threads was less thoughtful than usual. There was still some...
I may be projecting my desires a bit, but when lurking on Reddit earlier it did seem like the quality of discussion/posts on frontpage threads was less thoughtful than usual.
There was still some intelligent discussion, but not as much or at the levels that I see from very educated participants. It will be interesting if the high quality users return after the blackout or not.
The other thing about Reddit is it was oversaturated. What I mean to say here is post in a popular askreddit thread that is a couple hours old - expect no interaction and few upvotes. I haven't...
The other thing about Reddit is it was oversaturated. What I mean to say here is post in a popular askreddit thread that is a couple hours old - expect no interaction and few upvotes.
I haven't been there currently but I bet the smaller pool might even provide a better user experience? It's weird because that's not what we all wanted but there's absolutely a sweet spot of enough going on to keep you entertained, but not too big that you can't have a voice.
This has a lot to do with the changes Reddit made to encourage scrolling through posts rather than engaging in comments. New Reddit and the app don't show comments more than a couple levels deep....
This has a lot to do with the changes Reddit made to encourage scrolling through posts rather than engaging in comments. New Reddit and the app don't show comments more than a couple levels deep. It's easier to monetize the post feed than the comment section.
Well they definitely don't want me on their site anymore then cause I'm on reddit more for the comments than the articles linked. I can find those articles on my own but I like to see what other...
Well they definitely don't want me on their site anymore then cause I'm on reddit more for the comments than the articles linked. I can find those articles on my own but I like to see what other people are saying about them. I'll go to reddit after reading some news just to see what people are saying (since most news sites now don't have a comment section.. understandably honestly).
And I think that's why a lot of long-time redditors are migrating to Tildes. The quality comments were always the most valuable part of Reddit for me too!
And I think that's why a lot of long-time redditors are migrating to Tildes. The quality comments were always the most valuable part of Reddit for me too!
Have they? Basically all of the big subs I checked (with a few exceptions) were sticking to 48 hours. It seemed like anyone going indefinite was a smaller niche community that didn't drive as many...
many subreddits have said they'll protest indefinitely
Have they? Basically all of the big subs I checked (with a few exceptions) were sticking to 48 hours. It seemed like anyone going indefinite was a smaller niche community that didn't drive as many clicks, but conversely would now mean more high quality content was missing.
And of course they'll probably just replace and re-open at the end of the day anyway.
Here's where they're all mobilizing if you want to keep track. So far, 2 of the top 7 by subscriber count are staying private with half the original protest period still remaining. Let's give them...
Here's where they're all mobilizing if you want to keep track. So far, 2 of the top 7 by subscriber count are staying private with half the original protest period still remaining. Let's give them another day to figure it out then see where things stand.
It seemed like anyone going indefinite was a smaller niche community that didn't drive as many clicks
You're right they don't drive as many clicks, but I think you're missing something. A lot of new users come to reddit because they found a small, niche community for their hobby/interest/passion there, then they stayed and generated clicks for the other content reddit aggregates. No one here can quantify the ripple effect of losing those communities and their users, but it's a point people are overlooking.
Thanks for the link. If nothing else I name dropped the small 16k sub I mod that's out indefinitely. One other factor that is interesting in all this is the number of porn subs that are blacking...
Thanks for the link. If nothing else I name dropped the small 16k sub I mod that's out indefinitely.
One other factor that is interesting in all this is the number of porn subs that are blacking out (some indefinitely by the looks of that link) which is not great for reddit considering that a good chunk of their traffic is NSFW.
Been checking in on the linked thread for the last half-hour and am heartened to see the number of extra subreddits going indefinite every time I refresh.
Been checking in on the linked thread for the last half-hour and am heartened to see the number of extra subreddits going indefinite every time I refresh.
I'd rather wear a 4chan clover in public. Mostly because it'd be non-intrusive to 99% of people. But there's a part where at least that 1% who does recognize and engages me on it won't be boring.
I'd rather wear a 4chan clover in public. Mostly because it'd be non-intrusive to 99% of people. But there's a part where at least that 1% who does recognize and engages me on it won't be boring.
Knowing 4chan I'd either expect the weirdest encounters or none at all because they're too introverted to say anything. Would genuinely be interested to see what would happen.
Knowing 4chan I'd either expect the weirdest encounters or none at all because they're too introverted to say anything. Would genuinely be interested to see what would happen.
You'd just get a lot of racist people, to be honest. Most of the decent people got tired of the nonstop /pol/ spam on every board years ago. It stopped being cute or charming when overt meme...
You'd just get a lot of racist people, to be honest. Most of the decent people got tired of the nonstop /pol/ spam on every board years ago. It stopped being cute or charming when overt meme fascism started making our lives materially worse.
A few subs have done that, obviously with the caveat that they still remove anything that breaks sitewide rules. Mods could choose not to remove that stuff as well but then they would just be replaced
A few subs have done that, obviously with the caveat that they still remove anything that breaks sitewide rules.
Mods could choose not to remove that stuff as well but then they would just be replaced
The statement had a tone of „moderator bad actor - admin good victim“ here… I know Reddit Inc. refers to admins and Snoos, but moderators should not be considered lessers, yeah we aren’t paid and...
The statement had a tone of „moderator bad actor - admin good victim“ here… I know Reddit Inc. refers to admins and Snoos, but moderators should not be considered lessers, yeah we aren’t paid and don’t have admin tools, but we’re Snoos too and the protest is work we’re doing on our time! We’re also working hard to improve reddit.
He makes a very compelling argument about why mods should shut down and migrate their communities elsewhere, instead of giving up their protest tomorrow. Nothing will change. He said it himself....
He makes a very compelling argument about why mods should shut down and migrate their communities elsewhere, instead of giving up their protest tomorrow.
Nothing will change. He said it himself. It's time to move on.
It's very unfortunate to see what I would call a real downfall of a website I've been a part of for 11 years. I don't welcome the downfall of it but if the ceo wants to keep not listening to its...
It's very unfortunate to see what I would call a real downfall of a website I've been a part of for 11 years. I don't welcome the downfall of it but if the ceo wants to keep not listening to its user base that literally made the website what it is today then so be it.
I feel you. I was on Apollo not long after it released, and losing it feels like the end of an era. I genuinely feel a sense of emptiness leaving behind the niche communities I loved (RIP...
I feel you. I was on Apollo not long after it released, and losing it feels like the end of an era. I genuinely feel a sense of emptiness leaving behind the niche communities I loved (RIP Dogelore), but Reddit proved definitively it is not a worthy steward of its communities or users.
On the bright side, we found Tildes, and so far it's lovely. I think it has the potential to be better than Reddit ever was.
Apollo has me spoiled. I don't want to use reddit without it. Except for not having a keyboard on the devices I use apollo on it is a nicer experience then even the desktop website.
Apollo has me spoiled. I don't want to use reddit without it. Except for not having a keyboard on the devices I use apollo on it is a nicer experience then even the desktop website.
yeah... every other website that I used to go to that I left it was either cause something else drew me away (sadly that is what happened with livejournal when all my friends went to facebook) or...
yeah... every other website that I used to go to that I left it was either cause something else drew me away (sadly that is what happened with livejournal when all my friends went to facebook) or one time when a forum imploded but some motivated users made another forum for people to migrate to. I think with reddit that would have to happen to really see reddit get hurt... since there is no alternative some one would have to be motivated to make an alternative that is directly trying to replace reddit (but with improvements in management).
But where are they going to migrate? I was just reading a post from the owner of this site outright saying how it works now is hard to do a migration like that to it (Unless they change how it...
But where are they going to migrate? I was just reading a post from the owner of this site outright saying how it works now is hard to do a migration like that to it (Unless they change how it works some). Lemme is honestly confusing (so far this site has stuck to me more then the little I tried lemmy) and you don't want to be really confusing to people. Everything else I've seen is just different (Mastadon seems to work more like twitter from what little I tried).
Honestly, reddit does have the advantage of there really isn't a good alternative (imho this place has come closest).
Honestly at this point I've enjoyed not having the mass migration because the Lemmy login and make account servers have been down or something. People are posting back on reddit that they can't...
Honestly at this point I've enjoyed not having the mass migration because the Lemmy login and make account servers have been down or something. People are posting back on reddit that they can't get in.
Every comment I read of Steve’s is so cringey. I couldn’t imagine sending a company wide email and addressing everyone as Snoos, multiple times. That being said, I figured the protest wouldn’t be...
Every comment I read of Steve’s is so cringey. I couldn’t imagine sending a company wide email and addressing everyone as Snoos, multiple times.
That being said, I figured the protest wouldn’t be enough, although I had a small misguided hope that something might change.
Also the "don't wear reddit gear in public" feels like a pathetic attempt to skew the point of the blackout as not about Hoffman himself and his own failures and his rather severe attitude...
Also the "don't wear reddit gear in public" feels like a pathetic attempt to skew the point of the blackout as not about Hoffman himself and his own failures and his rather severe attitude problems, and more about some nebulous "reddit bad" mentality that I haven't once seen amongst the angriest.
It seems a lot of newer tech companies call their workers stupid "endearing" names. Apparently at twitter they call them "twerps". Personally I think that it's dehumanizing - which might just be...
It seems a lot of newer tech companies call their workers stupid "endearing" names. Apparently at twitter they call them "twerps".
Personally I think that it's dehumanizing - which might just be the whole point.
At least twerps is kinda funny. I mean, no more so than tildos/tilderinos etc.? I think it's kinda harmless to have a label for your group. Definitely kinda lame to put them in a letter from the...
At least twerps is kinda funny.
Personally I think that it's dehumanizing - which might just be the whole point.
I mean, no more so than tildos/tilderinos etc.? I think it's kinda harmless to have a label for your group. Definitely kinda lame to put them in a letter from the CEO though. Very much "hello fellow cool employees".
No CEO would send a widespread memo of reassurance asking to stay calm, because there's nothing to worry about, unless there were good reason to worry. This is all corporate-speak indicating...
No CEO would send a widespread memo of reassurance asking to stay calm, because there's nothing to worry about, unless there were good reason to worry. This is all corporate-speak indicating significant impact and a lot of problems including staff morale.
This line specifically is written directly to investors: "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor." The fact that this needs to be called out so directly and clearly means there are real concerns.
The whole memo reads as kind of cultish and weird, especially the last part that reads like "watch out they're out to get us." It has this sort of us-against-them, insider club, "we're a special family" kind of energy.
All in all it's not the content of the memo but the fact that it needed to be said at all, and said this way, that speaks volumes.
"Look out engineers! What if Christian Selig jumps out from behind a bush and stabs you, because I killed 3rd party apps?" /s
The whole memo reads as kind of cultish and weird, especially the last part that reads like "watch out they're out to get us." It has this sort of us-against-them, insider club, "we're a special family" kind of energy.
"Look out engineers! What if Christian Selig jumps out from behind a bush and stabs you, because I killed 3rd party apps?" /s
Well, I'm reminded of the Mulan sauce thing and Rick and Morty fans jumping up and down on McDonald's counters. I'm also reminded of the kind of ambush behavior that seems to have grown acceptable...
the last part that reads like "watch out they're out to get us."
Well, I'm reminded of the Mulan sauce thing and Rick and Morty fans jumping up and down on McDonald's counters. I'm also reminded of the kind of ambush behavior that seems to have grown acceptable on social media for getting clicks.
I don't have too hard a time imagining somebody who's juiced up by the blackout throwing a latte, or worse, at someone they perceive to be a reddit employee. If the volume of the protest has made an impression on the admins, then that line doesn't actually feel completely out of left field to me.
It’s pretty clear that he is concerned about the damage, but also that 48hrs is just not going to be long enough. If all of these subs that have gone dark would go through to the end of the month,...
It’s pretty clear that he is concerned about the damage, but also that 48hrs is just not going to be long enough. If all of these subs that have gone dark would go through to the end of the month, or indefinitely, that might have been enough to change his mind. Otherwise it’s a cost of operating with the amount of ad revenue they will get by eliminating 3rd party apps.
If Apollo is gone, I won’t be on Reddit anymore. I’ve just been spending more time on Tildes, and less time on my phone overall. Maybe it’s for the best.
I've struggled with instinctively opening RIF today and yesterday. But I'm working on it. However, once it's gone, I'm done with reddit on my phone. I really think it will help me be more present...
I've struggled with instinctively opening RIF today and yesterday. But I'm working on it. However, once it's gone, I'm done with reddit on my phone. I really think it will help me be more present when I'm out and about with my phone..
Still would rather reddit decides to at least hold off for another year. Its wild to me they don't have these tools finished for mods but are still going forward. From what I gather though, they've been promising tools for years and it seems like the promise gets more empty every time. I almost doubt they even have new tools in the works.
Just remove it from your phone now. You can always add it back later if things improve. I put a link to Tildes in the same spot on my home screen, so it opens by muscle memory now instead. Huffman...
I've struggled with instinctively opening RIF today and yesterday. But I'm working on it.
Just remove it from your phone now. You can always add it back later if things improve. I put a link to Tildes in the same spot on my home screen, so it opens by muscle memory now instead.
Huffman is counting on your lizard brain to bring you back. Don't let him be right.
My phone (BlackBerry KeyOne) has a physical keyboard with configurable shortcuts. I remapped my long-press "R" (for RIF) to a Firefox home-screen shortcut for Tildes. I can still access RIF if...
My phone (BlackBerry KeyOne) has a physical keyboard with configurable shortcuts. I remapped my long-press "R" (for RIF) to a Firefox home-screen shortcut for Tildes. I can still access RIF if needed, but it's in a folder on my home screen that's more cumbersome than hitting the shortcut key.
I wish Tildes had an app. The browser I have on my phone opens links in private/incognito so just having a shortcut to Tildes on the home screen doesn't work.
I wish Tildes had an app. The browser I have on my phone opens links in private/incognito so just having a shortcut to Tildes on the home screen doesn't work.
yeah I have like 6 different versions of Firefox/forks, there's a private browser specifically for one-off searches and it just clears absolutely everything on exit. Perfect for random googling...
yeah I have like 6 different versions of Firefox/forks, there's a private browser specifically for one-off searches and it just clears absolutely everything on exit. Perfect for random googling escapades / multi-tab straight shot brute force tab jumping activities trying to find an answer to some obscure question
I hid Apollo in my app list, and took it off my Home Screen. I replaced it with Tildes so I can just tap on that any time I would have habitually tried to open Apollo. It’s helped so far.
I hid Apollo in my app list, and took it off my Home Screen. I replaced it with Tildes so I can just tap on that any time I would have habitually tried to open Apollo. It’s helped so far.
I'm pretty annoyed as I googled an issue yesterday and didn't realise a link I clicked on was Reddit, and earlier in this thread someone had a link that went to Reddit. So technically they've had...
I'm pretty annoyed as I googled an issue yesterday and didn't realise a link I clicked on was Reddit, and earlier in this thread someone had a link that went to Reddit. So technically they've had 2 daily active user numbers from me even though I haven't read a thing on there.
I admit, I've been week. ONly cause one subreddit but I'm super excited about Starfield and can't get enough. The game forum I'm on is talking about it pretty regularly but I still run out of...
I admit, I've been week. ONly cause one subreddit but I'm super excited about Starfield and can't get enough. The game forum I'm on is talking about it pretty regularly but I still run out of content lol. I guess they have a discord but it's not fun talking on the discord. Things go by too quickly and honestly since they do they have put a 2 minute time out between when you can respond which kinda makes it so you can't have a conversation (instead you can just read stream of random thoughts from people).
These are the kind of things I will really miss reddit for :(.
Yeah diving into a specific niche subreddit to get excited about a specific topic was one of my favorite things on Reddit. The theories and discussion of breaking bad and better call saul were...
Yeah diving into a specific niche subreddit to get excited about a specific topic was one of my favorite things on Reddit. The theories and discussion of breaking bad and better call saul were particular highlights for me. I'm hoping with the right tags and possible future subgroups changes we can have more of those kind of high quality discussions here though. There's a few fairly active starfield threads on here for instance.
I think it's a setting they can do. It made sense because the stream would go by so fast that you wouldn't even be able ot read what people were saying otherwise. But, at the same time, it doesn't...
I think it's a setting they can do. It made sense because the stream would go by so fast that you wouldn't even be able ot read what people were saying otherwise. But, at the same time, it doesn't leave room for conversation, just for everyone to type how hyped they are (or maybe get a question in and hope it gets answered).
It may have only been temporary tbh for that time cause I think it was pretty close to after the starfield deep dive I visited.
Did the exact same thing, have a Firefox shortcut to Tildes (sorted by top 24hr activity) in the place where my Sync button sat. It's been nice tbh, it feels so nice and quiet here - quiet in the...
Did the exact same thing, have a Firefox shortcut to Tildes (sorted by top 24hr activity) in the place where my Sync button sat.
It's been nice tbh, it feels so nice and quiet here - quiet in the sense of contentedness, not emptiness.
Sure, it will pass, at least for some subs, but the protest has already reached the attention of mainstream media. People who would have otherwise not known that anything was happening are now...
Sure, it will pass, at least for some subs, but the protest has already reached the attention of mainstream media. People who would have otherwise not known that anything was happening are now aware, including any potential investors. It's a really bad look for your platform to be partially shuttered by your users because of an unpopular corporate decision. Yes, this won't be a killing blow on Reddit as a service, but it might be enough of a wound to make others a bit wary.
Maybe the shares will tank after the IPO and r/wallstreetbets will band together to buy reddit only to turn it into the non-profit, user-owned cooperative it should always have been.
Maybe the shares will tank after the IPO and r/wallstreetbets will band together to buy reddit only to turn it into the non-profit, user-owned cooperative it should always have been.
I like your dream, but WSB is not the sub we want leading the charge. All they would want would be a different financially motivated dictator. One they choose.
I like your dream, but WSB is not the sub we want leading the charge. All they would want would be a different financially motivated dictator. One they choose.
idk about that one lmao I'm gonna take a guess and say if that sub somehow acquired control of Reddit shares they'd hot potato the actual decision making onto another sub. that place is like 4chan...
idk about that one lmao I'm gonna take a guess and say if that sub somehow acquired control of Reddit shares they'd hot potato the actual decision making onto another sub. that place is like 4chan ran thru a carbon filter
What a strangely accurate description of many communities on reddit - honestly that kinda feels like was reddit always was to me back in the day. A less edgy and toothsome 4chan.
What a strangely accurate description of many communities on reddit - honestly that kinda feels like was reddit always was to me back in the day. A less edgy and toothsome 4chan.
Anecdote, but even my own (very non-techy) father sent me a link to a CBC article about it, asking if that's what I was referring to when I told him "reddit dun goofed again" to explain why I had...
Anecdote, but even my own (very non-techy) father sent me a link to a CBC article about it, asking if that's what I was referring to when I told him "reddit dun goofed again" to explain why I had been spending so much time helping out on Tildes again. :P
So yeah, even people who have no real interest in Reddit are being made aware of this thanks to all the media attention. I don't know how much of an effect that will have on their API decisions, but it's still not a good look for reddit. And I don't imagine it's helping their IPO prospects very much either.
This is exactly what I mean. People with little to no knowledge of Reddit are being made aware that something is happening. That logically extends to people with some knowledge of Reddit...
This is exactly what I mean. People with little to no knowledge of Reddit are being made aware that something is happening. That logically extends to people with some knowledge of Reddit understanding some of the significance of the blackout, and hopefully, investors looking towards the IPO will be a bit more cautious to invest. That does open the door for an unfortunate scenario, where a Bytedance or an Elon step in and take advantage to the instability, getting a lower price for the platforming, and turning it into something else. Let's just hope that doesn't happen.
Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.
Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.
"Yes, this is happening, but it's not a big deal. If we stick our fingers in our ears and wish hard enough, the problem will go away! It's not our fault; it's a few noisy troublemakers causing all...
"Yes, this is happening, but it's not a big deal. If we stick our fingers in our ears and wish hard enough, the problem will go away! It's not our fault; it's a few noisy troublemakers causing all this ruckus. Just go about your business and everything will be okay."
"And I'm sorry if you feel like you're being attacked. It's not like it's my fault or anything. No one could have possibly foreseen this. It was utterly unexpected."
"And I'm sorry if you feel like you're being attacked. It's not like it's my fault or anything. No one could have possibly foreseen this. It was utterly unexpected."
If most people don‘t care, we probably won‘t be able to affect any change. In the end, it‘s probably good for me if Apollo stops working. The app worked so well that it was basically responsible...
If most people don‘t care, we probably won‘t be able to affect any change. In the end, it‘s probably good for me if Apollo stops working. The app worked so well that it was basically responsible for 50% of my screentime.
Curious what the next weeks will bring. I for one support all subs that continue the blackout. In hindsight it‘s sad that the blackout was announced for 2 days only.
It's actually absurd how I had to stop and think about what I was going to look at when I woke up yesterday and picked up my phone. When Apollo goes, my phone screen time is going to drop drastically.
It's actually absurd how I had to stop and think about what I was going to look at when I woke up yesterday and picked up my phone. When Apollo goes, my phone screen time is going to drop drastically.
I decided to bite the bullet, and deleted apollo as soon as Christian made the announcement that it will shut down at the end of June. I feel like I'm spending a fair bit less time on my phone now...
I decided to bite the bullet, and deleted apollo as soon as Christian made the announcement that it will shut down at the end of June. I feel like I'm spending a fair bit less time on my phone now (or at the very least more time in chatrooms/active content rather than passive scrolling).
While it may not yet have had a "significant revenue impact" I would wager that's because the people who are observing the blackout are on average not the ones using the official app or the new...
While it may not yet have had a "significant revenue impact" I would wager that's because the people who are observing the blackout are on average not the ones using the official app or the new interface where they presumably get most of their ad impressions. The power users who are 3rd party app users and old.reddit plus adblocker viewers are the ones who are not present.
The real significant revenue impact will only be felt once it's clear if the content is not being created on reddit any longer. And that won't be truly felt until the 3rd party apps go dark. I know that I personally will never use their official app after having used RIF for a decade, but I'm not a huge creator of content so who knows how much my opinion is worth.
As an older redditor who frequently posted responsible material and continued discussions in niche subreddits, I have no further plans to do so... The more I read, the more disappointed I get and...
As an older redditor who frequently posted responsible material and continued discussions in niche subreddits, I have no further plans to do so... The more I read, the more disappointed I get and now is closing in on righteous indignation.
After reading the introduction thread, it sure seems there are a lot of us over here in similar situations who plan to raze and burn their accounts, post history, and subreddits and just were holding out how in some kind of misguided optimism (more of a stages of grief process). I'm done bargaining (blackout), now I'm to anger (delete my account and post history), and acceptance (tildes).
Right now it's just a brand hit. Things might return to 80% by the end of the week, then there is the actual cut off at the end of the month, maybe another 20% drop when Apollo/RIF/etc. end? I'm...
Right now it's just a brand hit. Things might return to 80% by the end of the week, then there is the actual cut off at the end of the month, maybe another 20% drop when Apollo/RIF/etc. end?
I'm willing to bet it will go the route of twitter. Reddit will carry on but just as a shell of its former self. No longer trusted or being used as a news source. Also like twitter there isn't a direct option for everyone leaving reddit to go to (tildes, kbin, etc.)
It might just be my narrow point of view, but it's interesting to see the internet so unstable right now - facebook has lost its golden shine, twitter is out, reddit is going, I'm not about to install ticktock, and "AI" is on a path to change everything.
Does anyone else feel that the comment about not wearing reddit gear in public is a little offensive to your average redditor? Maybe my perspective is different not being in the USA and it is a...
Does anyone else feel that the comment about not wearing reddit gear in public is a little offensive to your average redditor?
Maybe my perspective is different not being in the USA and it is a genuine concern there, but it feels like he's saying redditors are a bit unhinged and liable to launch an unprovoked violent attack on anyone associated with reddit. Also deflecting that redditors are the problem party in this event.
The whole thing is messaging. It's PR. And you're 100% right. The message is: "We promise, our profits definitely aren't effected! These people are just unhinged babies, they're emotionally...
The whole thing is messaging. It's PR. And you're 100% right. The message is:
"We promise, our profits definitely aren't effected! These people are just unhinged babies, they're emotionally unstable but they'll be back under our control in no time! We're definitely capable of turning these losers into big fat money signs!"
I know a lot of people are still going to reddit to see if anything is happening so I wouldn't be surprised if traffic is not affected at this time. The real measure will probably be July 1st :(...
I know a lot of people are still going to reddit to see if anything is happening so I wouldn't be surprised if traffic is not affected at this time. The real measure will probably be July 1st :( RIP RIF....
I peeked a few times just to see what the front page is like, but only from desktop with adblocker turned on. Not going to let them generate any revenue from me.
I peeked a few times just to see what the front page is like, but only from desktop with adblocker turned on. Not going to let them generate any revenue from me.
I peeked with Teddit. I don't know what the front page typically looks like for a user that isn't logged in, so I can't fairly compare. I will say, the posts today seem to have especially high...
I peeked with Teddit. I don't know what the front page typically looks like for a user that isn't logged in, so I can't fairly compare. I will say, the posts today seem to have especially high engagement... but maybe those numbers are normal for these subs. The posts themselves seem lame and not particularly diverse, but maybe that's just my bias talking. I can't gauge what the average redditor thinks about the blackout or if they even notice anything's different.
I just had a weird thought. The blackouts are meant to be protests, as a way of strongarming spez into walking back his stupidity. Because of the power the mods hold over the site, they can...
I just had a weird thought.
The blackouts are meant to be protests, as a way of strongarming spez into walking back his stupidity. Because of the power the mods hold over the site, they can (potentially) do real damage to it if they give their protest some teeth (i.e., keeping subs private indefinitely). We'll see how many are willing to take that step, and how Reddit will respond to those who do.
My weird thought was, what if the mods had banded together like this for other reasons besides protesting spez? What if they unionized? Obviously they're volunteers, but they know their work is valuable. What if they went on strike? What if they organized to hold all the major subs hostage until Reddit formally agreed to compensate them for their labor?
We may be past the point of something like that ever happening now. Who knows. It's just a possibility I never considered, that mod solidarity could be leveraged for other purposes too.
Yeah anyone could see this when you announce an end date to your protest irrespective of whether your demands are met, especially one as short as 2 days. The one positive I think the 2 day...
Yeah anyone could see this when you announce an end date to your protest irrespective of whether your demands are met, especially one as short as 2 days.
The one positive I think the 2 day blackout could have is on the awareness and media coverage side, just getting the news out more people who might’ve been unaware and either see articles or pinned messages in locked subs they try to visit.
But I hope these comments embolden many subs to extend to an indefinite protest as reddit truly is one of the few sites that the users can actually fight for positive change on if they really try due to the unique position of having the moderators being community members not employees.
It looks like ModCoord is asking subreddits to extend indefinitely, in response to the news from Spez. For those who don't wanna go to reddit, here, we're going oldschool.
As someone who spent way too much time on Reddit, I have been surprised how relaxed I feel about not returning to it since the boycott. I will likely lurk to see updates in a few specialist subs I...
As someone who spent way too much time on Reddit, I have been surprised how relaxed I feel about not returning to it since the boycott. I will likely lurk to see updates in a few specialist subs I follow, but I don't intend to log in again at this stage.
In the last two days I have been somewhat in overdrive trying to avoid it and actively trying to do other things... But I feel like I've been so much more productive, and active. In the last day...
In the last two days I have been somewhat in overdrive trying to avoid it and actively trying to do other things... But I feel like I've been so much more productive, and active. In the last day and a half I've been for a swim, to the gym, cycled to work, made a start on weeding the garden. All things that I don't normally have time for because I waste it scrolling reddit.
Not sure it'd last if I try to avoid it long term (which I likely will do if they take my app away), but it's definitely good for me short term!
You're spot on. I'm with the boycott, but come July 1, I don't expect I'll use reddit all that much. The key will be replacement, since it is a pretty big hole being left. I'm curious how you're...
You're spot on. I'm with the boycott, but come July 1, I don't expect I'll use reddit all that much. The key will be replacement, since it is a pretty big hole being left. I'm curious how you're planning to utilize all this new-found time. I need ideas.
I’m definitely going to have more time without Apollo. I spent so much time moderating over all though… a decade… I hope those skills can translate into other things.
I’m definitely going to have more time without Apollo. I spent so much time moderating over all though… a decade… I hope those skills can translate into other things.
Moderating could translate to volunteer work with sports or debate clubs or stuff like that? One thing I completely forgot in my list of things to do with ones new free time. Volunteer! With kids,...
Moderating could translate to volunteer work with sports or debate clubs or stuff like that? One thing I completely forgot in my list of things to do with ones new free time. Volunteer! With kids, the homeless, animals... I'm not comfortable being around strangers so it's not something for me, but I have seriously thought about volunteering for the local animal shelter (and then found out they were in need of someone answering phones, one of my biggest stressors).
No problem! I've been trying to "digital detox" for a while so it is already easier for me (no twitter, no insta, no TikTok, no Facebook, only actual videos on YouTube, no shorts). It will become...
No problem! I've been trying to "digital detox" for a while so it is already easier for me (no twitter, no insta, no TikTok, no Facebook, only actual videos on YouTube, no shorts). It will become more natural as you continue! And then suddenly you realise you haven't touched your phone for half a day and yet you feel fine.
Another thing to learn is to be bored. Just don't do anything. It will feel so weird at first, but it does make a difference mentally.
It's interesting, isn't it? I was talking about this with someone earlier, that for me, it's become less about Reddit, but a larger personal examination on how I interact with the Internet, and...
It's interesting, isn't it? I was talking about this with someone earlier, that for me, it's become less about Reddit, but a larger personal examination on how I interact with the Internet, and even the world, at large. Being on Reddit less has genuinely made me feel more relaxed, that I have less of a chip on my shoulder about everything. I'm finding other things to fill my time rather than just grabbing my phone and mindlessly scrolling.
Not really, it runs on very outdated software, it would need to be updated to even be semi secure, and that is a very large undertaking. It is coded on Python 2.7 which is already sunset. Not to...
Not really, it runs on very outdated software, it would need to be updated to even be semi secure, and that is a very large undertaking. It is coded on Python 2.7 which is already sunset. Not to mention all the other dependencies that also are outdated and invariably full of security holes.
If some enterprising soul were to spin up an instance of Reddit, but with none of the crappy additions introduced after 2017, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
If some enterprising soul were to spin up an instance of Reddit, but with none of the crappy additions introduced after 2017, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Yeah, it's going to pass. I think everyone knew that, although some might have held out some hope that change would happen. I'm perhaps a bit too cynical for that, so I'm not surprised at the...
Yeah, it's going to pass. I think everyone knew that, although some might have held out some hope that change would happen. I'm perhaps a bit too cynical for that, so I'm not surprised at the outcome.
I deleted RIF on Sunday night, and I'm actually kinda surprised at how I've adapted without it. I have no plans on returning to Reddit. It's just not really feasible for me - most of my usage was via RIF on mobile, and I refuse to install their shitty app. On the desktop, I signed out. So every time muscle memory / habits take me back to Reddit, I see their god-awful UI and exit. I imagine that it'll still come up in search results, and that's fine - Google will take me right where I need to be.
Reddit will be fine. I has the numbers to move on, and a large user base that does not care about these issues. But after 13 years and 60k karma, this event has irreparably soured my perception of Reddit. So I'm ready to move on.
I'm right there with you. Reddit seems to be going the way of Digg and I'm not really interested in sticking around while the end user experience continues to degrade.
I'm right there with you.
Reddit seems to be going the way of Digg and I'm not really interested in sticking around while the end user experience continues to degrade.
Honestly I am a bit disappointed with some of the comments in this thread. It seems like many tilderinos takeaways have been that this is a corporate bullshit memo that means nothing, it is...
Honestly I am a bit disappointed with some of the comments in this thread. It seems like many tilderinos takeaways have been that this is a corporate bullshit memo that means nothing, it is secretly admitting that this is a serious issue, and it would have been better if Steve said nothing at all. I think this ignores a ton of the context around this memo.
Most importantly: this is an internal company memo. It is not meant for the public. It is meant to people who are worried about loosing their jobs in the next few weeks. The job of a CEO is the leader of a company. If Steve did not send out a reassuring internal memo in a situation like this, he would be failing in his role as leader.
Steve saying that the company has not seen a financial impact is not some smoking gun that things are terrible. Financials are the only metric companies care about, so they are the metrics that employees must necessarily care about (hopefully to a lesser extent than the CEO, but if an employee doesn’t care about making the company money, they will not be an employee for long). Calling out the financial effect, if any, was also something expected for an internal company memo. After all, employee paychecks are paid with this revenue.
As for the warning of wearing Reddit merch in public, that is also expected in a memo like this. Internet fights have become violent in the real world. It would not be unexpected for a mad redditor to do some sort of violence towards an employee. Humans are very bad at separating employees of a company and leaders of a company. And office shootings have been perpetrated with less reason before. A CEO not including a warning like this in a situation like this would be extremely negligent.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Steve is an extremely unreliable person. He is definitely not someone I would want to work for. If I had a board seat on Reddit, I would be calling for his immediate removal. But this is not some smoking gun of malice that some people are treating it as. In my reading, it is the type of memo that is expected from a CEO in a situation like this.
I don't think he's wrong. Only some subreddits went dark, and of those most for 48 hours. It's clear it's a halfhearted attempt at best, and most people will capitulate one way or another. There's...
I don't think he's wrong.
Only some subreddits went dark, and of those most for 48 hours. It's clear it's a halfhearted attempt at best, and most people will capitulate one way or another. There's a lot of people acting as if he's out of touch on this and it's going to be painful for them or something, but honestly it sure looks like it's a bunch of noise in the breeze. The vast majority don't care or can't stick it out. Much like twitter, the number of people actually willing to abandon the platform for their morals is extremely small.
At this point it feels like obsessing over how my ex is doing right after a break up. I'm interested. I do have some feelings about it. And I worry, abstractly, about his selfishness hurting other...
At this point it feels like obsessing over how my ex is doing right after a break up.
I'm interested. I do have some feelings about it. And I worry, abstractly, about his selfishness hurting other people in the future.
But it's out of my control and the whether he fails or succeeds isn't really any of my business anymore.
If the protest doesn't work, and the outcry blows over, and people forget and Reddit continues on, I'm content to remain here. Looking at one of those trackers and seeing how many trash/trashy...
If the protest doesn't work, and the outcry blows over, and people forget and Reddit continues on, I'm content to remain here.
Looking at one of those trackers and seeing how many trash/trashy subreddits there were made me remember that, "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
In fact, it's better for the mob to have a place for themselves.
This is all just making me lean toward never returning to Reddit. I'm new to Tildes, but really enjoying the slower pace. Reddit had become a big time suck for me and had a growing list of other...
This is all just making me lean toward never returning to Reddit. I'm new to Tildes, but really enjoying the slower pace. Reddit had become a big time suck for me and had a growing list of other issues I was uneasy with. This is making it a lot easier for me to just move on.
Reddit will even be less profitable if the mods quits in droves and Reddit has no choice but to hire employees to do moderation site-wide on the large subreddits.
Reddit will even be less profitable if the mods quits in droves and Reddit has no choice but to hire employees to do moderation site-wide on the large subreddits.
He is probably right. The Reddit redesign (when users were totally ignored despite being asked for feedback over the course of about a year) caused a bit of a revolt that amounted to very little...
He is probably right.
The Reddit redesign (when users were totally ignored despite being asked for feedback over the course of about a year) caused a bit of a revolt that amounted to very little in the end. Of course though a lot of users just stuck to the old UI (and stuff like RES) along with third party apps to get around this, at least one of those options will now be gone with the other looking uncertain.
I think Reddit will still be around a year or two from now but the site has definitely been bleeding good quality users and the focus of a lot of subreddits has changed massively. They made that decision a long time ago now though.
They became a company whose mission is to farm users for serving ads. The experience became so similar to instagram reels for me. Scrolling through meaningless images faster and faster. The...
They became a company whose mission is to farm users for serving ads. The experience became so similar to instagram reels for me. Scrolling through meaningless images faster and faster. The discussion has kept me engaged, but it is now so impersonal. It is super rare now to see a familiar account, or to have someone actually reply to me, as opposed to just making a statement into the faceless crowd. I like the teeny tiny sub reddits, like for specific shit, but it's not enough to make it worth sifting through everything else. I'm sure they'll keep being a company, but what their product actually is has drastically changed over time, and is likely to keep changing over the next few months. Less human interaction, more links faster, dumber shorter content, and lots of bots doing the modding to replace relying on people. I have reported actual sexual solicitation on instagram and gotten an autoreply that "the account didn't violate any rules" and my ticket is closed. Like obviously a human did not review my report... the type of people who want to hang out in poorly moderated places are not the type of people i want to hang out with :(
There's no simple alternative to reddit that I'm aware of, and without that, I can't imagine reddit is going anywhere. A lot of people are straight up addicted to it (myself included)... for most...
There's no simple alternative to reddit that I'm aware of, and without that, I can't imagine reddit is going anywhere. A lot of people are straight up addicted to it (myself included)... for most folks, they're not just going to quit without an alternative, unless the experience there becomes so negative that it outweighs the dopamine hits they get. Maybe some will but I wouldn't think the majority would.
If a viable alternative had existed right now (like reddit when digg v4 came out), I could see more coming out of this.
What made me sad about that memo was employees "working around the clock". Man, I hate that this is so normalized... no one should be working around the clock :( I feel for those devs
side note: he's CEO and it's expected for him to send some memo during this time, so nothing seems out of the ordinary here. I think he's smart for recommending they not wear reddit insignia right now.
We did it Reddit! Not that I ever cared about this, but if it wasn’t obvious that these things do nothing by now then you’re probably new to Reddit’s “protests.”
We did it Reddit!
Not that I ever cared about this, but if it wasn’t obvious that these things do nothing by now then you’re probably new to Reddit’s “protests.”
Well of course. He's not going to send a companywide memo saying "the protests are working and we'll probably have to bow to the community's demands if only the blackouts would continue just a bit...
Well of course. He's not going to send a companywide memo saying "the protests are working and we'll probably have to bow to the community's demands if only the blackouts would continue just a bit longer".
Prepared statement or not, I knew this would be the official response. I’ve been on Reddit for over 16 years at this point, and while it’s sad to let go of a site/community which has been so...
Prepared statement or not, I knew this would be the official response.
I’ve been on Reddit for over 16 years at this point, and while it’s sad to let go of a site/community which has been so integral to my life for so long, I refuse to support the company when its leadership is so blind, rude, and frankly anti-user.
I really am grateful to be on Tildes now. Obviously, it’s not the same, but the site is very reminiscent of Reddit back in the old days, and I find myself liking it more and more. I’m honestly happy to be here.
I just deleted the official app, I only used it to check chat because Infinity didn't have a chat option I think I'm going to keep my account, but delete Infinity onmy phone and I barly get on a...
I just deleted the official app, I only used it to check chat because Infinity didn't have a chat option
I think I'm going to keep my account, but delete Infinity onmy phone and I barly get on a computer these days, my use age will probably shrink 10 fold
Just a heads up: name calling definitely goes against the culture here. I’d recommend editing out your first sentence or changing it to something less biting (e.g. “I can’t believe the terrible...
Just a heads up: name calling definitely goes against the culture here. I’d recommend editing out your first sentence or changing it to something less biting (e.g. “I can’t believe the terrible decisions he’s making.”)
I had a feeling that the blackout wouldn't work unless it was indefinite, and it seems reddit thinks so too. Interesting that they advised "please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public", I didn't think anyone would go that far.
Additonally, "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor." Expected, but still disappointing. I guess the "typical" redditor doesn't care (or hasn't noticed) about the changes?
It's because this is a prepared statement meant to be leaked, to help garner sympathy for Reddit. The entire thing stinks of PR, but that part in particular, as well as the whole paragraph where spez looks at the camera and reiterates that they're working with apps that want to work with them:
It's pretty clear already that they're not actually in talks with any apps people care about, and employees should be even more aware of that—this is using all the same verbiage that he's been using to talk publicly about the changes, it's continuing his DARVO tactics by invoking "people are attacking poor helpless Reddit employees", and it's providing only information that Reddit clearly wants the public to understand.
Sure, this was sent out as an internal memo, but they're not looking for the person who leaked it. This was all strategic.
And I sincerely doubt the strategy is going to work. It's too transparent.
The thing that gets me about this whole thing-- it reeked of "going corporate" with the IPO and it was whatever. spez was doing his due diligence to cash out and retire with enough generational wealth to own a planet or whatever.
But then the shit with the Apollo dev started, and they lied and bullshitted and doubled down. It went from emotionless ideal-state capitalism to something that felt more... sinister. Like, obviously a massive company and the money rolls require asshole-ism, but going after some random dude who did all of this work just feels so incredibly petty.
Like, when spez could retire into obscurity to go be a photographer like Tom from Myspace, disappearing from the annals of internet history as "just another dev gone corporate", he decided to double down on infamy for no reason.
It feels like spez (and the other admins) are scrambling to control the narrative, despite that control slipping further and further from their grasp with every word they say. They know this change has to happen for their IPO, and they know that the media is going to latch on to the poor underdog (Apollo), so they’re trying to make the narrative that Apollo is unreasonable rather than Reddit.
Unfortunately for them, it’s pretty easy to spot DARVO when it’s as obvious as this.
IMO it seems not that they're trying to control the narrative, but they're trying to hide the true intentions. It's a small distinction, but what encapsulates this perspective best to me is the question in the AMA and Steve's response.
Question: 'Why is the timeline so strict?'
Steve's Answer: "I acknowledge the timeline is tight."
They have yet to actually provide an answer to this simple question. Why after 10+ years of this API setup, even after they told Apollo dev in January this year they had no plans to make any changes, it it suddenly so important to completely change it so quickly? What answer could there be to this question, that they either can't answer, or don't want to answer? At this point I don't think it's an accident they haven't answered it or that it has been overlooked, they're being very intentional in not providing an answer.
Yeah, the obvious one initially was, they wanted to kill 3rd party apps. Maybe that is it.
Another possible answer is, ChatGPT and LLMs, but if that's the answer, why not just say it? Unlike the 3rd party apps answer that makes them look bad to say out loud, how does this answer reflect poorly on them? Why not expand on what in particular matters about this, because these LLMs already have 15+ years worth of reddit posts and comments, what would be 1 more year if they slowed the rollout?
Then that brings us to the other answer, the IPO. I don't know the legalities behind what they can or cannot say about IPO plans or certain business moves leading up to an IPO. But if this move were because of the IPO, and not about killing 3rd party apps or LLMs, why not roll out API changes gradually or more in advance of the IPO giving people more notice? Why anger and frustrate users and developers all at once, in one big action, rather than slicing up who is affected and by how much into smaller pieces so you don't have this giant tidal wave of protests crashing down on you? You can't argue that Apollo is bad for reddit if they had gradually increased the costs for API to the point where Apollo could continue existing but the only users left on it are paying $10 per month and reddit's getting half of that. Why shut down possible revenue streams and anger people over being unreasonable if the answer is IPO?
Their lack of speaking on that issue is what is not allowing them to control the narrative in my opinion, and for whatever reason they're not wiling to say why.
What if they want to IPO faster? Steve could think the value of Reddit is at it's peak right now and delaying the IPO further back risks reducing his payout.
Absolutely. They wouldn't have done this any earlier than they absolutely had to. They waited at long as they could: with enough time before the IPO that it would mostly be forgotten, but not so much time that any impacts of losing moderators and contributors will start to have a measurable impact on traffic.
That's a cynical take. Are you suggesting spez deliberately sabotaged Reddit to make a quick buck for himself? I can buy that he's looking to maximize profits, but not that he intends to tank the company in the long term.
He's not intending to tank it, but I firmly believe he doesn't care about the site's long-term success beyond the IPO. I think he views post-IPO reddit as someone else's problem.
Reaching a reasonable compromise on the API price point with third-party apps would have been the move to make if he actually cared about the site and communities; reddit would get its fair share, users would have plenty of options for apps, everyone wins.
But he moved to kill third-party apps because it will maximize the price of the IPO, since it will give a big boost to their official apps user base and investors see users as things they can monetize (but they can't do that if their not using their app). He knows there is a risk that it will alienate reddit's oldest users and biggest contributors—not to mention its mods—but any effects of that, if any, won't be immediately measurable by the time of the IPO.
Yeah, agree with this. Short deadlines as a result of short term thinking. Not a long term plan to tank it, but when you're only looking at the near term, you're necessarily not looking at the long term.
I expect the reasoning was along the lines of "ripping off the band-aid," in that the anger (and press coverage) world be bigger, but it would be over more quickly and more likely to fade from memories once they pull the trigger on the IPO.
A bigger warning would make it might more clear that reddit has no intention of negotiating or accommodating, and it would give people even more time to organize a widespread protest (likely involving more than just blackouts).
Really, though, it's not about the money or the API costs; they want the user browsing data because that's where the real value in reddit will be seen by investors.
But they didn't need to. Just let the clusterfuck run its course, cash out, and be done. There's no amount of narrative control that would make spez seem like "the good guy," so unless he genuinely wants to be seen the same as Aaron Swartz and is too clueless to realize that will never happen, there's no reason to do any of this.
Spez sold reddit for a total of $10million, so he only netted like $5 million before taxes.
MySpace was sold for $580 million. I'm guessing a huge chunk of that went to Tom.
Spez is broke as fuck, if you compare him to his tech bro peers.
Yep, Spez and kn0thing sold reddit for that (relatively) low sum back in 2006 as soon as it got popular enough to attract a buyer. He's publicly said he regrets it. And ever since then he's watched as the founders of similar platforms of the era held out until they could sell for much higher sums, or like Zuckerberg, retained control and became billionaires in the process. He's got major tech-bro envy and it's been driving his decisions ever since he was rehired as CEO in 2015. I have no doubts he's committed to try and make up for that premature sale at the expense of the community itself. Spez wants what he thinks he's owed for deciding to take a "small bag" 17 years ago.
I'm sure as CEO, spez will get a comically large chunk after the IPO.
This doesn't read to me as a letter designed to be intentionally leaked. It reads like somebody trying to reassure his employees who are likely feeling down about the whole situation.
I think if this were designed to be leaked, he wouldn't include statements like "We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday", since that is exposing a weakness. Indeed it's had the opposite effect of firing up some who only planned on going dark for two days. There would be little strategy in that if the goals were simply self-serving.
My assumption is (to the point of “3p apps are profitable, Reddit is not”) that their revenue is primarily ads based, and I doubt they sell out their full inventory every day. Thus the temporary blackout has had no hit financially.
It’s at least partially an attempt to say “this doesn’t affect us” without lying but also concealing the underlying truth which is the good chance that USAGE and other metrics are way down.
That said, he’s also likely correct that the blackout won’t matter much if it’s only a two-day event. The bigger, harder to measure impact is how many people actually leave vs stay (a la Twitter). Decent bet even if droves leave it doesn’t affect CURRENT revenue (see above re:not selling out inventory), but if power users defect long-term it spells Bad Things for an IPO.
Unfortunately, based on the charts on this site, it doesn't seem like usage metrics have dipped that that heavily either. Which is surprising, honestly, given just how many of the top subreddits have gone dark. Maybe a much bigger portion of reddit activity than I had previously thought is divided amongst a huge slew of smaller subreddits that aren't blacking out (as much)?
I have to wonder how many comments are being made by bots (which was a huge problem even before the blackout).
r/therewasanattempt has Automod set up to respond to almost every comment with something about the blackout. So the number of comments has exploded. Other subs are doing one Automod comment on every post.
r/fragrance went unmoderated and the number of posts per day is close to 4 times what it used to be. Quality is way down. I've heard other subs are doing something similar as a form of protest, but I'm not sure which ones.
Bots are huge contributors of "traffic" to reddit's stats. My largest sub, per the monthly community digest, shows 45% of posts and 10% of comments are removed. Looking at the actions by the mods, only 5% of those post removals are done by us, the other 40% is my bot filters (because the bots are never creative). 40% of the posts in a 1.5M subscriber sub are bots, I don't even want to know what it looks like in larger subs.
The chart on that site doesn't exactly tell a great picture, and I found that out by following part of it's source. It references "The list of subreddits is based on this website. This list includes the top 1000 SFW and 500 NSFW most popular subreddits." which links to this page
https://subredditstats.com/
I took this screen shot last night
https://i.imgur.com/fC3PEX9.png
You can see a bulk of the posts are from pretty unknown and random subs, which visiting those subs revealed they were banned for spam. Then there's the TEMU ones which might as well be spam as well, seeing as it's some referral scam BS people are getting involved in which isn't reflective of the general user's experience on reddit.
The bulk of the data being monitored there is pure spam. Now it's not entirely clear how the blackout site you linked is acquiring data, seemingly it may have set up its own monitoring and simply decided what subreddits to monitor based on what is listed on the subredditstats.com site, but in that case it would also be monitoring the spam subs.
I also tried to plug that subredditstats site into the wayback machine but and there's plenty of snapshots but none of them load, as I wanted to see historically if those spam subs that were banned were a constant or if they're new.
So without better data and more historical data, it's harder to get a clearer picture of what impact there is.
I moderate a medium-sized niche sub (~163k subscribers) that is private as part of the protest. Apparently, the native Reddit app doesn't show our private message explaining the blackout (like Old Reddit does), so I get tons of join requests.
Most of these are from obvious bot/spam accounts, with minimal karma. Some are old accounts (7-10 years old) with little activity (probably bought). Very few are actual potential users. I've taken to replying to them with a stock message explaining the blackout and that we will not be accepting approved submitters at this time.
Moderation has definitely been slipping, someone made a post about commiting suicide in a Spanish speaking subreddit and it got blasted in the trending section of the site.
Oh, for sure. Like by the raw numbers, most reddit users probably won't be affected by this change, but the important ones are disproportionately affected for sure. The amount of free labor reddit gets each year from unpaid moderators is frankly staggering... so wild to me that they would risk alienating such a key user segment so badly, but, here we are.
Absolutely. I saw a shirt-bot get to the second page of r/all last night with 883 points (and had been up for 2 hours) which never used to happen as the shirt-bots and mug-bots would generally be removed during the short time they rose up r/top/hour.
The vast majority of the people that visit the site don't interact with anything, so it shouldn't be too surprising that there's a lot of people that are still browsing whatever they're shown.
That’s why this was never going to work since Reddit is so fragmented. You could close 60% of the subs and the activity would just shift over to the 40%. Hell, people can just make new subreddits to fill in the gaps.
It’s a shame but it’s the reality. I still supported the blackouts, obviously, but I had zero faith it would amount to anything but a firm gesture to the management that we’re not happy. They decided they don’t care, they want that IPO money so Spez can be the next Zuckerberg.
Reddit can just stuff any aggregate pages with content from the subreddits which didn't go private, and this includes content from subreddits that did go read-only...
reddit just fills the frontpage with content from other subs, and since most people aren't that picky, they won't notice much of a difference. That's why they shouldn't be going private since that just silences yourself, and gives you no place to coordinate further actions. They should be locking the sub or restricting it to only posts about reddit like dankmemes is doing, to continue making more noise, which is much more disruptive to the site.
Funnily enough I was looking for help with Transport Fever 2 earlier and clicked on a Reddit link from Google, forgetting all about the blackout, and was quite confused about why that sub of all places was private.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
I don't know why they assume this will pass when many subreddits have said they'll protest indefinitely, not just for 2 days. This doesn't magically end tomorrow when subs consider reopening.
For the big ones, they’ll just yank ownership. For the smaller ones, they didn’t really matter to Reddit to begin with.
Even now, basically for every big sub that’s protesting, there is now an alternate sub that does the same thing where all the users went.
I can't wait to see reddit admins try to moderate at scale.
They’re not going to moderate. All the alt subs show that there is no lack of appetite for people who want to run subs. They’ll just hand it to whoever is running the alt sub.
Of course, but having willing replacements doesn't mean a smooth or easy transition.
Yeah, but that’s not going to affect Reddit itself much. Few of the users are going to care, half of them hate all mods with a burning passion anyway.
Things will tick along.
Yeah. I believe there were some (power) mods who explicitly expressed interest in NOT protesting. Likely because they want the admins to hand them more subs to mod when they yank ownership from places that protest indefinitely.
Interesting how this may makes it so that really only the toxic power mods will be left on Reddit. As if that wasn't an issue already.
If someone wanna simp to the Reddit admins for free, so be it. They can be the little king in their ghost town if they want.
There's even already a system in place -- all they have to do is expand eligibility of requests on /r/redditrequest to include permanently blacked-out subs.
If it works as well as /r/redditrequest has historically, it will not be an efficient process.
I happen to have requested a subreddit today (r/buyreddit), and it was granted immediately by u/request_bot. There's a first time for everything!
Something tells me it will work better now than it has in the past on abandoned subs...
Fair point, but it still seems more feasible to focus efforts on streamlining new volunteer moderators, than it does to hire new in-house moderators.
I have a naive analysis but: a lot of the powermods do moderate a lot of subreddits at the same time for free. I don't know if it's really effective but I'm sure they'll find replacements. Those mods are ban-happy, but it didn't seem to bother redditors before.
My opinion is that the blackout won't be effective unless people really leave reddit. I still think Spez is focused on the IPO and it shows in his recent letter:
There are plenty of self-interested power mods, but the other reason why people mod so many subs is that it's easier to onboard someone who already uses the same third party apps, browser extensions, and custom bots necessary to make up for reddit's failures in providing strong native tools. That's the same reason why it's hard to recruit new mods with no mod experience. You basically need full stack dev services on the team, and new people with no programming experience have a massive learning curve.
Also, the subreddits moderated number can be pretty misleading. We used dozens of sandbox/test/storage subs when I did the mod thing. Sometimes camped out subreddits for future expansion plans along the same theme. There's a limit on the number of defaults you can moderate, and the power mod situation has improved since that rule was implemented.
Nail on the head. But I would like to add another factor: Trust.
Trust is important. Adding a mod to a sub means giving someone access to power over that sub and its community. A lot of people want that because they have an axe to grind with the current sub management. Others are just not equipped to deal with the responsibility. Yet others are just trolls. Some may be qualified, but you can't know that beforehand.
It's much easier to give control to people who have experience and a proven track record. They also have something to lose, because they are already invested in reddit and don't want to endanger their other mod jobs.
I disagree with the first statement. Redditors on the whole have distain for (power)mods and how ban happy they can be. I feel like reading through comments any time the topic comes up will tell you as much.
As for what spez has said regarding revenue, part of me thinks it is true simply because it may be difficult to measure a revenue drop in such a short period of time. So technically he's telling the truth.
Have you ever read about the 90/10/1 rule? It suggests that 90% of internet users are lurkers who read or observe, 9% of members edit or respond, and 1% of community members create new content. I only bring it up because it tells me that the individuals complaining about mods (or commenting at all) comprise 10% or less of all users. I doubt redditors as a whole have disdain for mods or even power-mods if mods register on their radar at all.
To me, moderating was like cable news: I was 20x more likely to hear negativity/criticism than praise. If you look at all the reaction threads and votes on whether to protest or not held in various subreddits though, you'll see strong support for the mod protest coming through.
I have heard of the 90/9/1 rule. The 90/10/1 rule would math out to 101% lol.
Splitting hairs aside, it only makes sense that only the 10% that interacts with reddit ever complains about the mods being ban happy. Since the 90% that doesn't would, by nature of their lurking, never do anything ban worthy. Plus even if the 90% did have an opinion on the matter we don't know what it is because they don't ever express it. So we more or less are forced to remove them from the sample when considering how "reddit" feels about moderators.
It's evident by looking in on subs where mods are striking right now rather than blacking out they are probably a net positive, but I'd hazard a guess that they achieve this by being a bit overly liberal with the ban hammer at times. Just my 2¢.
Excluding the
90%89% of users who don't voice an opinion just leads to a misleading statistical conclusion based on10%11% or less of the population. The only thing we can say for sure is that we don't know what the vast majority of redditors think about mods, not that redditors on the whole have disdain for (power)mods. That's the only point I wanted to make - any generalization of redditors is going to be skewed heavily by the loudest users. Also users who do comment and participate may have a positive view of mods that they just don’t share.I may be projecting my desires a bit, but when lurking on Reddit earlier it did seem like the quality of discussion/posts on frontpage threads was less thoughtful than usual.
There was still some intelligent discussion, but not as much or at the levels that I see from very educated participants. It will be interesting if the high quality users return after the blackout or not.
The other thing about Reddit is it was oversaturated. What I mean to say here is post in a popular askreddit thread that is a couple hours old - expect no interaction and few upvotes.
I haven't been there currently but I bet the smaller pool might even provide a better user experience? It's weird because that's not what we all wanted but there's absolutely a sweet spot of enough going on to keep you entertained, but not too big that you can't have a voice.
This has a lot to do with the changes Reddit made to encourage scrolling through posts rather than engaging in comments. New Reddit and the app don't show comments more than a couple levels deep. It's easier to monetize the post feed than the comment section.
Well they definitely don't want me on their site anymore then cause I'm on reddit more for the comments than the articles linked. I can find those articles on my own but I like to see what other people are saying about them. I'll go to reddit after reading some news just to see what people are saying (since most news sites now don't have a comment section.. understandably honestly).
And I think that's why a lot of long-time redditors are migrating to Tildes. The quality comments were always the most valuable part of Reddit for me too!
That feels like confirmation bias, threads that went to the front page almost definitionally did not contain thoughtful posts.
Have they? Basically all of the big subs I checked (with a few exceptions) were sticking to 48 hours. It seemed like anyone going indefinite was a smaller niche community that didn't drive as many clicks, but conversely would now mean more high quality content was missing.
And of course they'll probably just replace and re-open at the end of the day anyway.
Here's where they're all mobilizing if you want to keep track. So far, 2 of the top 7 by subscriber count are staying private with half the original protest period still remaining. Let's give them another day to figure it out then see where things stand.
You're right they don't drive as many clicks, but I think you're missing something. A lot of new users come to reddit because they found a small, niche community for their hobby/interest/passion there, then they stayed and generated clicks for the other content reddit aggregates. No one here can quantify the ripple effect of losing those communities and their users, but it's a point people are overlooking.
Thanks for the link. If nothing else I name dropped the small 16k sub I mod that's out indefinitely.
One other factor that is interesting in all this is the number of porn subs that are blacking out (some indefinitely by the looks of that link) which is not great for reddit considering that a good chunk of their traffic is NSFW.
Been checking in on the linked thread for the last half-hour and am heartened to see the number of extra subreddits going indefinite every time I refresh.
I'd rather wear a 4chan clover in public. Mostly because it'd be non-intrusive to 99% of people. But there's a part where at least that 1% who does recognize and engages me on it won't be boring.
Knowing 4chan I'd either expect the weirdest encounters or none at all because they're too introverted to say anything. Would genuinely be interested to see what would happen.
You'd just get a lot of racist people, to be honest. Most of the decent people got tired of the nonstop /pol/ spam on every board years ago. It stopped being cute or charming when overt meme fascism started making our lives materially worse.
A much better protest would be for moderators to stop moderating. Remove all the automatic rules, remove all the bans and do nothing.
A few subs have done that, obviously with the caveat that they still remove anything that breaks sitewide rules.
Mods could choose not to remove that stuff as well but then they would just be replaced
I do think there's some merit to what is a "typical" redditor that just lurks and never comments vs heavy users
[citation needed](I want to believe you but this is the first I've heard of that particular claim.)
The statement had a tone of „moderator bad actor - admin good victim“ here… I know Reddit Inc. refers to admins and Snoos, but moderators should not be considered lessers, yeah we aren’t paid and don’t have admin tools, but we’re Snoos too and the protest is work we’re doing on our time! We’re also working hard to improve reddit.
He makes a very compelling argument about why mods should shut down and migrate their communities elsewhere, instead of giving up their protest tomorrow.
Nothing will change. He said it himself. It's time to move on.
It's very unfortunate to see what I would call a real downfall of a website I've been a part of for 11 years. I don't welcome the downfall of it but if the ceo wants to keep not listening to its user base that literally made the website what it is today then so be it.
I feel you. I was on Apollo not long after it released, and losing it feels like the end of an era. I genuinely feel a sense of emptiness leaving behind the niche communities I loved (RIP Dogelore), but Reddit proved definitively it is not a worthy steward of its communities or users.
On the bright side, we found Tildes, and so far it's lovely. I think it has the potential to be better than Reddit ever was.
Apollo has me spoiled. I don't want to use reddit without it. Except for not having a keyboard on the devices I use apollo on it is a nicer experience then even the desktop website.
yeah... every other website that I used to go to that I left it was either cause something else drew me away (sadly that is what happened with livejournal when all my friends went to facebook) or one time when a forum imploded but some motivated users made another forum for people to migrate to. I think with reddit that would have to happen to really see reddit get hurt... since there is no alternative some one would have to be motivated to make an alternative that is directly trying to replace reddit (but with improvements in management).
But where are they going to migrate? I was just reading a post from the owner of this site outright saying how it works now is hard to do a migration like that to it (Unless they change how it works some). Lemme is honestly confusing (so far this site has stuck to me more then the little I tried lemmy) and you don't want to be really confusing to people. Everything else I've seen is just different (Mastadon seems to work more like twitter from what little I tried).
Honestly, reddit does have the advantage of there really isn't a good alternative (imho this place has come closest).
Honestly at this point I've enjoyed not having the mass migration because the Lemmy login and make account servers have been down or something. People are posting back on reddit that they can't get in.
Every comment I read of Steve’s is so cringey. I couldn’t imagine sending a company wide email and addressing everyone as Snoos, multiple times.
That being said, I figured the protest wouldn’t be enough, although I had a small misguided hope that something might change.
Also the "don't wear reddit gear in public" feels like a pathetic attempt to skew the point of the blackout as not about Hoffman himself and his own failures and his rather severe attitude problems, and more about some nebulous "reddit bad" mentality that I haven't once seen amongst the angriest.
Great point. I’m not mad at the Reddit engineers, I’m mad at him
If anything good for them that they survived the lay-offs
It seems a lot of newer tech companies call their workers stupid "endearing" names. Apparently at twitter they call them "twerps".
Personally I think that it's dehumanizing - which might just be the whole point.
At least twerps is kinda funny.
I mean, no more so than tildos/tilderinos etc.? I think it's kinda harmless to have a label for your group. Definitely kinda lame to put them in a letter from the CEO though. Very much "hello fellow cool employees".
Yeah, but it's not a company calling employees that. That distinction is important.
Sure, if it comes from within the group.
If it comes from the CEO it looks more like branding cattle.
I am but a simple messenger of the people.
I think it's too late. Hidey ho Tilderino!
As much as I share the same sentiment, it’s been a thing for a while.
I thought tilderinos was already a thing!
I know some of us went for tildestrians in the past. I personally like tilderinos.
I vote tildos
Every time I hear “tilderinos”, it’s in Ned Flander’s voice.
My company (about 2000 employees) is 40 years old and has a variety of names based on job function, where you're located, etc.
I hate it.
"How do you do fellow narwhals? How has the baconing gone?" Has the same energy, right?
Exactly! I’m shocked there wasn’t a TL;DR at the bottom of the memo
"Snoo" sounds too much like something I'd call a girlfriend lol
No CEO would send a widespread memo of reassurance asking to stay calm, because there's nothing to worry about, unless there were good reason to worry. This is all corporate-speak indicating significant impact and a lot of problems including staff morale.
This line specifically is written directly to investors: "We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor." The fact that this needs to be called out so directly and clearly means there are real concerns.
The whole memo reads as kind of cultish and weird, especially the last part that reads like "watch out they're out to get us." It has this sort of us-against-them, insider club, "we're a special family" kind of energy.
All in all it's not the content of the memo but the fact that it needed to be said at all, and said this way, that speaks volumes.
"Look out engineers! What if Christian Selig jumps out from behind a bush and stabs you, because I killed 3rd party apps?" /s
An eye for an eye, a kill for a kill!
Coming out this summer, from Supermassive Games...The Dark Pictures Anthology: Redditors
Oooh death...
Remain calm! All is well!
Well, I'm reminded of the Mulan sauce thing and Rick and Morty fans jumping up and down on McDonald's counters. I'm also reminded of the kind of ambush behavior that seems to have grown acceptable on social media for getting clicks.
I don't have too hard a time imagining somebody who's juiced up by the blackout throwing a latte, or worse, at someone they perceive to be a reddit employee. If the volume of the protest has made an impression on the admins, then that line doesn't actually feel completely out of left field to me.
But I may be paranoid.
It’s pretty clear that he is concerned about the damage, but also that 48hrs is just not going to be long enough. If all of these subs that have gone dark would go through to the end of the month, or indefinitely, that might have been enough to change his mind. Otherwise it’s a cost of operating with the amount of ad revenue they will get by eliminating 3rd party apps.
If Apollo is gone, I won’t be on Reddit anymore. I’ve just been spending more time on Tildes, and less time on my phone overall. Maybe it’s for the best.
I've struggled with instinctively opening RIF today and yesterday. But I'm working on it. However, once it's gone, I'm done with reddit on my phone. I really think it will help me be more present when I'm out and about with my phone..
Still would rather reddit decides to at least hold off for another year. Its wild to me they don't have these tools finished for mods but are still going forward. From what I gather though, they've been promising tools for years and it seems like the promise gets more empty every time. I almost doubt they even have new tools in the works.
Just remove it from your phone now. You can always add it back later if things improve. I put a link to Tildes in the same spot on my home screen, so it opens by muscle memory now instead.
Huffman is counting on your lizard brain to bring you back. Don't let him be right.
My phone (BlackBerry KeyOne) has a physical keyboard with configurable shortcuts. I remapped my long-press "R" (for RIF) to a Firefox home-screen shortcut for Tildes. I can still access RIF if needed, but it's in a folder on my home screen that's more cumbersome than hitting the shortcut key.
I wish Tildes had an app. The browser I have on my phone opens links in private/incognito so just having a shortcut to Tildes on the home screen doesn't work.
Apps are being worked on by a few different people now. See the ?tag=apps topics in ~tildes by talklittle ('rif is fun' developer) and wababa.
y not install another browser for stuff like forums? I have like 6 or 7 different browsers on my phone lol
At least on Android, Hermit's great for stuff like this. Single-site browsers for any site you want.
yeah I have like 6 different versions of Firefox/forks, there's a private browser specifically for one-off searches and it just clears absolutely everything on exit. Perfect for random googling escapades / multi-tab straight shot brute force tab jumping activities trying to find an answer to some obscure question
This is what I'm currently using. It's been working well so far.
I hid Apollo in my app list, and took it off my Home Screen. I replaced it with Tildes so I can just tap on that any time I would have habitually tried to open Apollo. It’s helped so far.
I'm pretty annoyed as I googled an issue yesterday and didn't realise a link I clicked on was Reddit, and earlier in this thread someone had a link that went to Reddit. So technically they've had 2 daily active user numbers from me even though I haven't read a thing on there.
I should have set up a DNS blocker or something.
I admit, I've been week. ONly cause one subreddit but I'm super excited about Starfield and can't get enough. The game forum I'm on is talking about it pretty regularly but I still run out of content lol. I guess they have a discord but it's not fun talking on the discord. Things go by too quickly and honestly since they do they have put a 2 minute time out between when you can respond which kinda makes it so you can't have a conversation (instead you can just read stream of random thoughts from people).
These are the kind of things I will really miss reddit for :(.
Yeah diving into a specific niche subreddit to get excited about a specific topic was one of my favorite things on Reddit. The theories and discussion of breaking bad and better call saul were particular highlights for me. I'm hoping with the right tags and possible future subgroups changes we can have more of those kind of high quality discussions here though. There's a few fairly active starfield threads on here for instance.
wait... like you can only post once every 2 mins?
I think it's a setting they can do. It made sense because the stream would go by so fast that you wouldn't even be able ot read what people were saying otherwise. But, at the same time, it doesn't leave room for conversation, just for everyone to type how hyped they are (or maybe get a question in and hope it gets answered).
It may have only been temporary tbh for that time cause I think it was pretty close to after the starfield deep dive I visited.
Did the exact same thing, have a Firefox shortcut to Tildes (sorted by top 24hr activity) in the place where my Sync button sat.
It's been nice tbh, it feels so nice and quiet here - quiet in the sense of contentedness, not emptiness.
lol I've been spending more time on my phone on tildes
Sure, it will pass, at least for some subs, but the protest has already reached the attention of mainstream media. People who would have otherwise not known that anything was happening are now aware, including any potential investors. It's a really bad look for your platform to be partially shuttered by your users because of an unpopular corporate decision. Yes, this won't be a killing blow on Reddit as a service, but it might be enough of a wound to make others a bit wary.
Maybe the shares will tank after the IPO and r/wallstreetbets will band together to buy reddit only to turn it into the non-profit, user-owned cooperative it should always have been.
I like your dream, but WSB is not the sub we want leading the charge. All they would want would be a different financially motivated dictator. One they choose.
Thanks. Yes, you're right. It should be a substantial portion of all Reddit users, regardless of subreddits.
idk about that one lmao I'm gonna take a guess and say if that sub somehow acquired control of Reddit shares they'd hot potato the actual decision making onto another sub. that place is like 4chan ran thru a carbon filter
What a strangely accurate description of many communities on reddit - honestly that kinda feels like was reddit always was to me back in the day. A less edgy and toothsome 4chan.
That's one hell of a story arc. Having seen some of the shenanigans of WSB I'd say it's possible.
We can always dream! That would be poetic justice though,
I just took ownership of r/buyreddit ... youneverknow
Anecdote, but even my own (very non-techy) father sent me a link to a CBC article about it, asking if that's what I was referring to when I told him "reddit dun goofed again" to explain why I had been spending so much time helping out on Tildes again. :P
So yeah, even people who have no real interest in Reddit are being made aware of this thanks to all the media attention. I don't know how much of an effect that will have on their API decisions, but it's still not a good look for reddit. And I don't imagine it's helping their IPO prospects very much either.
This is exactly what I mean. People with little to no knowledge of Reddit are being made aware that something is happening. That logically extends to people with some knowledge of Reddit understanding some of the significance of the blackout, and hopefully, investors looking towards the IPO will be a bit more cautious to invest. That does open the door for an unfortunate scenario, where a Bytedance or an Elon step in and take advantage to the instability, getting a lower price for the platforming, and turning it into something else. Let's just hope that doesn't happen.
"Yes, this is happening, but it's not a big deal. If we stick our fingers in our ears and wish hard enough, the problem will go away! It's not our fault; it's a few noisy troublemakers causing all this ruckus. Just go about your business and everything will be okay."
Also be careful walking outside! Someone might hit you!
"And I'm sorry if you feel like you're being attacked. It's not like it's my fault or anything. No one could have possibly foreseen this. It was utterly unexpected."
Yea, it'll pass like a kidney stone. Completely pain-free.
He has to say this to maintain what morale still exists internally.
If most people don‘t care, we probably won‘t be able to affect any change. In the end, it‘s probably good for me if Apollo stops working. The app worked so well that it was basically responsible for 50% of my screentime.
Curious what the next weeks will bring. I for one support all subs that continue the blackout. In hindsight it‘s sad that the blackout was announced for 2 days only.
It's actually absurd how I had to stop and think about what I was going to look at when I woke up yesterday and picked up my phone. When Apollo goes, my phone screen time is going to drop drastically.
I decided to bite the bullet, and deleted apollo as soon as Christian made the announcement that it will shut down at the end of June. I feel like I'm spending a fair bit less time on my phone now (or at the very least more time in chatrooms/active content rather than passive scrolling).
While it may not yet have had a "significant revenue impact" I would wager that's because the people who are observing the blackout are on average not the ones using the official app or the new interface where they presumably get most of their ad impressions. The power users who are 3rd party app users and old.reddit plus adblocker viewers are the ones who are not present.
The real significant revenue impact will only be felt once it's clear if the content is not being created on reddit any longer. And that won't be truly felt until the 3rd party apps go dark. I know that I personally will never use their official app after having used RIF for a decade, but I'm not a huge creator of content so who knows how much my opinion is worth.
As an older redditor who frequently posted responsible material and continued discussions in niche subreddits, I have no further plans to do so... The more I read, the more disappointed I get and now is closing in on righteous indignation.
After reading the introduction thread, it sure seems there are a lot of us over here in similar situations who plan to raze and burn their accounts, post history, and subreddits and just were holding out how in some kind of misguided optimism (more of a stages of grief process). I'm done bargaining (blackout), now I'm to anger (delete my account and post history), and acceptance (tildes).
Right now it's just a brand hit. Things might return to 80% by the end of the week, then there is the actual cut off at the end of the month, maybe another 20% drop when Apollo/RIF/etc. end?
I'm willing to bet it will go the route of twitter. Reddit will carry on but just as a shell of its former self. No longer trusted or being used as a news source. Also like twitter there isn't a direct option for everyone leaving reddit to go to (tildes, kbin, etc.)
It might just be my narrow point of view, but it's interesting to see the internet so unstable right now - facebook has lost its golden shine, twitter is out, reddit is going, I'm not about to install ticktock, and "AI" is on a path to change everything.
Does anyone else feel that the comment about not wearing reddit gear in public is a little offensive to your average redditor?
Maybe my perspective is different not being in the USA and it is a genuine concern there, but it feels like he's saying redditors are a bit unhinged and liable to launch an unprovoked violent attack on anyone associated with reddit. Also deflecting that redditors are the problem party in this event.
The whole thing is messaging. It's PR. And you're 100% right. The message is:
"We promise, our profits definitely aren't effected! These people are just unhinged babies, they're emotionally unstable but they'll be back under our control in no time! We're definitely capable of turning these losers into big fat money signs!"
Nah. I'm out.
I know a lot of people are still going to reddit to see if anything is happening so I wouldn't be surprised if traffic is not affected at this time. The real measure will probably be July 1st :( RIP RIF....
I peeked a few times just to see what the front page is like, but only from desktop with adblocker turned on. Not going to let them generate any revenue from me.
I peeked with Teddit. I don't know what the front page typically looks like for a user that isn't logged in, so I can't fairly compare. I will say, the posts today seem to have especially high engagement... but maybe those numbers are normal for these subs. The posts themselves seem lame and not particularly diverse, but maybe that's just my bias talking. I can't gauge what the average redditor thinks about the blackout or if they even notice anything's different.
I just had a weird thought.
The blackouts are meant to be protests, as a way of strongarming spez into walking back his stupidity. Because of the power the mods hold over the site, they can (potentially) do real damage to it if they give their protest some teeth (i.e., keeping subs private indefinitely). We'll see how many are willing to take that step, and how Reddit will respond to those who do.
My weird thought was, what if the mods had banded together like this for other reasons besides protesting spez? What if they unionized? Obviously they're volunteers, but they know their work is valuable. What if they went on strike? What if they organized to hold all the major subs hostage until Reddit formally agreed to compensate them for their labor?
We may be past the point of something like that ever happening now. Who knows. It's just a possibility I never considered, that mod solidarity could be leveraged for other purposes too.
Yeah anyone could see this when you announce an end date to your protest irrespective of whether your demands are met, especially one as short as 2 days.
The one positive I think the 2 day blackout could have is on the awareness and media coverage side, just getting the news out more people who might’ve been unaware and either see articles or pinned messages in locked subs they try to visit.
But I hope these comments embolden many subs to extend to an indefinite protest as reddit truly is one of the few sites that the users can actually fight for positive change on if they really try due to the unique position of having the moderators being community members not employees.
It looks like ModCoord is asking subreddits to extend indefinitely, in response to the news from Spez. For those who don't wanna go to reddit, here, we're going oldschool.
Hold the line! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv-0LkDouRs
As someone who spent way too much time on Reddit, I have been surprised how relaxed I feel about not returning to it since the boycott. I will likely lurk to see updates in a few specialist subs I follow, but I don't intend to log in again at this stage.
In the last two days I have been somewhat in overdrive trying to avoid it and actively trying to do other things... But I feel like I've been so much more productive, and active. In the last day and a half I've been for a swim, to the gym, cycled to work, made a start on weeding the garden. All things that I don't normally have time for because I waste it scrolling reddit.
Not sure it'd last if I try to avoid it long term (which I likely will do if they take my app away), but it's definitely good for me short term!
You're spot on. I'm with the boycott, but come July 1, I don't expect I'll use reddit all that much. The key will be replacement, since it is a pretty big hole being left. I'm curious how you're planning to utilize all this new-found time. I need ideas.
Read books, go outside, learn a crafting skill (knitting, woodworking, sewing), learn a new language (actual or programming).
I’m definitely going to have more time without Apollo. I spent so much time moderating over all though… a decade… I hope those skills can translate into other things.
Moderating could translate to volunteer work with sports or debate clubs or stuff like that? One thing I completely forgot in my list of things to do with ones new free time. Volunteer! With kids, the homeless, animals... I'm not comfortable being around strangers so it's not something for me, but I have seriously thought about volunteering for the local animal shelter (and then found out they were in need of someone answering phones, one of my biggest stressors).
That is a great idea. I’m so caught up in reddit that I honestly did not consider the real world. Thank you. Good point!
No problem! I've been trying to "digital detox" for a while so it is already easier for me (no twitter, no insta, no TikTok, no Facebook, only actual videos on YouTube, no shorts). It will become more natural as you continue! And then suddenly you realise you haven't touched your phone for half a day and yet you feel fine.
Another thing to learn is to be bored. Just don't do anything. It will feel so weird at first, but it does make a difference mentally.
It's interesting, isn't it? I was talking about this with someone earlier, that for me, it's become less about Reddit, but a larger personal examination on how I interact with the Internet, and even the world, at large. Being on Reddit less has genuinely made me feel more relaxed, that I have less of a chip on my shoulder about everything. I'm finding other things to fill my time rather than just grabbing my phone and mindlessly scrolling.
It would be hilarious and awesome if someone spun up the old reddit2 Python codebase from GitHub. Basically OSRS but for reddit.
That may actually be the way to go. Is that feasible? It won't be federated or novel but that might be for the best
Not really, it runs on very outdated software, it would need to be updated to even be semi secure, and that is a very large undertaking. It is coded on Python 2.7 which is already sunset. Not to mention all the other dependencies that also are outdated and invariably full of security holes.
If some enterprising soul were to spin up an instance of Reddit, but with none of the crappy additions introduced after 2017, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Good news! The open source code stopped getting updated in 2017. Coincidence??
Yeah, it's going to pass. I think everyone knew that, although some might have held out some hope that change would happen. I'm perhaps a bit too cynical for that, so I'm not surprised at the outcome.
I deleted RIF on Sunday night, and I'm actually kinda surprised at how I've adapted without it. I have no plans on returning to Reddit. It's just not really feasible for me - most of my usage was via RIF on mobile, and I refuse to install their shitty app. On the desktop, I signed out. So every time muscle memory / habits take me back to Reddit, I see their god-awful UI and exit. I imagine that it'll still come up in search results, and that's fine - Google will take me right where I need to be.
Reddit will be fine. I has the numbers to move on, and a large user base that does not care about these issues. But after 13 years and 60k karma, this event has irreparably soured my perception of Reddit. So I'm ready to move on.
I'm right there with you.
Reddit seems to be going the way of Digg and I'm not really interested in sticking around while the end user experience continues to degrade.
Honestly I am a bit disappointed with some of the comments in this thread. It seems like many tilderinos takeaways have been that this is a corporate bullshit memo that means nothing, it is secretly admitting that this is a serious issue, and it would have been better if Steve said nothing at all. I think this ignores a ton of the context around this memo.
Most importantly: this is an internal company memo. It is not meant for the public. It is meant to people who are worried about loosing their jobs in the next few weeks. The job of a CEO is the leader of a company. If Steve did not send out a reassuring internal memo in a situation like this, he would be failing in his role as leader.
Steve saying that the company has not seen a financial impact is not some smoking gun that things are terrible. Financials are the only metric companies care about, so they are the metrics that employees must necessarily care about (hopefully to a lesser extent than the CEO, but if an employee doesn’t care about making the company money, they will not be an employee for long). Calling out the financial effect, if any, was also something expected for an internal company memo. After all, employee paychecks are paid with this revenue.
As for the warning of wearing Reddit merch in public, that is also expected in a memo like this. Internet fights have become violent in the real world. It would not be unexpected for a mad redditor to do some sort of violence towards an employee. Humans are very bad at separating employees of a company and leaders of a company. And office shootings have been perpetrated with less reason before. A CEO not including a warning like this in a situation like this would be extremely negligent.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Steve is an extremely unreliable person. He is definitely not someone I would want to work for. If I had a board seat on Reddit, I would be calling for his immediate removal. But this is not some smoking gun of malice that some people are treating it as. In my reading, it is the type of memo that is expected from a CEO in a situation like this.
I don't think he's wrong.
Only some subreddits went dark, and of those most for 48 hours. It's clear it's a halfhearted attempt at best, and most people will capitulate one way or another. There's a lot of people acting as if he's out of touch on this and it's going to be painful for them or something, but honestly it sure looks like it's a bunch of noise in the breeze. The vast majority don't care or can't stick it out. Much like twitter, the number of people actually willing to abandon the platform for their morals is extremely small.
At this point it feels like obsessing over how my ex is doing right after a break up.
I'm interested. I do have some feelings about it. And I worry, abstractly, about his selfishness hurting other people in the future.
But it's out of my control and the whether he fails or succeeds isn't really any of my business anymore.
If the protest doesn't work, and the outcry blows over, and people forget and Reddit continues on, I'm content to remain here.
Looking at one of those trackers and seeing how many trash/trashy subreddits there were made me remember that, "just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
In fact, it's better for the mob to have a place for themselves.
This is all just making me lean toward never returning to Reddit. I'm new to Tildes, but really enjoying the slower pace. Reddit had become a big time suck for me and had a growing list of other issues I was uneasy with. This is making it a lot easier for me to just move on.
Reddit will even be less profitable if the mods quits in droves and Reddit has no choice but to hire employees to do moderation site-wide on the large subreddits.
He is probably right.
The Reddit redesign (when users were totally ignored despite being asked for feedback over the course of about a year) caused a bit of a revolt that amounted to very little in the end. Of course though a lot of users just stuck to the old UI (and stuff like RES) along with third party apps to get around this, at least one of those options will now be gone with the other looking uncertain.
I think Reddit will still be around a year or two from now but the site has definitely been bleeding good quality users and the focus of a lot of subreddits has changed massively. They made that decision a long time ago now though.
They became a company whose mission is to farm users for serving ads. The experience became so similar to instagram reels for me. Scrolling through meaningless images faster and faster. The discussion has kept me engaged, but it is now so impersonal. It is super rare now to see a familiar account, or to have someone actually reply to me, as opposed to just making a statement into the faceless crowd. I like the teeny tiny sub reddits, like for specific shit, but it's not enough to make it worth sifting through everything else. I'm sure they'll keep being a company, but what their product actually is has drastically changed over time, and is likely to keep changing over the next few months. Less human interaction, more links faster, dumber shorter content, and lots of bots doing the modding to replace relying on people. I have reported actual sexual solicitation on instagram and gotten an autoreply that "the account didn't violate any rules" and my ticket is closed. Like obviously a human did not review my report... the type of people who want to hang out in poorly moderated places are not the type of people i want to hang out with :(
There's no simple alternative to reddit that I'm aware of, and without that, I can't imagine reddit is going anywhere. A lot of people are straight up addicted to it (myself included)... for most folks, they're not just going to quit without an alternative, unless the experience there becomes so negative that it outweighs the dopamine hits they get. Maybe some will but I wouldn't think the majority would.
If a viable alternative had existed right now (like reddit when digg v4 came out), I could see more coming out of this.
What made me sad about that memo was employees "working around the clock". Man, I hate that this is so normalized... no one should be working around the clock :( I feel for those devs
side note: he's CEO and it's expected for him to send some memo during this time, so nothing seems out of the ordinary here. I think he's smart for recommending they not wear reddit insignia right now.
We did it Reddit!
Not that I ever cared about this, but if it wasn’t obvious that these things do nothing by now then you’re probably new to Reddit’s “protests.”
Don't go to reddit today, the self-entitlement of the users who feel inconvenienced by this is through the roof.
That sounds like a dare to me. I hope users/mods and the like double down.
Well of course. He's not going to send a companywide memo saying "the protests are working and we'll probably have to bow to the community's demands if only the blackouts would continue just a bit longer".
We have to make Spez resign. If this is his takeaway from all this, that it will pass, then he's the one that must pass.
As long as he gets his golden parachute, I don't think he cares.
He's not wrong. They knew exactly how much interaction is via third party apps or not.
This will be much sound and fury resulting in nothing
The memo reeks of PR shenanigans. I completely forgot it was internal because it reads like it's actually meant for future investors.
Prepared statement or not, I knew this would be the official response.
I’ve been on Reddit for over 16 years at this point, and while it’s sad to let go of a site/community which has been so integral to my life for so long, I refuse to support the company when its leadership is so blind, rude, and frankly anti-user.
I really am grateful to be on Tildes now. Obviously, it’s not the same, but the site is very reminiscent of Reddit back in the old days, and I find myself liking it more and more. I’m honestly happy to be here.
I just deleted the official app, I only used it to check chat because Infinity didn't have a chat option
I think I'm going to keep my account, but delete Infinity onmy phone and I barly get on a computer these days, my use age will probably shrink 10 fold
He's not wrong. They knew exactly how much interaction is via third party apps or not.
This will be much sound and fury resulting in nothing
Just a heads up: name calling definitely goes against the culture here. I’d recommend editing out your first sentence or changing it to something less biting (e.g. “I can’t believe the terrible decisions he’s making.”)