Reddit CEO pledges to not force subreddits to reopen. Admin team then immediately threatens moderators who closed their subreddits with removal.
In this article from The Verge posted today "While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that"
Ironically mere minutes before this article went live, Reddit admins posted this to /r/modsupport.
"Leaving a community you deeply care for and have nurtured for years is a hard choice, but it is a choice some may need to make if they are no longer interested in moderating that community. If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team."
This statement not only completely contradicts what was "pledged" by Spez, but is also a very clear threat to subreddit moderators telling them to fall in line or get replaced by someone who will.
More articles that came out today about this subject:
Kotaku: Reddit's CEO Is Just Making Everything Worse
NBC: Reddit CEO slams protest leaders, saying he'll change rules that favor ‘landed gentry’
MacRumors: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts
ARS Technica: As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty
NPR: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: 'It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company'
The full Verge interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
Comment transferred to text post. (Thanks @demois)
I'll use this space to restate how much Reddit leadership (behind the banner head of Steve Huffman) has destroyed the trust of their previously most loyal users. Moderators and power users have been pouring countless million man-hours into reddit for over a decade for no monetary compensation whatsoever. They've generated hundreds of millions in value for a company that obviously didn't value them at all. Reddit used these people to scale their company up to a whopping 2,000 employees, many of who's job is marketing, business development, advertiser relations, etc. You want to know what teams reddit has been cutting over the past few years? Community support. Direct admin communication to mods has gone downhill over the past decade obviously, but now even the community admins are being laid off and leaving people high and dry.
Has the other shoe finally dropped? People are starting to realize that reddit is no longer the place they joined years ago, and that all it cares about is a big fat IPO and to fit in with the big kids like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
Edit 2: If you still are not convinced this is a whole huge mess of a situation PLEASE read the complete interview with Spez just published. The lying, half-truths, and corporate speak should be clear to anyone with a bit of experience on reddit. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview
This article is actually full of contemptible garbage spewed by Spez if you're interested in reading it. Once again tripling down on villainizing the 3rd party app developers who built the apps that his company thrived on for years. Pretending like there was no middle ground here in charging reasonable prices for API access, and then downplaying the effectiveness of the protest by claiming most users were unaffected.
I haven't been back to reddit since the blackout for obvious reasons.
I see articles here and kbin pretty regularly saying "everything is fine, we're fine, we don't need or want you, you change nothing" - and at the same time shit seems to be on fire.
Sounds like these protests are reaching an uncomfortable amount of pressure for Reddit HQ.
I mean, they might be right that 'most users' aren't really noticing, but something like 90% of users just browse.
Something like another 9% actually comment, and 1% create new content.
A site might only lose 4% of their users, but if that contains most of the mods and people who created interesting content, you're going to be in bot-land soon enough. Reddit was already struggling with that. I don't think this is helping.
A decade ago, 2 or 3 posts down was insightful, 5 years ago 9 or 10 until you got an insightful non joking post. Recently, good luck finding anything not joke related. Kind of a bummer. But the endless summer is finally eating itself.
I'm not against jokes on reddit, I think they have a place assuming they are relevant to topics being currently discussed in that subreddit. What I've noticed over the last 3 years is bot armies, reposting content out of context from years ago with hundreds of comments in minutes ripped straight from the previous post.
If I had my reddit druthers, there would be several upvote options, like Slashdot. So you could sort by funny or insightful. And it really went south when they removed upvotes versus downvotes. That was pretty useful.
The 'vote' here is like this old vestigial thing that has outlived its purpose - yet it's still sitting there. I suspect we will get around to reinventing that just like when we changed downvotes into labels. Votes need to become 'votes with a reason' so we can measure things and find out why something is good or bad, and better categorize things. Slashdot was on the right track there I think. Biggest criticism I had of that was insightful and informative were misapplied all the time.
The question I wonder about is, what five-ish categories would we sort upvotes into? We've got exemplary and that tag is used terrifyingly well here, it always finds the quality somehow. I think /r/changemyview's
ΔdeltasΔwould be a good choice for the next 'vote with a reason'. Those were a way of counting how many users said 'upvoted because this post changed my mind' and they seemed to work quite well even in adversarial threads.I think showing the actual delta count itself might be a bad idea, though. We don't want to gamify them, let's save the counting for when the gamification is beneficial. Instead perhaps we have a temperature attached to the count, and it changes the
Δcolor from cool up to hot as more users apply deltas to the comment.A third tweak to the upvote might just be an easy way for someone to say 'thanks this was helpful'.
I like the idea of doing away with votes, but I would suggest introducing some small token of appreciation, along with the meaningful accolades. Otherwise we might get threads full of one-word "thanks" or "interesting" replies?
Not sure we should do away with the votes, just augment them a bit. Once they've become obviously redundant then we can talk about dropping them completely, but their weights do sort the content, so they are serving a purpose.
I'm going to date myself here, but I always liked the slashdot way of handling it. No firm number, just a fuzzy system of "normal", "troll", "insightful", "funny", etc. It removes the impetus to strive for a higher number, and focuses on the quality of the comment.
I also liked their system of randomly assigning "mod points" to trusted peers, and not being able to rate comments if you'd commented in the thread. Not sure if it's right for this site, but worth considering.
I think five categories is too many, personally. Just have a up/down vote for each of two: “funny” and “informative”.
This seems like the kind of thing that needs to be kept as simple as possible for it to be useful at scale. (No, I don’t have a source, but I’d be interested to see what kind of research has been done into this?)
I think it's more about screen real estate. I don't think we could fit more than five in without things starting to get cluttered. Simple and clean and as close to one click/tap as possible every time.
This. While Reddit was a nice way to handle posts, threads, comments, votes, the way Slashdot handled this was very cool. Your uovote was variable, as you said, and you could pick why you scored the content, and then sort the comments thread by comment type (as determined by the user base).
It's been struggling with bots for so long that I had just started tuning them out, but you're 100% right. I have no interest in driving any traffic there unless I'm searching for something that I can't find elsewhere, so I'm afraid I'll miss out on what it will become, but I think your prediction will be spot on.
I think this is exactly what will happen, to a degree. But I also think a mildly participating (viewing, voting, scrolling) userbase will drive just enough ad revenue to justify the move in admin's mind. Meanwhile the core of the community left. Those very loosely participating users are the intersection of reddit and tickstachat, and they don't mind bot posted garbage. It's what they're mostly used to, and the bots will just scrape other platforms for the newest meme or whatever.
It'll mean the death of quality content on the platform most likely, but not the death of the platform itself. A web 3.0 Kafka story.
Why does the fun part of the internet always turn into Kafka's Castle? Apparently there is money in endless bureaucracy and being as opaque as possible.
I saw this article somewhere last week when the API arguments at reddit started to bubble : https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
It's a nice explanation on how social media companies/platforms evolve from providing their users what they want to "trap" users (by becoming the popular source for desired content in their demographic or whatever) , then provide content creators what they want (deals/access to user attention, promotion) to trap them, then the same with advertisers (want data, access to user attention especially via trusted creators) , and finally investors for an IPO cash out.
Of course once a given group has served their purpose (to lure the next), the company alters policies and procedures to maximize profit and basically says "fuck you" to the previous group.
I've been back a few times. It's basically the same except a few subs I used to visit are shut down or inactive.
I don't fool myself into believing Reddit is about to collapse or that a boycott of a few thousand will topple a website with literally millions of users. But I still feel guilty or something about going there.
I actually think that the stuff in this article is less contemptible than the things he has been saying earlier. If I were to sum up:
He did still disparage Christian Selig and the other devs, and clearly doesn't recognize moderators as having value.
This is a lot more honest than the AMA. I wish it was different, and I think he's not a good person, but I appreciate that there is more honesty in this than in past statements and interactions.
I don't know, I feel like these comments from Huffman are fairly insidious.
This is, as respectful as I can possibly be, absolute horseshit. Reddit is doing exactly what Twitter did by making a prohibitively expensive API that is intended to eliminate alternative clients. (EDIT1: I do want to add context from the full interview that came out after my initial comment that he's referring here to fully closed platforms like Facebook, I inferred he was referring to Twitter) Plus, this whole guise of "the ball's in their court, they just don't want to engage" is so exhausting. This is a pissing-on-my-leg-and-saying-it's-raining sort of response. He's made it abundantly clear that he is the one who isn't wanting to play ball or compromise.
To your highlight of "he didn't know the extend of third-party app API use," I just can't even almost believe that. He's the founder and CEO of a company whose platform has enabled third party integration for around a decade and a half. If he's claiming this is some sort of shock, he's either an idiot or assuming we are. Plus, Christian Selig (who's been raked over the coals for an "inefficient" client) claims Apollo uses not even ten percent of the API limits Reddit itself imposed—and I'm inclined to believe him. There's no way Huffman is being genuine about any of this.
Your other highlight of lost revenue is, again, complete nonsense on his part. He's acting like these folks who develop and maintain these apps full time don't deserve any sort of compensation for their work, which is ridiculous. It's not like these indie devs are grifters. It’s my take on the matter that Reddit is totally within their right to charge for API access. However, there is no way in hell that they're pricing it in good faith.
I feel like the longer these talking points get regurgitated by Reddit, the more people will become numb to the fact that none of it is acceptable.
—-
(EDIT2: reworded a sentence to be more inclusive of alternate views on API pricing)
Why is this just assumed? As has been noted ad nauseum, it's the users who create the content. It's users who develop the app specifically for other users to create that content. This is the agreement that the userbase has had with Reddit since the beginning. You provide the servers and simple code to host the community, we generate the content that brings people to the site and puts eyeballs on your advertising.
Spez then just pulls a straight Darth Vader and says he's altering the deal, and that we should pray he doesn't alter it further.
I really wish fewer people would talk like it's unquestionable that a company should always seek maximum monetary profit at any expense. There are other kinds of profit that should be on a company's radar, in this case, the ability of people to form and maintain communities without monetary gates.
I actually agree, charging for API access for commercial purposes isn't a problem, if the prices were reasonable any developer could easily pay for the costs and still be making plenty of money to fund themselves. The cost of using the API could cover reddit's server costs for displaying that content and everyone wins.
Unfortunately reddit has decided that isn't the path they want to take, they want to squeeze the 3rd party developers out by charging outrageous prices for their API access.
Okay, while I definitely support the spirit of your comment, I feel like I have to play devil's advocate a little here.
Yes, and the eyeballs actually seeing those ads are what pays for the infrastructure costs. It isn't exactly inexpensive to operate one of the largest social platforms on the internet. It's also not inaccurate for Reddit to argue that they spend significantly more for users who access Reddit via the API—app/vanilla Reddit users subsidize the cost of Reddit's service with their attention in addition to the value of their content. It's not completely out of the question for Reddit to charge here.
As much as I would love a world with Good Corporate Citizens™, that's just super unrealistic. That is inherently opposed to the way capitalism works, unfortunately.
Remember, we're on the same team here, but I have to concede that it isn't out of the question for Reddit to charge. It's what they're charging and how they've conducted themselves throughout this ordeal that's so upsetting—at least to me.
As you say, it's not completely out of the question for Reddit to charge for API access, but it's not a prospect that can't be questioned either. It seems to me that the element of negotiation is notably absent.
I respectfully disagree that it's a given that capitalism will always just seek monetary profit and always only monetary profit. I think that's true when capitalism is completely unmoderated, as is increasingly the case. Government regulation is one way to moderate corporate action – an apparently too easily corrupted way – but another rein on corporate action is labor organization. Americans in particular cannot seem to wrap our heads around why labor organization is so important, how it can be a vital check on corporate interests holding too much power.
Which brings us back to the current subject. I haven't seen anyone in these threads framing this as what I believe it actually is: a labor dispute. This is a strike, not just a protest. Reddit has completely forgotten that their users aren't just a captive audience, but actually do necessary work to keep the site running. As in all labor disputes, management believes they hold all the power and that workers – who in this case mostly don't even themselves realize that they are workers – just have to suck it up and tolerate whatever their betters decide for them. That's also why Reddit Inc is threatening to bring in scabs, in this case friendly moderators.
I'm actually surprised there's been no involvement by established unions. I haven't even seen a statement from a union, whether of support or otherwise. Maybe that should change.
Although we may not agree with one another fully on this particular facet of the debacle, this is an interesting framing of the issue I hadn’t previously considered. Thanks for taking the time to write this up and expand my understanding of people’s opinions a little further—I hadn’t realized there were folks out there making the argument that any API pricing is counterintuitive to Reddit’s culture. We’re aligned in a few places here and misaligned in others, but I’m not here to challenge every person’s take on everything. So instead, I’ll leave it at thank you for teaching me something new.
I apologize if the language of my earlier comment suggested in anyway that your views were unwelcome from the conversation—that certainly wasn’t my intent and you’ve definitely added value to this comment. I’ve tweaked my wording slightly to hopefully correct that.
Lol You're good. I didn't take it as confrontational at all. We're allowed to disagree on points, as long as we keep it a conversation rather than a struggle to shout each other down. That's how discussion works, remember? ;)
No pressure, but would you be OK with it if I made a screenshot of this to circulate on r/ModCoord and maybe Imgur? With or without your username attached?
Of course, I'd prefer it if you turned this into a post on r/ModCoord yourself and invite you to do so.
Go buck wild. That's probably one of the few subs I'd be okay with my content being posted to. You can leave my username intact if you want. It's the same as my primary on Reddit.
Also, I prefer my honorifics to be "The Most Esteemed Reverend Promonk, Esq."
Noted! Sadly, r/ModCoord has restricted who can post there. Hadn't noticed that before. Sent a message to the mods linking to your post, asking them to post it if it struck a chord with them, too. And now we wait...
I think a lot of established unions are in a similar boat to mods - they also don't realize that it's labor, so the idea that this is a strike of volunteer labor hasn't hit anyone. It didn't hit ME until I read this comment, but you're on point. Reddit has benefitted a ton from free mod labor and now spez has the gall to call them "landed gentry" when they protest a decision that impacts them.
Anyway I'd give this comment an "Exemplary" if mine weren't currently on cooldown, I really like you framing it that way.
It's starting to dawn on people.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14bbznz/reddit_made_the_mistake_of_ignoring_its_core_users/joez28x/
Over time, the likelihood of this happening to any for profit entity approaches 100%. It's less a question of if will happen, more a question of how long other forces can hold it at bay. Eventually any group company government church or institution exists for only one reason - predatory self-sustenance. Tribalism's final form is very, very ugly.
I think the solution is to set a kill-by date on everything when it's created. There's no value in an immortal institution, and the 'reboot' phase is exceptionally fun and exiting every time. So, let's make that the way forward and stop trying to keep institutions alive past their sell-by dates. The shadows had it right - it is the cycle, embrace it. Learn to dance with entropy.
I'm with you on the union angle, though. Perhaps they should get involved, that's a total left-field development and it'd change the conversation considerably. Might even be productive!
I agree that it's not realistic to expect traditionally structured corporations to behave in any way other than maximizing profits. But there do exist alternative structures where the corporate fiduciary is explicitly not exclusively profit driven, like a Perpetual Purpose Trust. Patagonia is an example of this, where under their corporate restructuring:
I agree in principle, but a company the size of Reddit just cannot subsidize itself with donations. In our economic reality, you need money to survive whether you're a person or a corporation.
Charging an API fee is in theory a way to monetize that forgoes advertisement. I think that this is the key; if charging for an API is done to alleviate other forms of profit, it's good, but if they just start doing it out of the blue, on top of ads, in a crazy marked-up rate, it's a little ridiculous.
But the thing is, it’s reddits choice to hire so many people to do all the silly NFTs and everything else that’s distracting them from the core of what people use the platform for.
Like adding image and video hosting was their choice that they made which invariably massively increased costs and legal risk
No doubt about it, they brought themselves into this situation. My point was that because they've bloated the site so much, pricing the API is necessary for them as they just cannot sustain their bad business decisions. I think that, in theory, a website that charges for its API and nothing else (no ads, etc) is a valid marketing strategy that circumvents throwing ads in your users' face. The way the comment I replied to was worded made it seem like the very concept of pricing an API is bad when the reality is dependent on how it's implemented and how many other forms of profit exist in the company, at least for me if I'm judging a corporation's "financial morality".
In fact, Reddit was situated in a place where if they charged a realistic rate for their API (and stopped wasting money on dumb shit) they could have cut back on their other desperate attempts at clawing for money and maybe could make the user experience more bearable. But that would require the CEO to care for more than commas in his bank.
I think at this point everyone has to realize how badly Reddit has been managed financially since ~2017. It's abundantly clear in hindsight:
Much of that list is such a waste of the limited resources they had. Steve basically chased every single tech bro invention for the last few years thinking it would make Reddit bigger. And now while he's rightfully got AI on the mind, I seriously doubt it will be profitable. Reddit is already open to scraping without the API and I don't think these LLM providers are going to pay his prices for that content.
I wasn't suggesting that Reddit keep itself afloat with donations (although I don't think it's as impossible as you seem to believe; Wikipedia is still a thing, after all). I also can envision an API pricing scheme that serves the purposes of both Reddit as a corporation and Reddit as a community enterprise.
My argument is that corporations don't exist in a vacuum, and that the fixation on maximizing monetary profit over all other considerations is not only short-sighted and ultimately destructive, it's not the only paradigm by which for-profit enterprise can run.
There was a time when GE, then one of the largest corporations in the world, actually boasted that shareholder return was fourth in their list of priorities after technological advancement, employee well-being, and meeting and exceeding their tax obligations. It was a point of pride in their corporate culture.
Henry Ford, certainly no beacon of enlightenment, realized that accepting what appeared to be a loss of profit by paying his workers a little more would actually advance his company's viability by expanding its customer base. He had many faults, but believing that ledger balances told the whole story of corporate gains was not among them.
Somewhere along the line the word "profit" became synonymous with "monetary gain." I think that's a delusion, and an especially pernicious one at that.
I love that the answer is “see what the community wants” when it comes to moderators continuing to protest, but not when it comes to decisions made by Reddit the company.
His 'these moderators aren't making democractic decisions, it's more like landed gentry deciding for the users' comment (paraphrased) is just absurd. I can't imagine saying these things with a straight face.
Rules for thee, not for me. That's the American way.
I posted that article as a top level comment here as well a few minutes ago. He's all over the place in what he's saying, but I stand by what I said - the things he said in that specific interview that is linked above, he is less contemptible... until you realize that he's just spinning.
I was surprised to briefly not think that he was pond scum, but he brought it back pretty fast!
Oh, no apology necessary! Just getting whiplash from reading spez' stances on things.
Removing from the table this is only a problem when it isn't serving the best interests of Reddit, how are they planning on doing a vote for who's moderating a sub that's already private? Unless the game plan is to force the subreddit public in the interest "of the community," have a "vote" on the status of the subreddit with a captive audience, then kick the mods, seems like a lot more work just as much of power play as taking over and installing your own guy who literally has the Mandate of Admin, which throws a wrench into this whole democracy thing to begin with.
I would suspect they won't. They'll just replace the mods, reopen it and say 'we're back!' and hope no one realizes.
If you believe that I have a bridge to sell
Absolutely!
...by adding their ads into the API they provide third party apps in the first place!
The complete lack of acknowledgement that this is entirely due to reddit's own decision making is infuriating.
Reddit decided not to monetize third party apps through their ads, but somehow third party apps are to blame! And reddit is definitely not responsible for letting solo developers build better apps than they're providing!
I recommend avoiding discussions based on calling someone gullible.
Regardless, I find it easy to believe both that the API was intended for mod use, because I remember when the API was released... originally to moderators. It explicitly was built and created for moderator use. I was one of the people to whom the announcement was made, and I was one of the people to use the API before anyone else. I also believe that he didn't know the extent of third-party app API use, because he's the CEO and unless someone points it out to him, he's not likely to know something like that. For a source on this, I am a high level executive in a tech company, and I recently had someone tell me about the API use of one of our services being much higher than I knew about. It's super believable and it's totally bizarre to me that either of these would be a sticky issue for someone, since it seems obvious to me that what happened was something like this: someone said something in a meeting that spez was in about how third party apps a) use the API a lot and b) have x% of users, and spez said "shut that down right away".
With regards to your next point, they definitely should not be adding ads to the API, because the API is intended for moderators / people who want to improve the site. It always has been, and it is actually a loophole that third party app developers are using it.
In the article that is linked, the entire reason that I find what spez said in the verge interview (and just that interview, and not others) is less reprehensible than the other interviews, is because it acknowledges the reasons why things are the way they are, and he even acknowledges his role, albeit not entirely:
Obviously after that interview, he said things that seem like contradictions, but in this one specific interview you actually get the root causes:
That is way better and more truthful messaging than any of the previous stuff, especially the AMA.
What exactly about reddit — the site that agrees they told Christian there would be no API changes in 2023, btw — leads you to believe their claims? Especially when spez went on to do and say otherwise on the very same day?
You seem to be simply accepting their narrative instead of assessing it critically.
Who cares what the original intent was?
Monetizing your API by ensuring your ads are passed through is a way better decision than burning down your moderator and power user communities.
What claims do you think that I am believing that I should not be?
Also, again, refrain from telling me I'm not being critical. I'm not attacking your basic ability to reason. I have reached a different conclusion from you, but I am not a gullible idiot who cannot think. I understand that you're new here, but that's not what we do on Tildes. If you think I am incorrect, then talk about the things that I am writing, do not talk about how you perceive my intelligence or gullibility.
And then also proceed to not do that in every conversation you have online.
I don't think this response is warranted given that I simply said:
Your extraordinarily condescending response seems far more rude than my suggestion that you were uncritically accepting of a PR exercise. But I don't think attempting to continue that conversation would be productive anyway.
The oddest part is the CEO comes off as clueless, which is crazy strange, since he has been there for 18 years. If anyone should know their audience you would think it would be this guy.
Through the interview, my whole thought was just how much like Trump’s interviews go for Huffman. Unhinged, repeating himself over and over while saying nothing. The only difference is there were other people in the interview to gang up on the interviewer.
And you know the other people were there to keep spez from shooting the IPO in the foot yet again.
The biggest flaw of the interview was accepting the false dichotomy that what must exist is either the current API which reddit decided shouldn't display their ads or an exhorbitant pricing scheme. "Why don't you simply update your API so third party apps show your ads?" was a pretty obvious question.
The interview was otherwise a solid attempt at answers, but he struggled with spez constantly pivoting to years of justifications for the sudden policy change. He needed to be called out and pinned down for a rationale and a timeline, particularly given reddit's communication to Christian that there would be no API changes in 2023.
Apologies ahead of time for the short comment.
I have no clue how that interviewer kept themselves from punching everyone in the room in their stupid faces by the end. Everything coming out of the reddit employees' orifices was bullshit.
Yeah, it’s another terrible public relations showing by him.
Since yesterday the RIF developer, who Huffman claims had no contact or intention of working with Reddit, has produced email history of interactions.
There’s also the whole narrative about how apps were never supposed to be in the platform while at the same time Huffman personally credits himself, while CEO, as backing third party app support since 2015 (almost a decade). Surely even he can see how contradictory he is being.
Can you link to those comms between RiF and Reddit? RiF is what kept me on the platform as they destroyed the official version with bloat and ADHD autoplay irritations. I've been hearing a lot about Apollo but RiF is always an aftermention.
The article kinda got overshadowed by the threats Huffman made against moderators who were keeping their subs closed, but here's the link:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763661/reddit-rif-is-fun-developer-ceo-steve-huffman
That is interesting. I'd love to see the full correspondence.
Honestly, the most informative article for me was this one:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
The fact that spez wants Reddit to be more like Twitter under Musk says all we really need to know. It explains the API changes, the layoffs, the anti-user policies, the lack of care for the community, everything. I’m not at all surprised they have been talking to each other.
I thought this was all for AI training for the few big players that can afford it? Microsoft, Google, amazon, etc.
For some reason, just like "driverless cars", AI is not regulated at all, or even has a proper definition of what it is.
What it is however is a machine, trained to get the most tickets out of the ball machine.
I think it's hilarious he keeps bringing up these "other" apps he's still in talks with, but never elaborates further, and given modern journalists forgot what a follow-up question is, it's never challenged. I imagine if challenged either:
Well that promise lasted even shorter than his usual bull:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544
Oh please let him do this. It'll turn reddit instantly into mods politicking all the time. Reddit will become the house/senate floor. It's a hilariously bad idea and I cannot wait!
This is imo the biggest threat in the entire interview - open your subs up, or we'll make you a target for the users.
Admins removing mods is not something I can argue against (other than losing goodwill), the site is ultimately owned by reddit after all. Opening it up to a popularity vote would get very ugly very fast and I would bet any amount you name that the first targets will be LGBT mods, especially anyone known to be trans.
Even worse, it'll let trolls completely change a subreddit if they want to and the system doesn't sufficiently protect against outside "candidates" or "voters" being able to influence a vote. I could see someone organizing a campaign to take control of a trans subreddit and change it to spread anti-trans rhetoric, for instance, with the justification being along the lines of "showing both sides of the debate" or something like that.
I might be being overly optimistic here, but I don't think any admins in charge of this process would be that dumb or malicious. It would probably fall on community admins like redtaboo, sodypop, chtorrr, etc. who know the site and would at least add active community members. They have tools to identify users who are active and do things like report content in a helpful way.
I thought redtaboo and chtorrr left years ago
They still have an admin [A] on their user pages with recent admin-distinguished comments. I thought they had left too.
I think there's a simple hack here.
When you run for a mod role, simply promise a green badge to every user. You will win the vote. Then they either make you (and you make everyone else) a mod, or they walk back that system, or they assign mods by fiat. None of those outcomes is good for them.
You're underestimating how vitriolic it can get.
Edit: I'm not saying that to be flippant or dismissive, but I do know people who've been doxxed, threatened, had people try to get them fired or kicked out of school, had their home address posted, their kids threatened, and other nasty stuff, all for the horrible crime of removing/approving the wrong post or comment. An internet mob is a very ugly thing.
Vote for me for mod and I'll start allowing furry porn!
Vote for me for mod and I'll bring in Blackjack and Hookahs!
Drama?! Reddit is 40% drama!
40% minimal; may contain traces of popcorn; ask your doctor if Reddit is right for you
I'm going to miss /r/subredditdrama at the very least. I don't want to watch trashy TV shows for people having ridiculous fights with each other.
I'm going through withdrawal as well but...you know, today I went outside for a stroll, with some peanuts in a container. A tiny squirrel came up and I fed her some, and then another squirrel came by and tried to get in on that, and they chased and there was some fighting, and then the original squirrel came back to my hand and ate while she shouted at the other squirrel :)
So maybe we're just using that to fill another need that more drama won't actually fill.
Is that need a squirrel fighting league? I think that might work.
If you bring the hookahs, I'll bring the shisha. ;)
Agreed. It's such a laughably bad idea.
Such a system would be open to abuse. Moddy McModface would rule Reddit.
When I read this I thought ," He's pretending to care about mods now?" Mods are famously untouchable. I've seen users complain all the time about power mad mods, absent mods, being abused by mods, and in the whole spectrum of complaints nothing was ever done.
It took a protest almost the size of this to get a mod removed from r/teens that had been using the sub to supposedly groom victims.
Now an admin cares? Pshaaa. Nah.
All I can hear is his bad parenting tactics taken from the shame book.
He has so few actual coping tools and he's worn them all out .
This keeps coming to mind:
Kent M Keith poem , The Paradoxical Commandments
"The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway."
It would be the death of Reddit, which is why I hope they do it and also why they won't.
It's interesting that he has gone from 'it's fine, we will wait it out, there is no revenue impact' to 'we are reopening with or without mods'.
I searched for days to find specific measurable data for the actual impact beyond 'mods closing' and this is what I found that comes closest: https://digiday.com/marketing/reddits-recent-blackout-could-be-a-real-problem-for-advertisers/
Advertisers are NOT liking the blackout and are pulling out. Probably no surprise in the fact few days I keep seeing 'advertise on Reddit' ads everywhere on social.
They are scrambling to restore it so they can get their advertisers back, and they know the longer it goes on the harder it will be to recover them.
That's why he is saying one thing to users and doing another, probably just trying out to see if the userbase will believe the lies he tells now the protestere are laying low.
My company advertises sporadically on reddit, and we were planning to run another campaign this summer. Now our discussion has gone from "when should we run our next campaign, and how much should we budget for it?" to "should we continue advertising on reddit at all with the recent instability?" If our little company is having this discussion, you know larger ad partners are too.
I'm inclined to agree that the protest has been something they could weather for a few days, but now that it continues, it seems to do some damage, if Huffman's hissy fits are anything to go by. Things also seems to escalate really fast. From "we're not touching people's subs" to "hey, I'm reddit-admin, open the hell up or else we might just get some more willing mods." in less than a day. This really looks like they're pushing hard to get this to stop. Which is surprising for me, I expected them to keep pretending it wasn't really all that bad.
Hilarious that it took him 15 years to propose this idea, when the cogs started being a bit squeaky instead of just turning in his money machine.
Landed Gentry.
So in his analogy is he the King, and the users the sharecroppers?
All the way back from 2006:
and
https://www.roughtype.com/?p=634
He conveniently left his own position out, which is much closer to the landed gentry than any mod is really. At best the mods are the people who keep the tenants in order so the king doesn't have to come down from his lofty mansion to deal with the riff-raff.
spez saw the success of r/RepublicOfReddit and has spent the last decade carefully planning how to implement it sitewide
Guy with all the land tries to villanize folk with some land to those with no land.
If we're landed gentry, he's the emperor throwing a hissy fit because we don't just suck it up like we're supposed to.
We’re pointing out a lack of clothes and he is PISSED.
So, are we talking Joffery or Prince John from Disney's Robin Hood?
This guy is the worst
Seems the best form of protest would be for moderators to reopen and actively ruin their subreddits.
Our team at /r/videos is considering this
If /r/listentothis is going to burn reddit down I will go back there and post so much fire content their servers explode. I'd bet every single retired member of the mod team since day one would show up for that. Time to explore that most terrifying genre of music... the darkest metal there is.
I even have a proper march for the protest. Let's get /r/highqualitygifs and /r/freefolk in on this and make it a party. May as well have some fun with it.
You know... making all of the users mods over there for the asking might also lead to some maximum hilarity. That's what we should have done instead of going 'default' with the bots, but hindsight is 20/20. I wonder how many mods it takes to crash a subreddit?
Every post redirects to Machine Metal Music
Burning it all down to the ground sounds awesome, I'll bring my deathcore toolbox with me. And the obligatory CBat https://youtu.be/KAwyWkksXuo which seems to be a very matching track for this whole ordeal.
Let the Albert Ayler marathon begin.
Holy fucking hell Batman, My ears! I think you found Pharoah Sanders' spiritual opposite on the free jazz spectrum. Well done. We could do Paper Chase or Listener or Pryapisme or Anal Cunt or Sir Millard Mulch or perhaps Aphex Twin and just some good ole Brute Force... then perhaps Half Man Half Biscuit or Tally Hall or 2NU. But only after I sticky Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq and Mister B. So many options, so little time. Shit, I forgot Kimmo. Gotta have Kimmo.
The backup of the /r/listentothis and /r/listentous track archive is actually in my head, you know. I just can't access it all at once. Something has to remind me of it. :P
I think if you were any more passionate about this topic then your comment would be dangerously close to the LD50 for wholesome posts. Be careful, eh? :p
(…does the linear no-threshold model apply to good vibes?)
My cat was relaxed against my thigh when I played this and she lifted her head and twisted her ears like "wtf is she playing at?!?ugh"
There needs to be a way for this to be communicated to the masses. It'll combine the protestors, memelords, anarchists...
How long would the subreddit last if you guys started adding thousands of moderators? I mean, Reddit can't claim no one is moderating democratically if everyone is a moderator.
Haha this is an interesting idea... Unfortunately Reddit has tools in place to stop bad faith actors like that, still it's worth considering as a last resort.
It's kinda sweet that you are still holding out hope for a good resolution. Let's say they actually did reverse course - would you believe them? Or would you expect this to start up again in six months or two years?
It is time for the last resort. I can't even put into words how much better you are going to feel after not looking at reddit for an entire month. You'll still have your community - I guarantee you that people will follow you to whatever new homes may come. Swapping eternal september for spring is invigorating. Tildes has the highest barrier to entry to that process that there is and I'm spotting old friends by musical taste in ~music all the time here. If we can do it, so can all of the other sites and communities.
People are ready to leave reddit. You'd just never notice that because half the comments are bot farms with an agenda, and the other half are teenagers flinging poo from mobile apps instead of doing their homework. You won't miss it, I promise. Leave it now and let reddit do you the favor of holding on to the shitposters - you'll bring the better half of your community with you and leave them with the worst. ;)
I think people have this 'omg we need to have the most people and reach the MOST people evar' mentality and don't consciously realize it. That's the only reason reddit remains 'sticky' - but do you really reach everyone? No. You get a fraction of a fraction of users even when you top /r/all and those users are less pleasant and intelligent every day. It's simply not worth it. Let that mirage go.
I've got an 11 year account that needs burning now, so whatever is happening just let me know.
I deleted all my content on what turned out to be my 12th cake day. The more this goes on, the better I feel about it.
Do what /r/pics did. Have a vote, open the subreddit fully, or only allow videos of Steve Colbert
I'm interested to see if its enough to flummox the enforcers that Reddit is sicing on the mod teams currently, I kinda doubt it but who knows.
From what I can tell the /r/pics protest is going well so far. I'm seeing quite a few people upset about it being all over /r/all.
Other big subs doing the same thing probably would cause action to be taken if it causes too much traffic drop.
Be the change!
i have multiple years on reddit of writing a several page technical faq/document/analysis/teardown 3-4x per month plus well over 100 chain of posts per month helping people debug their vr gear: everything from ”is it plugged in” to ”send it to me i need to see this on my oscilloscope”.
to brag a bit:
it's crazy how much actual text (as in, # of keys hit) i have in my 16-year old account + my 10+ year old alts.
i'm working out how and where to make the subreddits i posted in searchable as static content because it represents a large knowledge base for this set of products. possibly the largest publically searchable for the valve index and related gear.
i'm really pissed at reddit and /u/spez right now, and wish nntp/usenet would have grown instead of dying and the ashes and usenetizens becoming reddit eventually.
grrr.
powerdeletesuite will give you the option to download all your content in a csv(I think?). r/powerdeletesuite
I used it very recently. It does. I will say tho, I had a look at the csv file, and it has one column per word. Of all comments and posts. It may be used to maybe import data or keep a backup but it's not easy to read. If it's posts you need the text of, I would recommend copying all text and pasting it into Word, prior to taking it off Reddit. That'll be a lot easier to use later on.
Maybe this will yield you a better format?
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
My account is deleted and data stripped off now, I deleted it after making the backup. But that's okay! I posted a lot of comments but the only impactful post I made on reddit was a nice Minecraft build I have saved as an image on my pc. The rest was all opinions and questions for advice so nothing the world will sorely miss, unlike Krista's stuff above.
thank you!
i will check it out as a tool for killing my content and getting a backup csv.
a week ago i get reddit to send me a zip of csv files of all 16 yeas of mostly my writing as i didn't post many links.
it'll be good to have both methods of backup because i trust reddit about as far as i an [pick an appropriate metaphor]
Reddit has a GDPR tool to request all your data.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043048352-How-do-I-request-a-copy-of-my-Reddit-data-and-information-
I think a sub set to restricted could do that - all old posts searchable and findable, but nobody else can post anything new.
problem would be other users erasing their posts would kill context as well. plus it's not my subreddit :(
That really sucks. It sounds like the best option would be to save those posts and host them elsewhere, but you likely would struggle to get the same SEO visibility. There isn't much to control about Reddit currently
You can request all of your data by following this link:
https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
and doing a GDPR request. Technically, they only have to abide if you are located in an EEA member state, but that's basically impossible for them to check.
You can try to request it through Reddit, but good luck with it. I made that request a week ago and they never responded. Ended up backing up and deleting my content myself with scripts.
They legally have 30 days to reply to your request, I only did it today, so I'll see how it plays out. If they don't comply, I'm going to see what I can do about it. I'm from Germany, so I do have the legal right to receive this information, and I know that it's fairly easy to report companies that are in violation of GDPR to the responsible authorities.
I can only hope that this is the same OBLIVIATER from my all-time favorite subreddit, r/videos.
I cannot begin to describe how r/videos has molded my life through the years. Countless hobbies, passions, fandoms of mine began by stumbling upon a channel I found on r/videos. It very well may have saved my life at some points.
All the more power to you my friend. I hope that moderators of very popular subs continue the fight during this time, the beginning of the end of Reddit.
After only 48 hours, I was recently outvoted to take my small city's sub, r/Lexington public. I refuse to feed the beast Reddit will inevitably become, because I can't stand to help ruin something I hold so dear. Furthermore, I stand with subs like r/videos in solidarity by vowing to never use Reddit, unless in an official mod capacity.
The very same
In the older introduction threads you can see a lot of other mods have/had accounts here, too
So I have no clue how moderating Reddit works, but could the mods potentially in retaliation threaten to delete the subs or something to that degree?
There's only one thing they can do, and it's not a checkmate, more of a fire on the way out the door.
The options in bold, they have no defense for. That's where the pressure points lie. The rest they can cope with, but not those options, not if lots of subs and users go that route. The users can get in on those last two anytime they want as well. Plenty will, especially when the apps die. If that happened to several thousand subs, it will take reddit a lot of time to put it back together. It will also leave the site's front page open to less savory vultures that hang around the site. That said, reddit will put it all back together eventually even if this is done.
The real issue is, if all the mods nope out, someone still has to do the mod work, and reddit hasn't got that kind of budget. So that means they draft everyone they can find who will 'take over' the communities and moderate them. It won't work out well for them, because the powertripping types will be the ones stepping forward so they can stroke their ego with those green tags. Those new mods will antagonize the users and probably cause more problems than they solve.
That's the best they could do, I think. I'd say it was a dick move, but then so was not paying all these people for their work, and not working with them to steward their communities, and so was selling them all out for a quick buck. Reddit can be profitable the instant they drop half their marketing team, let's not pretend this was necessary.
I'm just going to sit here and munch on the popcorn, welcome the new folks in, and fiddle while it all burns. It's been a long time coming, and it sucks, but we all love a good fire, don't we?
Warning to all reddit users: If there is community content out there that you want to save, you'd best get it backed up and archived as soon as possible. Let's not lose the gold while the city gets sacked, eh?
Edit: The more I think about this, the more I get the idea that making everyone a mod over there will be maximum pain. I bet that system breaks under the load and takes the site down, it'll never have been that busy. Redditcorp(se) can't have prepared for this because in their darkest dreams they'd never imagine it. Plus, when reddit revokes those privs someday, it'll piss off every user who had them. It'll give the users a chance to see how shit the mod tools are, that will be hilarious.
Yep. Mod everyone everywhere. Spez wants us to vote on mods? Fine by me. Make me a mod and I'll hand out a green badge to every user. ;) The modpocalypse is upon us. Let's see some democracy in action. Then GDPR them just to cost them money, even if you don't delete your content. You do want your content and all your comments in a nice zip file, yes? They have to give it to you if you ask them or the EU will fine them a couple billion - a fantastic thing to happen right before the IPO, no?
Holy shit balls, full scorched earth protocol. Lay waste to the fields then salt the soil. That might just break the front page of the internet.
Pass some of that popcorn, next act is about to begin.
If anyone plans to do this, here's the items that will actually get you in trouble with reddit:
Basically, you need to keep anything illegal off the site, and make sure NSFW posts are flagged. Other than that, there's nothing to stop you from letting the sub run wild.
I'd be so tempted to sticky all of that stuff. Let's shine a light on the best of reddit for them!
A protest is not about being nice, and it's not about being removed - assume you will be removed, and set free of dozens of hours of thankless work forever in the process. A protest is about making reddit bleed money, users, and especially about making them lose their minds over the vile content that's so common on that site today. That's why they have such a strong reaction to this content - it hurts them the most. Advertisers aren't interested in reddit's reasons or excuses. All they care about is that their ads show up however briefly alongside vile content. Make that happen on a semi-regular basis for even a week and they will drop reddit. Take some screenshots and send them to the advertisers if you want to get really mean. Create some trojan mod accounts, log in on your bot accounts, get creative, make them ban you five times just to get rid of you once! Have fun with it.
heck, just this step would cause a huge strain on reddit. processing hundreds of GDPR requests would clog their infrastructure for a few weeks. Because to be honest I doubt they have that process properly automated.
I mean its Reddit, they won't have it even automated. I just imagined its just a monkey at a computer doing it.
Is there a way to do that if you have already deleted your account? Will it matter if the request comes from someone in the US?
If you request the data before the account is deleted, it doesn't matter where you are in the world. Reddit's data request system asks about GDPR/California's data privacy laws IIRC, but it doesn't require that they apply -- you can just put.
I don't know about after deleting an account though, since it'll be harder to prove that you own the account. It might still be possible, but you'd probably have to go through some support system instead of the normal process. (If you're in the EU, then it might be worth checking what GDPR says about deleted accounts.)
They will, but at a great cost.
Advertisers are already starting to leave, based solely on the blackout. It makes them feel Reddit isn't a steady or a safe place to reach their audience. And that happened in just this week: https://digiday.com/marketing/reddits-recent-blackout-could-be-a-real-problem-for-advertisers/
If Reddit descends into the kind of chaos you described, with free NSFW and bot posts in previously safe and kid friendly subs, that is a nightmare for advertisers. If your products is targeted for teens, and suddenly r/teens is showing sex content and spamming, you know your ad won't do well.
Reddit can probably recover from that, but it won't be quick, and they will suffer revenue loss due to losing a lot of advertisers. It will hurt Spez a LOT.
I figure the best possible way to leave reddit is to get the admins to ban you - not the mods, the admins. As if they've got time for that. :P
/r/listentothis bestofs are now archived here on Tildes. We'll get 'em in the ~music wiki and clean them up. Since nearly everyone involved making those is already here, I'm bringing them over. Now there is nothing left of value over there except a few dozen pages of rules no one has ever read. :)
/r/music is dead. Long live ~music.
Thank you (and whoever else may be involved, if any) for archiving all that :) bookmarked
that link to the best of holy cow, def bookmarked and gonna have to spend some time in there
But wait, there's more from this year! Pick a mixtape, I promise epicness. Let the covers be your guide.
I got a 3 hr drive to go to a campsite tomorrow, perfect timing
OffTopic: in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction, Oryx And Crake (2003), where technology corporations dominate the lives of everyone, there is something called "Corporate Security Corporation", which is basically police hired by the corps to ruthlessly dictate the lives of workers and their families, and violently squash any potential sabotage or dissent. Their short name is CorpSeCorp.
Margaret Atwood and William Gibson have been disturbingly prescient in their writing for many many years.
Why wouldn't the Reddit admins just roll all that back, though? Setting the subreddits to private has made right now the perfect time for the admins to take a snapshot of the subreddit, ready to rollback if the mods do any damage on the way out.
Because they haven't got a roll back button. It's largely duct tape and chicken wire over there, tons of legacy bad design. Their backend is just as shitty as our front end and our mod tools. The place was not built by good engineers. There are some things they can roll back, but a lot of it requires some manual work on their part. They will eventually clean it up, but it won't be fast and it won't be pretty. Also, they work business hours and are limited in number. Reddit's users don't, and aren't. ;)
The tildes code is FWIW not that bad.
Deimos had many examples of how not to do things while working on reddit. By our there I meant 'our mod tools on reddit' are as bad as the admin tools on reddit. Tildes code is a formula one racer compared to that reddit trash.
Ahh yes I see, that makes sense.
Yes, the Tildes codebase is excellent and matches Tildes philosophies exactly.
The admin tools are, frankly, shit. They're worse than what mods have to deal with.
I am so split between "reddit doesn't work on any of this because they're happy with their ad / use time metrics and would rather code NFTs into the site" and "Reddit works on NFTs because they're so bad at things that they couldn't fix any of the issues if they tried"
Probably a healthy mix. Oh boy.
Not really. The mods are strictly less powerful than the admins, and certainly the developers. No site does true deletes for anything other than GDPR, so anything mods do can be undone. And if they're only in "threatening" mode, they can have those privileges stripped beforehand.
Best case scenario for them other than just compliance would be malicious compliance then, reopen but don't moderate and let literally everything bad get posted there. Shitty situation all around.
I mean that would also just get them removed and replaced.
That may well could happen on the biggest subs but I have doubts Reddit has the personnel to keep the whole thing afloat well enough to where a malicious compliance scenario didn't have a notably deleterious effect.
I don't think there's a lack of people who would be willing to take over the position (non-maliciously). If you look at general user sentiment, it's pretty anti-mod right now. If you go to any of the "we're back" threads, it's mostly vitriol and mockery towards the protesting mods. There's also alt subs already for all the major ones (e.g /r/nbatalk for /r/nba), and those have their own mods, and would probably be pretty happy to just takeover the main one.
I wonder how much the anti-mod sentiment is due to sample bias - if all the pro-blackout users have left the site for the duration of the blackout, then by definition nobody remaining on the site is supporting the mods.
I've seen a lot of anti-mod sentiment for a while before the protests. On some subreddits, some of the mods have definitely been less than stellar. I remember much drama regarding one of the "power mods" abusing their power. I particularly remember some big drama with the art subreddit banning a user accusing them of posting AI art (they weren't). I don't know how much of the sentiment is genuine grievances, and how much is general distaste for authority.
I have a sense the anti mod crowd doesn't realize how much modding actually takes, so we'll see what quality of modding they do.
I think it would be hilarious if mods publicly just anointed random complainers to mod and let them control all moderation, but didn't give them access to any tools or anything that reddit doesn't inherently give to mods. Make it a sticky post announcing a new mod that has promised to clean everything up. Then watch as the whole community shits on them when they inevitably fail.
I go back once in a while to check the response people have to the black out.
My theory is that all those who are in support of the blackout aren't around to participate as they too are protesting. So most of the people left are those who didn't support the blackout in the first place. And they're getting frustrated.
Perhaps, although if you look at usage numbers (https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/) the dip from the blackout is basically fully recovered now. So if it was the case, then it was a minority. Probably not the biggest concern from Reddit's POV.
Is there any chance that spun up bots to show more traffic? It's surprising to me they'd see no change in comments and posts.
There've been reports of a flood of chatGPT bots the past few days, literally thousands of them.
Edit: to clarify, I doubt it's reddit themselves, probably a spam ring that's testing out their new toys.
This isn't a new thing, though, so I'm guessing it's more due to karma farmers taking advantage of the chaos then reddit trying to create fake traffic/activity.
Yeah I should clarify my comment, i don't mean to imply it's reddit behind it, just that there's been reports of an unusually large number of bots recently, which would explain a spike in activity.
I do find the actual graph to be a bit suspicious. Why is there a sharp drop that then immediately recovers but then a few days later another such sharp dip.
If it was traffic recovering normally, I'd expect it to climb up a bit more gradually. But it's like they saw traffic go off a cliff, turned on the bots and then a few days later the bots were down for some reason.
I believe the dips were partial outages.
Hmm. That makes sense. Now. I have no theory for why people are turning against the blackouts.
Maybe they were only mentally prepared for two days, and not more than that?
Haven't been back and I do appreciate the report on the goings on. Tbh, I am not surprised at that. Disappointed, but not surprised. Short-sightedness seems more and more common. I figure my take there is more telling of my age than the actual state and direction of society, et. al.
I suppose in theory they could change the rules to be overly restrictive and automod the site out of existence.
It's technically already in the rules. Absentee mods is listed as one of the things that can get modship revoked (and actually does happen in normal operation - sub mods go MIA and someone asks the admins to take over).
That's not necessarily always the case, depending on what you mean by "true delete". E.g. From the Tildes Privacy Policy, everything users choose to delete here is "truly deleted" after 30 days. Retaining the information for at least that long is a requirement of Canadian law though, IIRC.
I think "no site" in this case would be the likes of FB, twitter etc. I'm assuming that's what he was picturing.
Some subreddits were vandalized by a rogue topmod in the past (context: there is a hierarcby, and each moderator have powers over other mods below them), who deleted the subreddit and the admins restored the subreddit and removed the topmod in place, making the mod below him/her the new topmod.
I went through that process when I saw a subreddit with an inactive mod. I asked if they wanted help to moderate the subreddit and automate some stuff. After a month without any reply, I requested to take over and I got access.
You're right, ultimately Reddit holds the key to the kingdom, but they'll definitely hurt their reputation if they remove too many mods in reaction to the blackout.
I appreciate you doing that! That sub has introduced me to a lot fun content.
There was also the password hack a few years ago that defaced a whole bunch of subs with T_D propaganda. That took a while to clean up.
You can't delete a sub, that functionality doesn't exist for anyone but admins.
Of course you know this... means war.
Those popcorn stocks are paying mad dividends now. Glad I invested early.
The interview with spez is only parroting these media talking points namely, with emphasis added:
They've clearly angling towards calling the long term shutdown of a popular subreddit a violation of the Moderator Code of Conduct, a document moderators should have already been up in arms about.
I just don't understand his complaint about Reddit being used to train LLMs "for free". Okay? Then go after them. How does this in any way justify going after the users who generate this content for you?
And if LLMs can't use the APIs to pull training data, they'll just scrape the site, exactly as they would any other site that does not offer an API. The load on Reddit's servers will actually be more pronounced with scraping than it would be through the API, so if their goal was to make money and reduce server load by charging LLM trainers, this would be a spectacular self-own.
They're not that stupid though. This was never about LLM training and always about killing third-party apps.
Saying that the third party apps add no extra value is demonstrably incorrect. They added many QOL features that Reddit simply refuses to incorporate into their own app which by and large was built off of the carcass of a very popular third party app after it was acquired.
Things like the ability to filter out keywords and specific subreddits from my feed was very important for my own personal mental health. Even going as far as being able to filter out country specific subs that have no relevance to me helped increase the amount of time I would spend browsing.
Reddit is making terrible terrible decisions that will ultimately end up affecting their business. It will end up affecting casual users in the long run and is one of the driving forces keeping me off the platform.
Their API rates are highway robbery. The decision was definitely made in order to kill third party apps to direct traffic to their own in order to gain more revenue from ads that they disguise as genuine topics or posts. That was a hell of a run on sentence.
You’re absolutely correct about API access being profitable for them under these current conditions. I assume they set them so high that on the off chance one of the third party devs would actually shell out it would be win/win for them. As it stands with them shuttering the doors for third party Reddit obviously feels nothing of value was lost.
I suspect people who go out of their way to find a third party app are more invested in Reddit than your average Joe who browses for 5 mins a day on the official app, and thus necessary to keep the latter returning. Maybe they have data to say otherwise and this will all turn out to be a lot of hot air, but I feel they do need to directly appeal to the third party app user base if there’s any chance of maintaining some goodwill.
No no, you don't understand, it isn't about value for the USER, it's about value to the SHAREHOLDERs.
What, you thought execs still cared about user experience in 2023?
This is entirely about their bottom line. CEOs and MBAs view any user that isn't 100% monetized as a leech, and that includes users of 3rd party apps. And they don't consider the contributions that 3rd party app users make to the community, because all they care about is the missing ad revenue, because they're only capable of comprehending the world in terms of dollars.
Which, from a business perspective, makes sense.... until you think literally any deeper than surface level and realize that Reddit's greatest asset is it's strong, self moderating, self stimulating community. And a large chunk of that community uses Old.reddit or 3rd party apps, both of which I imagine the execs don't like, because they want everyone to be on their new, shiny, TOTALLY BETTER app that just so happens to be showing you tons and tons more ads than the old design or the 3rd party apps. And because it's more profitable, to them, it IS a better app. But to the rest of us, the user experience is markedly worse, and they'll never understand why because they simply don't care.
Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? I used Apollo because I was sick of going to Popular and seeing really obvious rage-bait or viciously bigoted memes or videos of people being murdered. And in hindsight... I probably should have just deleted my account then, instead of waiting so long.
Ever since they introduced user-run subreddits, Reddit has been (primarily) a haven of little tin-pot dictators, and to see spez behaving in the same fashion is extremely funny to me.
I know its not entirely apples to apples, but I just want to point out what AWS charges for REST API calls:
In other words 68x - 159x the price AWS is charging for those calls. Reddit uses AWS for most of its infrastructure so its a very high possibility that they are getting the API bill from AWS, adding a 159x markup (Reddit is certainly at the largest discount, due to the sheer quantity of calls), and then trying to bill the 3PA dev that amount.
I absolutely understand charging the 3PA's for their usage, but the markup here is just absolutely absurd. Even just a "mere" 50x markup on the API calls would have netted Reddit a lot of money and been way more achievable for 3rd party devs.
Imgur charges Apollo a whopping $166 a month for API access, compared to the $1,700,000 a month that Reddit wants. It's crazy.
If you have a minute, can you explain what that means? By caching, is Apollo lightening the load on Imgur servers? Or do I have that backwards?
In this context, caching would means that every time a user requests an Imgur image, Apollo saves a copy. If the same image is requested again, Apollo sends the saved copy instead of querying Imgur's severs. Eventually, if the image isn't being requested, it gets kicked out of the cache to make room for more.
Got it, thanks for the explanation!
Definitely not apples to apples. It’s a content API vs a systems API.
In the content API, what is sold is the access to the content itself. That’s why the pricing is so idiotic. It’s not meant to provide access to third party APIs but rather to people building a business on top of Reddit content.
The thing is nobody’s going to seriously want to do this given how mismanaged the whole thing has been; it gives zero confidence in the API sticking around long term. And as far as the pricing goes, it’s also still stupid expensive. Reddit content is not so high quality that I would want access to it so badly, I’ll just build something on top of another social media.
To be a little pedantic - this isn't a complete picture, because the cost for the list price for API Gateway calls doesn't include any addition cost for the compute power (EC2, Lambda, etc), storage, etc, required to actually process the call and return a response to the user. So there is additional cost in the equation. However, these prices are still completely absurd on reddit's part, and $3.50 is the right order of magnitude, $240 is not.
Huffman has also now said:
NBC News Article
Wow. He is speed-running this Reddit car wreck.
I find it interesting he feels mods should be able to be voted out. Can the users vote him out?
He better hope that Reddit wants civil discussion more than they want another "We did it, Reddit!"
Sometimes its planned (see Disney) where a new CEO comes in as the bad guy, does the hated change.. then is replaced by a "good guy" CEO. To rip the band aid off...
even if he gets fired and a new CEO steps in (maybe with some fake olive branch) it might have been planned this way all along, and Huffman was just paid to take the brunt.
The Verge has posted their full interview now, that original article was just one piece of it: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
Oh man what a quote:
He's still defending the price point of the API changes? Is he lying and saying it costs them the estimated 450 million a year in data costs to run the reddit API? What horse manure.
After reading more of the interview, he actually gets into an ARGUMENT with the interviewer, holy moly what an absolute mess
It also completely ignores the removal of sexual NSFW content from 3rd party apps, even if they did pay. This is arguably the most egregious part and he doesn't even mention it.
Nobody's talking about that in these articles, and it's one of the 3 moderator demands to end the protest. It feels puritanical for these news organizations and interviewers to ignore it.
Man, that article is crazy to read. He sounds like a man who has no ability to read the room and is desperately trying to hype up his own viewpoint. Sad.
Wow, Huffman really said "Democracy is a pillar of Reddit /s" Classy.
I get a bit of satisfaction knowing that he's still hasn't let go of the whole logo debacle after all of these years.
As for the rest... hooboy, Huffman is pressed. Regardless of how things pan out, I'm very glad that this is bugging him so deeply.
Getting strong Trump vibes from (fuck) u/spez.
Reddit is a democracy! Reddit is a capalist dictatorship!
Pick one asshole.
What an absolute knob.
He just doubled down on everything the community hates about this announcement, and continuously claims the blackouts are upsetting most people. Is he being serious? Does he actually believe this crap?
Moving to Reddit from forums was a mistake. I need a new place for local stuff and Star Trek discussion because Reddit ain’t it. No way I’m going back after this trainwreck.
https://startrek.website just launched as a Lemmy instance from the same mods that ran /r/startrek, they aren't going back either. Once I had a chance to watch the new episode, I was going to put a burndown thread in ~tv as well.
I just want to thank you all for being here. I don't have to be on Reddit, but I can still :popcorn: the drama and enjoy. And for what it's worth, I feel like there's no comment I don't appreciate. You're all awesome.
I think that you’re awesome for thinking that I am.
I'm still sticking around on Reddit for the few communities that I moderate, as a last stand-type situation. The second this is over, though, I'm out of there faster than spez's comments get downvoted. While I hope it doesn't happen, I can definitely foresee me finally being the one eating popcorn on the sidelines, watching as everything burns.
It's lovely isn't it.
"Hey! If you won't do a difficult job for free and if you won't do it well enough to satisfy our desires, we'll fire you and replace you with someone who will be willing to try but will almost certainly not be able to actually live up to the standards you set while working for us for no pay."
That's effectively their offer. I can't imagine how the mods are not just opening the floodgates on the sorts of shit that gets submitted to the site and leaving at this point. Reddit's position on this whole thing is just abusive.
I geniunely believe that if they oust the mod team from my most frequented sub, I’ll just actually delete my Reddit account.
If you look at German communities online, it’s not easy to find one this large where bigotry is consequently deleted.
The absolute audacity to say third party apps add no value when for years they were the only way to access reddit on mobile outside of a browser.
To be clear, I do think it's fair for devs to pay for API access. What Reddit has failed to justify thus far is why does it cost so much when other sites that charge for API have much lower fees for similar services.
I think there was something like 30,000 unique moderators between all of the subreddits. Even accounting for the ones that only went dark for 2 days, you probably still have around 15,000 different moderators that reddit would have to replace. That isn't an achievable goal by them, and anyone they do appoint will probably step down after awhile.
Reddit really does not understand the value of their moderators in my opinion.
Power hungry neckbeards don't understand either. Let Reddit replace experienced mods with people who want to power trip. See how long they last after they receive their first death threats/doxxing after banning u/88Ragnar42069 for calling someone a race traitor.
I have modded one sub for 10+ years. Put a lot of work into building it up, don't do too much anymore, but I regularly remind newer mods to rethink certain decisions because they haven't experienced the sheer animosity that comes out if you remove someone's post or ban them.
They don't have to get all 15,000 different mods. They just need to get the ones that are in the top 100 or 500 subs and replace them.
Even so, the point about the replacements being low quality and short longevity is valid. What they're doing is likely going to backfire, and badly.
This seems like a shift in his stance, more from needing to charge for the API to outright disdain of 3rd party apps existing or all. I think it's more proof that it's not about the API pricing as much as getting rid of the apps entirely. They probably want to show a large increase in the users of their app in 3Q before the IPO, hence the short deadline.
Instead of shutting down, /r/AnarchyChess initially reopened fully unmoderated and was hit with a similar ultimatum. They're now closed instead. Unfortunately I couldn't find the screenshot of the conversation.
That probably had more to do with them asking their users to brigade subs that didn't shut down. (site is click at your own risk.)
I should not have clicked
Mmm, so it was, I misremembered.
from that Verge interview, I think this is by far the most telling part. emphasis added:
really saying the quiet part loud by referring to 3rd party apps as competitors
not a slip of the tongue, either. later in the interview:
the interviewer notices and pushes Huffman on it:
The funny thing is RIF was paying a sizable revenue share to Reddit starting 2012, the year Yishan Wong became CEO. (RIF actually reached out to Reddit to create this revenue share agreement.)
Reddit then terminated this agreement in 2016, which is after Spez became CEO. He's complaining about developers not giving Reddit money, when one such revenue share agreement was terminated under his tenure. Strange complaint.
This is very interesting precedent that I didn’t know about. This is something, I feel, that journalists should be using to press him in interviews. If anyone comes across any articles or resources about this, I’d love to learn more.
In my mind this was the obvious solution. Just push some ads in an acceptable format (to the RiF or Apollo community) thru the API into the third party apps and share the revenue with reddit Inc. Idk how this wouldn't work. Then /u/spez has no grounds to argue opportunity cost and could charge a fair price for the API. The obvious answer is that spez isn't speaking or acting in good faith and wants to further datamine and sell reddit's users to some deeply skeezy folks. That, or reddit wants to start running more weird social stuff/direct marketing/influencer economy stuff with features like tikstachat... Honestly it's probably all of the above.
Wow. I had no idea.
I didn't think huffman could disappoint me further, yet here we are.
The good news is that you've made millions since! I certainly didn't know that, not sure if you did.
I'd like to hear more about the story behind this arrangement.
Yeah it’s very MBA-brain. Huffman has been hyper optimising for app installs for a long time and he’s surprised that a better app out there is also reaping the benefits from that campaign.
This is a fire of his own making. And he’s so disconnected he doesn’t understand that the Apollo users are still good for Reddit. I highly suspect the official Reddit app users is much more read-only than Apollo’s.
Anyone can run a business into the ground. But it takes a special kind of anyone to run Twitter and Reddit into the ground. These idiots are role-modelling Zuckerberg’s disdain for his own users as if Meta doesn’t make products which are actually robustly built and well catered to their users.
It started that way, but it feels very un-MBA to me now. Like it's a personal vendetta for spez.
God I didn’t really have any issues with spez as a person until recently, but the more I read about him, the more he seems like a giant scumbag.
He’s completely omitting the fact that these third party apps have existed for years, driving traffic to Reddit, before Reddit even released their own version of a worse mobile app.
Does Apollo even do that? Does it collect user data? I'm not intimately familiar with it specifically but other apps don't necessarily do so
He's using dishonest language to make it sound worse than it is. He's talking about Apollo taking reddit's "data", aka its posts/comments and "reselling it" aka offering premium subscriptions for extra services.
Apollo does not collect user data and sell it as far as I know (unlike the official reddit app.)
Of course, the data is not reddit's. Its the users'. Reddit is the facilitator to create the content, not the creator.
It is weird (and dishonest) for them to claim otherwise.
They are probably trying to cause infighting within the mod teams by tempting any single low rank mod with an opportunity to instantly become top mod of a major sub with a big replacement mod team.
It is still pretty dang clear that Reddit corporation just doesn't care about the quality of their product anymore. They just want the cash. Reddit is over.
I haven’t sent anyone else mention this quote from the NBC article:
That’s….not a good sign.
Edit: If anyone remembers the r/skincareaddiction debacle, I don’t think that’s a future Reddit should be encouraging.
What happened with skincareaddiction?
The mods moved the faq to their own website to draw some profit from it and then were found be accepting payment to promote specific brands (and remove criticisms).
He has been repeating that revenue sharing stuff for years. Like a carrot for the donkey. Never going to happen.
Also: I think this marks the total collapse of the social media giants of my youth. Tumblr (catastrophically) died in 2019 when it banned explicit content, Twitter decayed and has been losing users (and its market cap) steadily since last November, and now Reddit is shedding users now as it bans API access.
I would implore you to check out Tumblr once more! Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
(In fact, it's a pretty big in-joke on Tumblr about how the rest of the internet thinks the site is dead, when it's really been thriving as of late.)
Tumblr at this point is largely a haven for old Tumblr users who have grown up and mellowed out... if you curate your follows, it's fairly easy to cultivate a really healthy and mature environment, I find!
yeah tbh Tumblr now is way better than when it was more popular. Most of the toxic discourae moved to Twitter, and I can get all my world news via Supernatural memes.
The community is fine but the ads / suggested posts / general experience of the interface to me is awful compared to when I was on Tumblr like 10 years ago.
I rejoined like 2-3 years ago and then quit after a couple of months again, just never enjoyed using the modern site or having to use hacky extensions to make it decent
This is curious to me! I don't use the app -- I've only ever used Tumblr through web browsers with adblockers installed (incl. Firefox on Android with ublock origin). I also aggressively turn off post suggestions and the like whenever they're introduced. My dash is basically only posts and reblogs from people I follow, no hacky extensions needed.
Does tumblr still want to federate? I was pretty excited about this; though I wonder if they’ll really go the AP way. Maybe they’ll federate with bluesky instead?
I'm not really up to date on this, sorry! Federation isn't really on my radar when it comes to my usage of Tumblr.
I haven't heard that they weren't , so I'm assuming that it's still on the map.
Grown up and mellowed out meaning saying no to a freshly made creampie when offered?
Reddit's tremendous lack of self-awareness continues to baffle me.
Don't get me wrong. I fully believe this was an entirely likely outcome — they are a profit-driven corporation that will snuff out anything if it'll give them an extra buck, just like virtually any other company. What I didn't expect was how utterly and brazenly they'd continue to risk so very much like this.
Reddit is in the unique position of having almost all of its moderation work done on a volunteer basis. They need their mod community, and so that community has a strong say in how they operate whether Reddit likes it or not. As we've seen first-hand these last few days, if Reddit tries to pull nasty shit, mods can effectively turn their site off. They have some tools to manage this, but not nearly enough, and the damage both is and will continue to be done regardless.
And yet, they keep doing this. They act like they can piss all over the most vital members of their site and suffer no consequence for it, and it's stunning. Reddit may be big enough by now where they can survive this off inertia alone, sure, but it's been hurt already, and this isn't nearly over for them yet. I've seen corporate myopia, but this is really something else.
Truth be told, I'm starting to feel like the internet will look very, very different in five years. Twitter and Reddit both look like they're about to go up in flames, and Discord's following in their footsteps, albeit slowly. Frankly, I'm starting to think the world may be better off this way.
I don't think it started this way, but sometime over the past two months Reddit has decided that they don't need high quality content or good moderators.
And they're probably right.
One of the mistakes we've made in assessing this is assuming that the quality of the site matters. But that's largely only true for the quality parts of the site. And that's an increasingly small fraction of the site as a whole.
It absolutely doesn't. If they can show high activity levels, that's all that matters. I'm guessing all the chatGPT bots would only add to the metrics too.
I'm not to in with how discord is running, can you give me some more information? Does it have to do with the screen name/discriminator changes? Or is there more?
Most of it's just gut feeling on my part, but I do feel the username changes are the first step among many they'll take along that path.
They display a lot of the signs of a company that's going to follow Reddit into the dumpster, at any rate; focus on growth, looking for new ways to profit, lots of changing things that weren't broken, etc. They're privately owned for now, but I'd wager you they too will want to go public at some point, and they'll want to be valuable when they do.
Ah. Can you share some more in-depth analysis please? I want to be fully in the know if I can.
Hard to say what kind of in-depth analysis I could share; like I said, this is mostly gut feeling for me. I've developed a lot of cynicism on capitalism over the years and have learned to recognize a pattern when I see one when it comes to things like this.
If you're looking for me to expound on the signs I mentioned in the second paragraph, though, I can do a bit of that:
Focus on Growth: This one's pretty blatant. Signup is free, creating a server is free, every basic feature is free. This is the kind of thing that becomes expensive fast, especially when you're as large as Discord is. Crucially, though, growth can attract investment, something Discord has accumulated almost a billion dollars of last I checked. Monthly Active Users is a shiny metric here, and so many companies are able to eat loss like it's Christmas dinner so long as the number's going up enough. You can also see a bit of growth-chasing in some other things they've done, like adding Reddit-like forum channels — something that smells to me very similar to, say, Youtube Shorts.
Looking for Profit: This one's more complicated, but there's been a few ways they've done this. The chief one is all the things they've been trickling in to Nitro over the years. Originally, Nitro Classic was the only thing they had on offer, but it's been expanding constantly since. Nothing bad has gone down with this so far, don't get me wrong. If they were able to set themselves up to sustain off of current Nitro and stay there, things would be rosy. But the problem is that, like most any company, they're constantly looking for new things to squeeze money out of, and eventually they'll run out of ethical ways of doing this. (The only other way they've done this worth noting that I can recall is when they tried to be a game distribution store for a bit, though I honestly kinda miss that one a tad.)
Fixing things that aren't broken I'll leave as it is though, as that's both the hardest to elaborate on and the least important. It's mostly just the username changes, in combination with the fact that it's another common trend at many companies; take your pick from a great many site redesigns, for example.
Thank you for the input! It’s appreciated, since I haven’t been using discord for that long comparatively, but my husband did interview there and he’s been using it for years. He’s just not one to complain.
Right, bc people are really going to trust that easily…I’ve seen so many subreddits sticking to private, way more then I thought honestly (think it’s about 5000 of the original 8000 that went dark) and I feel like the admins are definitely going to take a hand sooner or later. It’s not going to be pretty honestly.
I have a few small subreddits I made dark as soon as this started popping off. They may not have lost much, if anything, with my small subs going dark but it adds to the list.
I think (I might be wrong) r/gaming is going to be going dark every Tuesday in solidarity with the other subreddits that are going dark completely. I went on there out of habit and saw a poll from them on my feed. Which probably the only one and a few others that I had recognized on my homepage, with the others being ones that I wasn't even part of. It was really weird to scroll through it.
Every Tuesday feels too organized to me, people can eventually get used to it. I'd support subs shifting the schedule by one day each week. So Week 1 Tuesday, Week 2 Wednesday, Week 3 Thursday, etc. Make it harder to plan around since it varies every week, so advertisers would have to plan for each individual week rather than just around Tuesdays as a guaranteed slow day.
That is positively evil, I like it.
I lost Exemplary privileges a while back for being a little shit with them, if I would ask for them back, label this comment, and then get them restricted again, it would be 100% worth it because that is ingenious.
Turning off every single Tuesday would probably hit that sweet spot of unpredictable that would make advertising and SEO difficult, and mess with the site infrastructure to force Reddit to make the next move.
The same way I soured to the point of leaving on Twitter because of Elon I think is going to happen again with Reddit and Huffman.
I initially thought I might keep my account for work purposes or to browse PC part deals / trade subs, but now I'm not even so sure I'll do that. Considering closing the two accounts I have and potentially even going as far as blocking the reddit domain on my DNS
The biggest loss I find is just the wealth of useful reviews and troubleshooting type information collected there over the years. We need a searchable archive of reddit that is not on reddit so that can be preserved without giving them any further traffic.
It's wild the amount of useful products that have the worst leadership or company culture. There are so many things I use on a daily basis while absolutely despising the company that makes it.
I seem to recall a mention in a similar discussion that there was work happening to archive parts of Reddit, but I can’t recall the context or whether it was here or elsewhere.
I was thinking the same originally but even going back in to check on what’s open/not feels kind of… gross? Like it’s not even somewhere I want to be anymore, even just for informational purposes. Twitter and Reddit were places I used to enjoy being in (most of the time) and now I feel like I’m loading them with my fingers partly over my eyes, horror movie style.
I agree. I went back today just to take a look at things, and I felt gross enough to just go ahead and run Power Delete Suite on both of my accounts.
However, one thing I have noticed is that I can't edit/delete comments out of any subreddits that are still private, so I suppose I won't delete my accounts yet- not until more subreddits come back online so I can remove my comments from them- unless that never happens then I guess at some point I'll delete the accounts anyway.
Definitely wanting to wait it out for now to try and make sure for OpSec reasons that the least amount of my comments are left on the site as possible
Same, I’m waiting for my data archive (13 years’ worth somehow!!) and then I’ll batch edit comments.
Here's a new article from the Verge with the RiF dev's side of things, shooting down Huffman's claim that the RiF dev "never walked to talk" to reddit about the changes.
More outright lies from Spez, completely unsurprising.
Dam, get ready for a shit fest, I know if the mod teams get wiped then assholes will take over.
This is astounding. I was sure Reddit would go through a slow decline, remaining relevant and somewhat sustainable for the next 10 years, giving enough time for alternatives to slowly mature and communities to migrate in orderly fashion. Reddit leadership proved me wrong so quickly, I almost think they're intentionally imploding their website.
This makes me very sad.
I have choice words for Steve Huffman...
From plans to charge excessively for API access in a move to kill third-party apps to an utterly disastrous AMA where he quadrupled-down on falsified allegations that Apollo's lead developer was blackmailing him, Spez has been going on an any% speedrun to sink Reddit as a company. He's acting like an even bigger power-tripping megalomaniac than your typical high-profile Reddit moderator - and that's honestly a fucking high bar considering my past experiences on Reddit.
And you know the saddest thing about this? The blackout has proven without a shadow of a doubt that there will still be power-hungry users that would wilfully lick Spez's boots even after all he's done.
He's not gonna struggle to replace the internet janitors that rebelled against him. The community has already lost.
The only saving grace of this blackout is that Tildes, Kbin and Lemmy are popping off and seeing record amounts of growth.
Less than 24 hours later:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14b5q1f/how_to_request_an_abandoned_community_or_a_mod/
A process to replace mods to reopen subs is in place. Sort of.
I know a handful of dedicated spammers who are going to be requesting /r/listentothis right now. They'll get it, and reopen it. Anything that gets enough upvotes to threaten their own submissions will get removed for a couple of hours so that it doesn't have the opportunity to out-compete whatever they are being paid to promote.
that tactic hasn't worked in years. Removing posts on your sub penalizes the ranking of other posts.
I don't expect them to know that. :P
It seems like the only active /r/tumblr mod first got demodded by the admins and now 24h later his account has been suspended? Seems suspicious.
Should make everyone leaving Reddit feel vindicated. This tells us all we need to know about Reddit and the direction they’re taking.
Just wanted to share this post from the antiwork mods about being threatened with replacement if they didn't reopen the sub.
Noone should moderate Reddit in ideal case because it is clear they have no value for it. It won't be tough for Reddit to replace them because there are enough people with no principle, they will kiss Reddit's ass for false sense of power.
Having read a majority of what spez and other admins have said since this whole debacle started, I don't understand why any moderator would continue volunteering their time to the benefit of reddit. reddit hasn't been remotely truthful or honest in any of their communication. When I read their comments, I don't get the feeling reddit is coming to the community, hat in hand, asking for a little help with the hosting bills. What I read is that they have contempt for these damned moderators who built bots and third party apps to overcome the inadequacy of the moderation tools, mobile apps, and accessibility reddit provides. I get this feeling because reddit disingenuously lumps in moderation bots and third party apps (things people like) with big corps training LLM and "AI" chat bots (things people don't understand or don't like).
The constant refrain from reddit of "we'll fix your bots if they break" falls on deaf ears given the actions of reddit's past. reddit has promised better mod tools over and over. reddit is constantly years behind moderator developed tools and they're not going to catch up in a month. Also, reddit has a well known problem in timely communication with moderators who bring them problems in good faith. They give the copy/paste "thanks for contacting us" and that's all, until an issue reaches a boiling point. If the bot you built to help moderate a subreddit with millions of members breaks, why should you have any faith that reddit will help you fix it, much less with the urgency you would give it if you broke it yourself?
No, reddit is going to break the stuff you spent hours of your free time making to overcome the pains of moderating huge communities on reddit without their help, or pains you experienced using their mobile app, or pains you experienced because reddit is not as accessible as it should be. This downtime they will burden you with is something they expect you to overcome, consuming more of your time fixing the things they broke. This doesn't read as appreciation for the countless free time moderators and developers put into building things they love for the communities they serve on reddit. Based on this attitude, you are an annoyance to them and you can suck it up and accept that you owe them more work, or you can get replaced by the next mod team who don't know what they're getting into and will go through the same pains once again.
r/apple has reopened due to the threats of replacing the mod team.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/14al426/rapple_blackout_what_happened/
hmm something's broken there. Trying to hyperlink the reddit url displayed some odd behaviour.
I haven't really been on Reddit all that much since last week after the AMA, but after reading the comments... how the hell did the narrative shift so sharply to this being about corrupt mods? That is so weird, it feels almost manufactured to trivialize this whole mess to being about subreddit drama. Has anyone been following this more closely to clue people in? Or am I just completely oblivious?
I think there's multiple factors at play here:
There are some weird narratives among users who've never been a mod on a large, active sub that mods are all power crazy, arbitrary, and pushing an agenda. The reality is that most (not all) mods have very little power, the arbitrary actions are often mistakes, and the agendas are usually something as basic as "don't use slurs".
I've been following most of the mess on other sites and it's pure chaos.
Edit: Expanding thoughts. Might come back to this again later.
Reddit has recently gone on a confirmed astroturfing esque binge recently actually. They've been creating lots of badly translated foreign language subreddits. I'd be really curious who mods and posts in those as I imagine it must be company employees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/
omg THIS is why I kept getting recommended posts from random German versions of subreddits on my front page whenever I used my web browser. I did think that was weird.
The effort made is actually hilarious in terms of how terrible the execution went. The biggest issue is that English idioms obviously don't carry that same meaning. For example, Reddit translated offmychest to vonmeinerbrust, but in German that means more like "from my breasts/boobs" which is just terribly funny/bad.
That sub is absolutely begging for some "böswillige Befolgung" lol
It's one thing to use a machine translator even though you could easily just hire someone who speaks German natively on fiverr or something (or, heck, even just get a redditor to volunteer to do it). But they clearly just typed the names in with no context, because if you give Google Translate or DeepL a whole sentence like "I need to get something off my chest", they both produce appropriate German sentences with no references to breasts. Anyone who has ever used these for more than just playing around would be familiar with the fact that they perform better the more context they have. It's so utterly clueless AND careless of them.
Yeah, the overall tone of the comments is blowing my mind. I also can't understand why exactly they believe anyone rushing in to take over moderation would be inherently less 'power-hungry' and 'corrupt'.
Man he has so much confidence Reddit is going to be fine and arrogance.
Admins have officially begun removing mods / reducing perms and handing over subs to mods willing to cooperate, starting with r/aww.
Is there a source for this? Not necessarily doubting, but it would be interesting to see which ones get yeeted.
Yes, but it's nsfw and you click at your own risk.
It's mentioned along with a few others in this /r/SubredditDrama post, much more legible and significantly less NSFW.
Wow.. just popped into r/anarchychess and that place is weird. Seems like they might get banned soon, or I just don't understand them. r/pics is now officially only allowing photos of John Oliver :)
So I'm really tempted to go back just to see this chaos in r/pics haha
r/gifs is currently having a poll to go back to normal, or only post gifs of John Oliver. I'm going to participate until RIF goes dark :)
I am enjoying the petty mallicious compliance vibes... and references to being called landed gentry, lol.
I logged back in cuz of your comment to see it with my own eyes. So funny. I'm a RIF user too. For some subs I can understand the reference (r/San Diego mods are notorious for being undemocratic) but it's a pretty stupid generalized statement. Unpaid workers are gentry... asinine...
Uhh so this is interesting. I stumbled across this today: https://mstdn.games/@chris/110553477682106144
my reddit profile is empty, I deleted everything. And yet... https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/3ivlfi/connoisseurs_clash_over_cocktail_constituents_in/
I would guess this is something going wrong on the back end over something intentional, but the timing is definitely going to cause a fuss.
Honestly, all this amazes me. Reddit is a business. It doesn't give 2 hoots about moderators or closed subs or anything else. If it can't monetize and it runs out of VC, it's going under. The idea that closing a few subs for a few days would have any effect whatsoever is ludicrous. Moderators and users have no ownership interest whatsoever.
Sure, it may go the way of 4chan. Here's news: it will. One day. This is the internet. Today's big thing is tomorrow's afterthought.
We don't even know if Christian was telling the truth. $20mil? I'm not taking sides. But my point is: we are like Japanese villagers when Godzilla attacks.
The only way to affect Reddit is to stop using it. All anyone has to do is visit it to see how many people still are posting on it.
All closing subs does is penalize users who want to utilize a community to focus on those subjects. But this site shows that a generalized feed can work. In other words, we don't need focused areas.
And listen--I'm 15+ on reddit. I remember the early days. They were a lot like this, there.
If users are so offended, then let them leave. Let them come here, to hubski, to the various other lightly-trafficked sites. Because eventually, this protest notwithstanding, something else will arise.
Let Huffman lament his lost millions.
Time to move on.
But enough with the ineffectual protests.
P.S. I didn't even know that 3rd-party apps existed. Don't care. I'm not the only user who feels that way. Not all of us only access reddit via our phones.
Christian's figures have been verified by the numbers released by reddit itself. There is no ambiguity or "trust me bro" about it. If you still doubt this, I invite you to check out @cube's comment here where you can see that Reddit wants to charge up to 160x the price of what AWS charges for API access.
Under their current API prices, they're claiming it costs them 20 million dollars to supply Apollo with data, but oddly enough when asked directly Spez says that it costs them 10 million dollars a year to "subsidize all these 3rd party apps"
Wild how that number changed from 20 million for one app to 10 million for all of them.
Absolutely fair enough. Respect. I have no dog in this fight.
That’s not the full story. Huffman said the pure infrastructure costs for all third party apps was $10m, but mentioned other costs besides just the hardware and bandwidth.
Obviously the $20m figure is BS and Huffman is full of shit, but I do want to acknowledge that there is a lot more than just infra costs.
The only other major cost I can think of besides hardware and bandwidth to allow 3rd party apps to function would be the most important cost of all to greedy people: Opportunity cost. The driving force behind this decision was to kill all alternatives to the official Reddit app so they can fit in with Twitter and Facebook at the big kids table.
From the interview:
That’s not unexpected. It’s normal that infra is only one factor of the cost of running an application (often not the greatest cost - people cost a lot more).
Opportunity cost is mentioned there. And yes, it is a valid cost. Reddit supports a wide variety of business which are actually profitable, and which wouldn’t exist or have a chance of Reddit didn’t provide free API access. It’s fair that Reddit profit from the application they’ve created.
Wanting to reduce lost monetization isn’t necessarily greed. Honestly, it’s quite reasonable. If I worked on a product and offered it for free, and others commercialized it without contributing back, they would be the greedy ones. Not me.
That’s exactly what has happened to Reddit. Other companies are making bank on it. That’s not really negotiable; that’s the situation.
The problem is reddits handling of the situation. It’s been atrocious. There are a million ways they could have done it in a way that respects their users and the businesses that rely on the site. Instead it’s been a series of massive middle fingers.
Opportunity cost, while a valid concept, isn't a valid cost. It's a term akin to a figure of speech, and while it describes a real effect it's not a line on a balance sheet.
Ever try moderating from the official app? RiF contributed a great deal to the site, it's just hidden in millions of mod actions.
Developers aren't "greedy" because they use the API reddit very stupidly chose not to monetize to build vastly superior apps.
Yes, I can't see reddit folding, but maybe a slight acceleration to getting shitter. I've been avoiding it this week and I may delete my account in time, but at this stage it's more about feeling like the place is on a downward spiral and the balance between parts that add value to my life vs the parts that are just a distraction or have a negative impact has been gradually shifting to the right hand side.
Turning it off this week has so far been a net positive on my life. The first two days I was fighting the impulse to pick up my phone and open it up but that impulse is fading, and I feel like my avoidance is having multiple positive effects on my mental health and general life. The longer I go without the easier I think it'll be to stay away. It'll be extremely easy not to go back if I can find a UK specific forum with a good community, as it's the only thing I've lacked this week.
I’m extremely new to tildes, but over time my Reddit browsing heavily skewed towards the uk subreddits because the main ones just got way too big. I’d be really keen to try and get some uk discussion going with regards to news stories etc. it would be really nice to have an actual discussion about politics/economics/current affairs without it turning into the same ‘its the tories fault’ comments (no matter if it might be true) that add absolutely nothing.
I have no idea how to go about it though.
Yes, I avoided all subs with politics.
They had just become so depressing, and so full an anger. Reading r/UK you'd think the UK was some sort of authoritarian dystopia that bore very little resemblance to the country I live in. I have a tendency to avoid political discussion altogether since brexit, it's turned into an 'us' vs 'them' and far too much vitriol, but I'm open to balanced, respectful, discussion.
I've seen discussions on other treads about there maybe being a categories for local groups (so in the future we could might be able to share news and start discussions on something like ~local.uk). I'm also new so unsure on the it's and outs, but I think you can share news or discussion in any category and tag is as UK at the moment.
Agree with everything. As a 15+ I can tell you that reddit has been getting shittier for years. Eternal September is the cause.
Oh I know, I'm on 12 years but it's been a gradual decline (with some big steps at times). This is another big step, which for me pushes it over the line where it's too shit for me to want to stay.
I only find it manageable now with a curated list of subs, which are mostly niche and local, accessed through a third party app. I'm not willing to give the official one another try largely because of the promotion of 'suggested content', 90% of it is stuff I'm explicitly trying to avoid because it has a negative impact on my mental health (but part of me loves it even though it's harmful so I find it difficult to resist getting drawn in if presented to me. I avoid it by not giving myself the opportunity to even see it, suggested content takes that choice away from me).
What's ludicrous is the idea that reddit's survival is at stake here.
This is VC trying to monetize ahead of an IPO in order to maximize their exit, not a final gasp for air before shutting down reddit.
So that's not quite true:
...though I haven't seen any follow up as to how it was implemented
That's not all it does.
It hurts the value of reddit by hurting the value redditors can get from it. It hurts reddit's image, as you can see from yesterday's PR push. It forces Admins to make stupid policies.
Of course it's true that moderators have no ownership interest. Unless they/we group together and sue like the aol chatroom moderators did, we/they have no legal/financial ownership interest. Unless mods hit the bottom line, nothing they/we do means anything at all.
Did you read the quote? Altman says redditors were given 10% of Series B. Mods, as redditors, would be somehow entitled to their share of that 10%.
This is certainly true.
Given reddit's surprising PR push on Thursday, however, I'd say it had a rather significant impact despite reddit's "Our numbers have been fine" messaging. You don't do an all out PR blitz if everything is peachy.
Did you use RES, old.reddit, or actually use that terrible new reddit interface?
All this situation is almost unreal.
I have a hypothesis that this is just a big show, leading up to:
Why would they go through the whole show of making Huffman "walk the plank" when all they wanted was monetization of the API, and probably could have gotten that with some grumbling at reasonable rates?
Maybe they feared a huge backslash to any API monetization effort no matter the rate?
Where i live, its a common tactic when something unpopular is to be forced to a lot of people to do it like that:
This 'more reasonable' thing would not fly if it was the original announcement, but it might pass that way.
Tbh i don't think i would pay for API access to reddit, no matter the cost, so i would oppose any monetization -but that's me-.
Seems reasonable enough, but they would have offered more concessions and less bridge burning by now if the plan was to start walking back changes.
That's possible, but lets wait one more month to see what they 'll do.
You spelt two and a half weeks wrong.
Isn't it July 1st that they cut the cord?
Tech CEOs are frequently unreliable to begin with, but throw in the inevitable corruption once VC money is in the mix and all bets are off. They will say anything and do anything to keep all the sexy profit numbers moving up and to the right. Spez was an asshole already but in the run-up to IPO he has cheerfully shed any remaining shreds of integrity in pursuit of that golden payday.
Offtopic, but @OBLIVIATER, IMO this probably should have been submitted as a text-topic or posted to the megathread, since half of what's mentioned in your title is not actually covered in the article you submitted. Editorializing headlines is generally regarded as okay to do here, so long as your intent is to help clear up any confusion the original headline caused, or reduce how clickbaity it is. But your title here is almost the opposite of that.
I tried to make a text post but I guess it posted as a comment, I'm still pretty new to tildes so I haven't figured out how this works haha. I linked the sources of the title in the top comment
Ah, LOL. No worries. :P
Yeah, so if you include a link in the "Link" field of the the submission form, it will make a link post, and anything you put in the text field below that will be added as a comment when you submit. If you want to do a text-topic though, just leave the Link field blank, and write the link in the text field along with whatever other text you want to include.
Do you want me to convert it to a text post? Seems like a lot of different interviews are coming out now (The Verge, NBC News, NPR, more?), it might be nice to be able to have them all listed in the main post if you want to update it.
Sure, if you can do that without much effort, its up to you! I'll do my best to compile some of the new articles
Done, you should be able to edit it as a text post now.
Did my best to consolidate all the articles I could find, thanks!
I just want to chime in and say what a nice and human approach Tildes takes: post is made, folks come and help tag, @cfabbro makes suggestion, @Deimos asks OP what he wants to do and goes along with it.
So much more gentle than having your post be deleted by a robot and told to try again after reading the rules better.
To be fair, I'm sure a lot of subreddit moderators would love to take this more human approach too, instead of relying on strict rules, and bots to enforce them, but they unfortunately just don't have the ability to. Reddit has very very limited mod tools, submission organization/editing features, etc... and one of the few useful tools they do have built in to the site, Automoderator, was actually created and maintained by Deimos (who no longer works there). :P So most moderators on reddit are just trying to do the best they can with what they have available to them in order to keep their subreddits from falling apart.
Exactly! Moderators on Reddit have two choices:
remove the post
don't remove the post
That's it. All this fancy editing and re-formatting and moving isn't possible there, so we have a simple binary "remove/keep" choice.
In some of my subreddits, for some types of posts, I include referrals to more appropriate subreddits in my removal reasons. I can do that much, at least.
@chocobean
"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit ‘was never designed to support third-party apps’"
This clown is incredibly tone deaf.
Huffman is turning in to the next Zuckerberg
only without the money and success.
Ha! Good luck replacing all the free modding while you're desperate for profit dumbass.
What an incredible example of how not to handle a situation like this.
He reminds me of a CEO I had. Good enough to run the business, but totally out of touch with the users, and incredibly megalomaniac. Though in my case, I had hired the guy as ceo and I’m still heartbroken over him turning out like that, years later.
People like this see changes they have to make to execute on a plan which is half detached from reality and which they know is controversial. They see controversy and they rationalise that even though it’s worse than they expected, it’s still what they expected, so everything is fine.
And it just doesn’t take a lot for a business to be viable. What’s the worst case scenario? He has to lay some people off to cut on costs? The IPO anyway might go well in the beginning, who knows. So he won’t be “punished” for running Reddit into a shell of what it could be; he just won’t see the fruits of a sapling he tore down.
I absolutely think every exec (in fact, most employees) should have some amount of customer contact. As founder/cto of that company I still ran most of customer support until I left, and it was critical to keep me grounded into what our users wanted.
It was also a good use of time. Regular CS contact means not having to run survey programs for the most inane questions. It’s also always a great customer experience to have your issue fixed in no time by someone knowledgeable.