hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
You must log in or # to comment.
AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.
I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.
Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.
Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.
The askhistorians subreddit and it’s mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I’ve seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.
But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.
I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.
Oh, I hope so as well, that sub is absolutely precious. When people talked about nuking their account(which I get it) it was for post like those that I feared for.
Not to worry, every post and comment on reddit has been archived, and is freely available as a 2tb torrent on Academic Torrents.
Is there an easy way to access this? I wanted to point out to some older reddit posts.
The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.
If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Is he wrong though?
We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don’t really care about third party apps, a lot didn’t even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.
For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.
so - as one of those people who really didn’t know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you’re downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the “dissenting” opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don’t think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I’m not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind… for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it’s not happening.
Yes… I feel the same way. We will see. The last big blowup there was not a place to go (I went to voat for awhile, but it was just another walled garden filled with a certain type of vibe I did not really like that much). Lemmy seems pretty good now. We all know that moderation and a heavy “Do not feed the trolls” has always been the rule all the way back to Usenet and the early internet. One reason I choose Behaw is they seem to believe in that basic philosophy. Plus federation, people that do not like that, they can go to instances where they are happy too. Seems win win.
The big counter issue is scale. There are some areas where Lemmy does not cover well. These tend to be technical areas like Law.
I wish Lemmy had a really easy way for people to self host their own instances without having to know really much of anything at all about how it works (or at least an easy and comprehensive Guide to Self-hosting for Dummies!), so that we were less likely to end up with too many people on too few instances.
I’ve never self-hosted anything, and I know I could learn it, but it’s still a project.
I do some self hosting for my own projects… if you want to and have the time an resources it is fun in a way. It is trivial to start with 1 thing so try it out. Probably your OS already has servers installed.
However it is my opinion that it is better, for the most part, for most people to use tools hosted externally. There are economies of scale. It would really be truely stupid for masses of people to all have their own little homelabs. And being an admin is a serious trade with a lot of skills and it is a time sink. And it is risky. If we are doing stuff online that we want to last, that is important, there are reasons to leave it to smarty pants nerds. Just like home maintenece or health care or hair cuts… there is a role for hobby DIY and a role for getting a pro.
If you cant parse the documentation to figure out how to set it up, you are not competant to do it. The software is not ready to be run by a person of your skill level. And im not saying that to be shitty to you; i looked at the requirements and i think it would be more than i have the time/knowledge to do. I have tried and failed for this reason at lots of things.
This is really complex project. Try something simpler Here is a list (simple to ultra complicated): https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
There are a couple of selfhost(ed) communities on lemmy too
Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn’t take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn’t cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can’t say the same with this one.
In any case, whilst you won’t get the r/funny’s of Reddit going private indefinitely, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they’re blacking out immediately.
It’s pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn’t at least attempt to make an user relations play here.
The fact all those private and shuttered subreddits and deleted comments/posts already break a lot of “site:reddit.com” searches is a big deal for their traffic, too.
it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we’ll profit from it in new users. Spez’s problem isn’t that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.
I’m pretty sure his dream is just to make increasingly absurd amounts of money, every year more than the last: Line Go Up, forever. That dream is attainable in the short term, but utterly unattainable in the long term on a planet with finite resources.
He’s just in it for the $$$, regardless of how, not for any of the things that’re good about reddit. Someone who cared about reddit for any other reason wouldn’t do this to it.
That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez.
Tone deafness is spez’s speciality.
Everything passes. Including reddit. waves hands this is all just temporary.
Type O Negative - Everything Dies has surprisingly fitting lyrics for the search of people for a place to stay.
I wasn’t familiar with the band and for whatever reason based on the names I had thought it was going to be either an indie pop or a folk punk song.
I was not expecting I LIKE VITAMIIIIIIIIIINS to be growled at me like that, I had a good laugh.
At this point I’m convinced there’s no one running PR, it’s just Spez and his admin lackeys coming up with random stuff Musk-style.
Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:
The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
Great interview from Christian there, it really is so frustrating that Reddit is and has been so hostile towards him. :(
Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol
The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.
Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he’s doing his job perfectly. He’s looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He’s put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He’s a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.
Ah, the business world.
Fucks over Ellen Pao so that all hatred is directed at her, discovers a few years later that corporate can do the same to him.
surprisedpikachu
Although, I think he hasn’t actually learned this yet and still believes he’s doing a great job. His comments a few years ago about how he “sees [himself] as a leader, rather than a slave” speak to his arrogance (and also his weird philosophies; I’m pretty sure this is a dude who unironically considers himself a real life Hank Rearden… shiver).
It’ll actually be really funny if they just knock him out of the way just before the IPO. CEO makes bad decisions and proves to be a liability. IPO not looking as profitable. Get rid of CEO to gain trust from investors? Launch IPO. Take the money and run. Of course, the decisions were on them as well, but of course they’ll claim no credit for it.
I’m sure he has contingencies in place, but still. It would be a hilarious end to his tenure if something like that happened.
This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.
These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.
I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.
I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.
It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.
He should opensource it, then. Someone else will do it.
I’m pretty he just wants to go take a week long nap before answering any more questions.
Has anyone considered creating a bridging API interface for lemmy? Something that can translate between the lemmy and reddit API to make this easier?
Still new, but this was gaining a bit of traction a few days ago:
Do you know if there’s a drop-in replacement for PRAW in the works? It would be nice to be able to port bots over easily for communities that relied on them.
I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.
The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.
No reason to go back and every reason not to. The Fediverse is my home now.
Right? This was always bound to happen. The only way it wouldn’t be innevitable would require Reddit be a non-profit or co-op or equivalent. Which it certainly isn’t.
I also agree, the sudden breath into the fediverse (I’ve been poking my head in since I ran a nextcloud instance and they had a plugin for the fediverse called nextcloud social.). This place isn’t just a handful of OSS developers and enthusiasts anymore, but something starting to resemble a community of all types.
It reminds me of when Reddit was good, way back in like 2010 (for me) - but it feels more consequential now!
I don’t care about fixing reddit either, I don’t care if it lives or dies, not anymore, tho it wouldn’t be bad IMO teaching the CEO a lesson in humility.
Hard to teach humility to a dude who is surrounded by institutional investors funneling millions into his pockets.
But yeah I hope this is ruining his sleep
Not sure he is able to learn.
no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king.
Every decision is made by one person or a party of people specifically saying “Yes” to it. Whether they are “idiot[s]” is up for debate, but every single event involving anything artificial is decided by a person/people, not merely a faceless system.
I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted to fediverse, Mastodon just didn’t fill-in for twitter in the way that the lemmy instances have, once I learned how they work together.
Now that I have gotten over the first hump, it feels new and exciting enough to make up for the lack of diverse content. I really think lemmy/kbin can be the platforms that push forward an interoperable, self-custodial social media.
I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.
I’m not giving up. 11 year account deleted. I might read stuff on Reddit from time to time, but it will be without an account, in a private tab, through a vpn, with an ad blocker on.
hang on, what leaked internal email, do you know where I can find that?
i want to call complete BS on them making it out like the Redditors protesting would physically assault the staff. Guess that’s probably a reasonable thing now though. People are whacked in the head.
Seems on brand after the CEO doubled down on falsely accusing the Apollo dev of blackmail, even though the Apollo dev posted the recordings proving otherwise.
Yep. That was the point I became what he calls a ”whiny “ person and deleted my account.
I thought that was quite an escalation also. But maybe their health & safety committee reccomended it. Probably just trying to make the workers feel embattled and unsafe so they would avoid engaging with the issues and stay to reddits side. Its a PUA kind of doublespeak; spez is the one actually making the threat. But in a way it seems to come from us.
To be a fly on the wall at the water cooler. Please reddit workers, leak a zoom call.
I wonder if things are as tense as was shown in that video from reddit HQ.
was hovering over the link like “is this going to be a rick roll or something?”
so I click it and YES this is literally what I was imagining. not the rick roll, the previous comment. fucking brilliant. in the comments it says it is the last post to /r/videos
a lot of people mentioning ./ and digg here. on ./ there was this “first post” joke. it was very boring even at that time IMHO. but now is the moment to be thinking about “last post” if you are a person who has “last post” powers.
Well in a world where people will attack a fast food worker for their order being wrong, it’s probably prudent to make sure the employees you are responsible for are protected.
It at least seems like an attempt to push an “us” vs. “them” mentality.
He wasn’t content on slandering the Apollo Dev, now he’s slandering all of us
i like the part where he implies that redditors are so deranged they will physically assault his employees.
there are also a lot of subreddits that went readonly. which doesn’t hurt much. when the first google result for something is a functional readonly reddit page, reddit has succeeded. When the first result I click is a message about the issue we’re facing that is much worse for reddit.
At the same time, the couple of subs posting the images and only the images are causing /r/all to have some anti-reddit commentary.
Either way, r/all doesnt look that different. Ok, normal-reddit-for-thing isnt on the front page, instead smaller-reddit-for-thing is there.
I’m sure moderators will plan more, but I think it’s going to be difficult to maintain coordination and whether I like it or not, I get reddits approach to just ignore this.
It’s functional for the users, but not for Reddit who wants more data/engagement.
But yeah, the smaller reddit thingy is true. r/thesims4 was open when r/sims4 was not.
/r/ModCoord thread working on extending the blackout beyond tomorrow, as a response to Steve’s email: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
That’s great news 👏. I really hope most of the subs currently participating end up going indefinite. Especially with Spez shrugging off the whole thing in the media.
People commenting on there calling them lame for trying to protect the communities that they care about. Yet these idiots use the platform (for free) and just gobble up promotions and ads from daddy corporate and say thank you
This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.
However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.
To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.
Just my 1/2 cents.
Yeah I wouldn’t have ever signed up for lemmy if this api thing hadn’t come about. This is my first fediverse experience. I was pissed at reddit, but now I don’t care about reddit one way or another. Lemmy has gained enough users to sustain itself even if there is no more mass migration. There is an active community here that will help lemmy grow organically over time.
Mastodon’s story feels pretty similar Starts off as a small project, Twitter becomes worse due to corporate capitalism, mass influx is users some of those stay. Twitter still exists, but mastodon now is known and used interchangeably.
relying to lots of ads and
older demographicslow-literacy masses to sustainFIFY
Among the “older demographics” there are the most “nerdy” people, those born when personal computers and the internet didn’t exist, those growing up together with technology, used to a world when corporations didn’t destroy the good of sharing knowledge.
Those are the people most likely to rebel to what reddit is doing and find their way out if it, because they know it’s possible, because they’ve seen it before.
Youngest people are used to how the world is nowadays because it’s all they’ve seen, but they can be shown the difference if they’ll willing to listen.
Low-literacy masses are those who don’t listen because they don’t care, people of that sort exist in every age “range” and are unfortunately the majority of content “consumers”, that’s why Facebook(/Instagram/WhatsApp) doesn’t die, and Reddit won’t either most probably.
Exactly, I’m ‘older’ but I grew up with the internet in the 90s and know what it was before it turned into a monetized cesspool of corporate trash.
I’m trying to figure out what kind of blackout you’re talking about. I open up (oh my God, I feel like a heretic) Reddit and guess what? Hardly anything has changed on Reddit. My feed is still there. Yes, a grand total of five ever-fronting subs stopped working, ten more subs took a formal vote, and… it’s still the same. Every social network goes the way of monetizing content. I first joined Reddit in 2015, at the time it was an incomprehensible pseudo-social network with an awkward interface. It took almost 18 years before Reddit became usable. But blackout is still a long way off. While kbin/lemmy is consolidated by the thought of blackout, but people can’t stay in suspense for long.
It’s still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.
I don’t think the monetisation of content is inevitable for social media . It’s inevitable for companies driven by profit who fully control a platform if that company wants to survive - but there are other ways to structure a community that doesn’t rely on centralised platforms run by a business.
I guess we might see if i’m right over the next decade or two. I hope I am.
Reddit relies on user generated content, so it if the few users who actually generate entertaining stuff take their business elsewhere it will go the way of Myspace and DIgg. Because there is already a Facebook for old people.
Spez has told Reddit staff that the Reddit blackout “will pass”.
He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.
A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.
The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.
deleted by creator
Agree. It is not about negotiating. The point is we need a open Forum platform. Usenet use to be that platform, and it got shutdown basically by ISPs that did not want the cost and hassle. Then everything fragmented into separate websites, then it re-consolidated around one commercial platform for each segment. I.E. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Youtube, Instagram, … That is the fundamental problem. The Fediverse frankly is the only thing I have seen to at least makes a credible try to change that. ALL of these should be decentralized or federated, one or the other.
Other point I would make, Forums have a lot less network effect then friends networks like Facebook. My point is that less scale is required.
I think lemmy is pretty much at the number of users now where it can self propagate. I dont care what happens to reddit past this point, as long as lemmy stays active
There are a couple of subreddits that will go blackout indefinitely. I think r/video is one of them, and it’s quite big. This can be annoying for the platform.
They can, and probably will, replace the mods I wager
But a bunch of people will be permanently gone by then I hope
As others mentioned, if any worthwhile subreddit goes dark, then the mods will be replaced and it’ll be brought back.
Creating some noise works only if anyone is listening and willing to respond and enact change. Absolutely not in this scenario. The sad reality is the vocal ones are in the minority in the grand scheme of things. The 50k people leaving is, probably, pocket change and aren’t the ones that the platform is geared towards nowadays.
Excellent, I can only hope more join them.
Being out for a few days or a week could be enough for a disapera to form and go elsewhere. For me, I am finding Lemmy and Mastodon are more usable. If even 1% go to Lemmy or Masatadon, a critical mass might be established and people will stay.
Not to mention, it doesn’t feel like the blackout did anything either. I opened up r/all on Sync just now and it didn’t feel any different than it did a week ago besides a bunch of posts that say that Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps.
Yeah, I noticed the same. All it really showed me was how many subs didn’t black out…
Some subs went into restricted posting mode and made it so the only post in the past 2 days is that Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps. I’m not sure how you are expecting r/all to actually look. Even if every major subs closed their doors forever, as long as there is any activity on the site r/all will be populated.
Blacking out indefinitely won’t change a thing. Reddit has before and will again, if threatened this way, re-open shuttered subs if they believe it is valuable for their bottom line.
Agreed, but I don’t think negotiating is going to do anything. If they were to negotiate, it would likely only work temporarily. They would likely just changes the terms of the deal when it suits them.
I really feel like Reddit is in “pumping money out of the users” mode at their own expense.
Sadly the only solution feels like parting ways with them.
Maybe so. It wouldn’t be the first time - I’ve left platforms that have gone downhill before and I’ll do it again. But it is psychologically difficult to let go of a site that I’ve used for over a decade and made so many connections through. That’s how they get you I suppose, the sunk cost fallacy.
For sure. I feel the same way. I feel like I’ve developed hobbies from niche subreddits I’ve discovered over the years. Makes me wonder what other interests I could get into if I stuck it out. But I won’t be doing that with their horrible mobile app, or to be spammed to use the mobile app every time I access the site from a mobile browser.
I’ve made my peace with it and I’m going to move on.
r/piracy with a message to us lemmy:
This is a sub that could really benefit from just leaving reddit entirely anyways. Potentially being able to have more open discussions centered around piracy would make the content of that sub so much better.
That. Being able to actually post links to websites.
Is the exclamation mark command meant to trigger a link? It doesn’t do anything for me. My “home” lemmy is lemm.ee if that makes a difference.
Lots of Fediverse stuff works like you might know email to work, i.e.
thing@place.com, no matter where your email is hosted, you can send and receive messages from other hosts.In this Case, the
piracycommunity, within thelemmy.dbzer0.comdomain, you should be able to copy-paste the [email protected], or any community like it, into the search bar of your home lemmy server and be able to subscribe.Unless it’s blocked…
I’m not sure how to make a link to communities so that it works for everyone sorry. But yeah the ! Does indicate a community usually
So, apparently the mod purge started, one of the mods of /r/tumblr confirms getting booted out of the mod team and opening the sub
deleted by creator
Missed it, same thing?
deleted by creator
Saw that coming.
Not surprised in the least that they’re purging mods here, but I’m a little surprised they’re doing it during these 48 hours. Seems like it’d be a better move to at least wait until the protest ends before cracking down on delinquent subs/mods. Not that reddit has done anything to suggest that they’d act intelligently in this.
But r/tumbler is currently private
So it was for nothing, even better!
I posted this on Kbin too, but I thought people might find it interesting here as well. I feel like maybe younger/shorter term users, and other people really don’t fully understand what’s going on with Reddit, and how it’s been building to a crescendo for a while.
tl;dr: This shift in Reddit has been coming for awhile, and was heralded years ago by fundamental changes they made to how users engage with their platform, most specifically by turning “/r/all” into “/r/onlywhatwewantyoutosee”.
I was a Reddit user for 12 years and change. I pre-date the Digg migration, and honestly I thought the years after that were its peak. There were warning signs that it was going downhill at many points in time, but I think the moment that really signaled Reddit was never going to return to what made it popular and successful is when they removed NSFW subs from /r/all…even though they’d rolled out /r/popular a year or two prior, supposedly for that purpose.
It’s not because of the restriction of NSFW subs in and of itself, it’s the implications/precedents that were set for the service as a whole. At that point, it became crystal clear that Reddit wanted to make sure the vast majority of users would be stuck with reddit recommended content only, and from there out it’s felt more like user manipulation for maximum advertising. Think about it - probably 50% of the most popular posts are either thinly veiled ads, or posts LOADED with ads that Reddit is surely getting clickshare revenue for linking to. Then there’s the sponsored posts hidden in with the normal posts, and the banner ads inserted between those.
The point of /r/all was to show everything, in real time, as it was growing in popularity. That’s how people discover things they like that they didn’t know existed - but finding those things, means spending less time in the controlled environment engaging with the content they most want you to engage with, and making them less revenue as a result. When /r/all turns into “/r/onlywhatcorporatewantsyoutosee”, there’s really no going back or improving. This API bullshit is just the next iteration of that same long term strategy - control what users see and interact with by forcing them to stay in their tightly controlled environment
NSFW posts weren’t the primary reason why /r/all got limits. /r/all was littered with hate and bigotry and general garbage. If /r/all had been left alone, Reddit would have continued on the path to becoming Voat.
Not modifying, to some degree, what subreddits appear on /r/all would have made trying to remove the bigotry off the site that much harder. (It will never completely go away; the site is too huge at this point.) While they should have used the idea of quarantines long before they started out with flat-out removal of these subs, these weren’t just “[racist slur] are dumb” type of stuff. These were subs that outright called for the violence and death of people who weren’t them. These were places for racists and bigots who had no qualm about doxxing people with hopes that bad things would happen to them.
You can argue “Well, then, ban the people who do that kind of thing!” Sometimes when the pool gets full of scum, you have to recognize the point where spot cleaning isn’t the cure and you have to drain the pool to stop the scum from gathering.
You’re not wrong at all on that, however, the quarantining and banning of hate communities happened before the removal of any and all NSFW subs from /r/all. The hate groups were largely getting restricted well before that. I realize they’re two sides of a similar coin - but there were different motives behind the shifts. Recall also, that most of those groups getting quarantined and banned were not NSFW communities.
Nobody was using boobs or twerk videos for hate speech. A 4K/60FPS version of that gif of Alexandra Daddario wasn’t being used to advocate violence against political figures. That later shift was done purely for user control of content. Reddit (probably) isn’t getting click shares off of imgur reposts of daddarios boobs. If they’re not standing to gain, they lose every time someone leaves the front page and goes to a sub page to explore more. They also get fewer eyes on their paid content if people are turned off from using /r/all because they don’t want to see said boobs. That particular move was a dollars and cents content control move only.
Controlling the cattle has become the overwhelming purpose of the Haves.
The other side to all commercial social apps is driving engagement, and as you said driving ads and cash generation. These both are harmful to users. Driving engagement seems to be a more subtle thing, but more harmful of the two as it is kind of corrosive. So commercial social apps are just bad.
deleted by creator
After slandering the Apollo Dev, Steve now starts to slander the entire userbase.
But please continue to mod unpaid and unappreciated!
What a drama queen. No one has suggested anything more violent than harsh language.
We absolutely must ship what we said we would.
Nothing new, but shows that there is absolutely no attempt to find a compromise. I won’t be coming back on Wednesday.
Did he just imply people will protest by assaulting someone wearing a reddit logo?!
Correct, when you think he can’t sink lower he starts to Digg
To be fair, he isn’t wrong.
I cannot see another blackout happening. I think a sizeable chunk of Reddit’s moderators would go back if it otherwise meant losing power and influence on one of the largest social media sites.
Of course a lengthier or indefinite blackout of most of Reddit’s communities would cause major disruption.
I just used Power Delete Suite to remove all my comments and submissions
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I am just a drop in the ocean, but I won’t be going back to reddit now that’s I’ve discovered the fediverse
this feels like the internet I fell in love with back in the mid 90s with smaller communities and no corporations trying to control what I interact with
Considering doing what someone else suggested and editing all your comments to explain why you left, to mess with the data it has access to rather than outright removing it
Haha this sounds like such an amazing F you to reddit.
This is what I did, too. I even included a little blurb about Lemmy.
I suspect the account might just get banned and comments deleted, but nevertheless they were (or will be) there for at least a little while, and it removed my participation in reddit’s profit machine. It was oh so satisfying to do even if it only had a super small impact.
oh man I’d love to run that but I feel it’d be wrong to purge all of the technical answers I’ve posted over the years. I think it’s better to pass on that one
it had an option to export your comments into a .csv, so theoretically you could post them elsewhere if you want
but that could be a lot of work so I understand just leaving comments as they are
Archiving copies of my Reddit history would be nice, but here’s a somewhat idiotic question.
I use commas in copy a lot, so a CSV file sounds like a nightmare. How’s that handled?
Csv is not always comma delimited. It could also be delimited with a tab, semicolon, or pipe (|)
Isn’t a tab delimeted spreadsheet normally called a TSV, as in “Tab-Separated Values”?
Isn’t CSV literally Comma-Separated Values?
Sorry, pedantry doesn’t die.
A little bit yes, a little bit no
Tab delimited csv are sometimes called tsv, but just as often you’ll see csv (tab delimited) as a file type option
See the wiki section on standardization for details.
Csv currently includes the following delimiters:
Comma, space, tab, pipe, or semicolon
Now that you point it out, I remember being able to set delimiters on exports. It’s just been ages since I was generating them.
you can enclose the contents of a field in double quotes so that commas withing a field don’t break it.
I believe CSV format has quoting rules. Hope the software understands them. :)
You can filter by subreddit in Power Suite Delete, so if your tech answers are in specific subs, you can leave those alone and delete everything else
Just kicked it off on my account, it’s currently rewriting every Reddit comment I ever made. Feels good.
This has been absolutely wild. Sadly, it’s not that surprising and the corporate speak is strong. While Reddit likely won’t change, the “type” of users that will leave over this is the kind of users that made Reddit the community it is today. These are all likely active members from Fark, Slashdot, Digg, and others.
Good news though, we’ve got a group of people that are experienced in making fantastic communities. I’ll bet we’ll do it again. We’ll see how this goes with the Fedditverse/Threadverse via Lemmy/kbin. I’m sure we’ll figure this community/magazine thing out soon enough.
Sometimes all we can control is how we react to the situation.
I find it a bit disheartening that a lot of comments on Reddit (I know I’m mostly staying away) are labeling us, the people who take issue with not only the API pricing but the entire direction the site is going, snowflakes and whiny babies.
A lot of “I don’t cares” and “I just want to use the site not see this useless protest” etc. I remember a time when reddit could come together and actually get results (for better and for worse).
Even the way people comment is different. Seems like a lot more low effort, mouth breather posts, or suspiciously bad faith arguments that I see in response to the increasingly rare thoughtful/informative dialogue in the form of posts or comments.
I’m not saying the site was ever an iconic standard to the peak intellectual, but there seemed to be more people hungry for that type of content.
Maybe I’m just looking back at everything through rose tinted glasses, but I miss the days of ending up going down a new rabbithole sparked by a random comment chain.
I wonder if it’s just me and I’m just turning into that old bitter dude longing for the “good ole days.”
That’s reddit from 8+ years ago you’re talking about, and small communities. Reddit has long been a mainstream community now, and we all know how the average person is.
Guess I am getting old. Hope Lemmy here can usher in a new wave of similar content. I’ll have to wait and see.
