It is. Mass resident here. When the groups against this law were campaigning, they televised very creepy PSAs explaining this farcical point, to scare residents into voting against it. One I remember in particular was a POV shot of a man stalking a woman in a parking garage on her way to her vehicle.
Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.
Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain.
Give it a few months, it'll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off.
They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here.
They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank.
The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money.
But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.
This whole conflict could have been nipped in the bud, people would have grumbled a bit, but as long as Reddit got their act together in terms of tooling eventually, life would have gone on, and Reddit would have had their payday too (I doubt milking mods for spare change is the master plan here).
Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.
This is the end, it's all downhill from here, I doubt they can recover.
Needless to say I'll avoid their IPO like the plague and so will many others.
10 years from now something else will have come along and replaced them and we'll all look back at this moment.
There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.
No doubt some have already contacted Reddit management saying that if they de-mod x subreddit they will jump in and guarantee the subreddit's operation.
I don't understand the argument about the lack of free labour drying up. It won't. There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. And Reddit management knows this. For years they have seen how moderators relish and also abuse power. That's why there are moderator guidelines.
In fact, I think it can be argued that Reddit is leveraging this moment to flush out long standing and troublesome moderators which I think is clearly being what the end game is. And Huffman's goal.
It may be silly of me to say, however, I don't think people are giving Huffman enough credit. He knew that there would be significant blowback. He has been involved with Reddit longer and probably far more in depth than any other employee or user. I wouldn't put it past him that he knows Reddit moderation is due for a shake up and is probably keen on getting rid of a subset. And by doing so he can not only pick and choose which users he wants in on what subreddits but more importantly can dictate the culture he wants.
This whole episode if far from over. He has clearly said that the new API changes are going nowhere and I'm willing to bet that he gets what he wants (which includes a mod clean out) with the outcome being a few people quitting the site and people talking about him from now until eternity.
> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. (...) There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power.
Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power. This is how people seeking status and power self-identify, and if they're given mod power, you can count on their subreddits going to shit rather quickly, and/or them eventually getting bored and quitting, once they realize that being a mod is a hard and thankless job, with people who need you the most hating you the most.
Now sure, the current set of moderators isn't made of saints and purely selfless people either. But it's stable. The worst moderators long ago dropped out, or rode their subreddits down to ground. Reddit ecosystem reached an equilibrium. Now the corporate is shaking everything up, and the platform will have to re-equilibrize again. I expect to watch good subreddits go to shit, some getting forked off, and maybe those forks thriving if there's still enough selfless enough volunteers left after this debacle.
There's more: to the extent that Reddit corporate jumps at the chance to accept all these people, it will be replacing the 'currently stable' moderation environment with a substantial class of ringers, where we don't know their intentions other than they are prepared to back Reddit's power move here.
This is potentially a Twitter-like implosion, if they go there. Far from having major subreddits taken over by companies (which likely have no idea this is happening and have no motivation to suddenly supply social media volunteers), it's gonna be major subreddits taken over by kittens in blenders and 4chan-like behavior.
There's common factors among folks like this, and one is that they can be coordinated. I think it much more likely that Reddit gets taken over by conspiracy theorists and terrorists, than, for instance, hippies. Some will be very pleased at the result, but then some are really pleased at what's happened to Twitter (as long as you ignore the valuation, that is)
Lucid comment. Yes, always approach moderator, admin, other similar role candidates first. Some of the ones asking are going to be great. The trouble lies with the rest, who should never have the role.
Long ago, that was how I became a sysadmin. I still remember some of the talks. Great stuff on how to take good care of users, systems, other things.
On Reddit, people asking to moderate has generally been a bust in my experience.
I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread.
(We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.)
Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.
I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.
No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good.
Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.
> I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO
I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO.
My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.
I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone.
I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space.
In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine.
That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it.
So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!"
For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago.
In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place.
If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.
I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.
Yep, I was also shadow banned from my local city subreddit shortly after being blanked banned from several other subreddits for simply participating in unrelated subreddits. Shadowbans are particularly problematic in city based subreddits where people are more likely to actually try and connect for something in meat space. Missing persons, lost pets, etc. We found a stray pet, but it took my wife creating an account, to finally connect with the owner via reddit despite me having had a 10 plus year old reddit account that was shadowbanned for our city.
> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not
I think they can be justified under select circumstances.
For instance, I think a shadowban is justified for accounts that exist merely to post spam or purposely derail every thread, and obviously aren't being used by a reasonable person. If an account represents a long-term existential threat to the quality of the community, then almost any legal means are justified to take action against it. Whether it's a bot or a human who just wants to watch the community burn, let them shout into the ether.
On the other hand, shadowbans against people who accidentally break the rules a couple times, or call someone a doodiehead, or have the wrong politics, or are subscribed to the wrong communities, are largely unethical. It's a form of disembodiment being imposed on an individual who has a reason for wanting to communicate with others, even if their communication is considered disagreeable.
Even in the case of the incessant troll, the shadowban is just pretend. I identified after three posts with no engagement that something was afoot, and in order to see it, all I had to do was log out. It is incredibly petty, and even more ineffective.
> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.
Yeah, shadowbans suck.
On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.
>Yeah, shadowbans suck. On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.
Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.
How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.
> One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.
That’s pretty much what Reddit is like already. If you dislike the mods of one subreddit you can join another competing subreddit, or start your own.
Likewise, with Lemmy if the people on one instance are bad, leave the instance and join another or run an instance of your own.
I also got into a small argument in another thread about low effort sites.
Another constant criticism of fediverse sites I'm seeing here is equally weird, this idea that responsibility for finding the right instance is given - not forced upon, but gifted to - the user, and that is a problem.
It's a feature, it's the feature that makes the system invulnerable to the sort of enshittification that this forum's parent organization specializes in. therefore, in the minds of quite a lot of people here, it's a bug, and frankly, of course VC heads would think that way; never mind the petty dictatorship of the moderator, if there is no market capturing endgame where you can either cash out or seize a community and abuse it as your personal platform (Hi, Elon), that definitely is a bug, I suppose.
My thinking is that having a slight learning curve barrier to entry, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having a zero effort onboarding process, maybe THAT is the bug. Because who does an easy onboarding process serve, if not the VChead who wants to capture as many eyeballs as possible and turn them into income? It certainly doesn't seem to help the mods who have to deal with people who can very easily create a new account once banned.
And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.
(edit: thinking about it, though, I had nothing good to say about r/Winnipeg in the days after the shadowban, and I did speak about it in other places as a factual thing that I could demonstrate to be true. As such, their action along with my reaction was ultimately corrosive to the legitimacy of the subreddit. But at this point we've moved on to discussing the legitimacy of the whole site, and in my mind, it lost its legitimacy when it enabled shadowbans...)
But, I can see why reddit moderators have to resort to it: they do not have the ability to ban IPs, and Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs or IP blocks, because that runs contrary to their primary purpose, to capture and monetize eyeballs.
Compare to an operator of an individual Instance: of a sub is having issues with a persistent individual troll, they can appeal to the sysop (I just decided I'm calling them sysops and I don't give a shit what anyone else does) and have that individual's IP banned. If other instances allow him to return through them, well, we have defederation for instances that don't keep their houses clean.
Moreover, the sysop has zero motivation to build up as many users as possible, and that is going to do more than anything else to ensure that the only instances which tolerate trolls are going to be the ones setup specifically for that purpose, and that problem is already more or less sorted [edit: on the fediverse, anyways...].
Bottom line, the problem you're describing arises from the attempt to make content moderation compatible with scale, and that's just never gonna work, and without scale, you have no capitalism.
> And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.
If the user doesn't post, then shadow banning is much harder to detect. I regularly see comments from users who were shadow-banned by Reddit; it can take months for them to figure it out. We use shadow-banning only on spammers and trolls. Our process requires peer approval and evidence; there's also an audit trail. We used to ban these accounts, but shadow-banning them instead substantially reduced the amount of harassment we receive. Conflict is inevitable when moderating a subreddit, and we'd rather spend our effort on users who participate in good faith.
And that's one reason the platform has no legitimacy. You say YOU only use it on a certain type, but it got used on me. Have a look at my comments here, I'm far from perfect but I'm neither of those things.
I outlined in a different conversation in this thread that I can see why you have to resort to this: Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs, and I assume you are likewise not empowered to.
Reddit needs as many eyeballs as they can get, and that is why if you simply ban an account they are able to create a new one; the problem for you, the cog, is unfortunate, but from their perspective they get a new user on their balance sheet every time.
Reddit is incentivized to make your task a struggle that never ends. So it's not that I judge you for it, I judge Reddit's conflict of interest and complete unsuitability as a public square.
That said, I still see what you do as fundamentally cowardly.
Edit: It is intended to be a process with no appeal as a feature. Would you sign up to have your relationship with a community forum severed, secretly and capriciously, and with no appeal or review intended to be possible, at the whim of someone you have never met? And even if you had an attack of integrity, it will never not be a Reddit feature for the reasons outlined above, so your only course of action would not be to stop shadowbanning, but rather, to simply leave the forum for a better one. If Reddit survives as a place where Geographical locations keep their community forums, that will be a horrible fate for us.
To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?".
I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.
> from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO.
It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".
I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them.
Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:
- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.
- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.
- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.
- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.
- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.
- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.
- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.
I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.
Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened.
Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.
I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.
So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.
> So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.
I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).
The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.
An issue that has no relevance to the discussion of silos vs fediverse. If anything, the fedi is probably going to allow for slightly more actual free speech in the end; nobody is gonna kick Trump off truth.social, for instance, and people who are into that sort of thing still get to have a community, whatever mainline Mastodon might think about that. I doubt r/the_donald is ever coming back.
> Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.
This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me".
If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.
Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one".
I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil.
Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period.
That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.
I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated.
It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after.
Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.
This forum does have nuanced thought, from some users, some of the time.
But I wouldn't say that's the case for the majority of comments on complex, charged, and/or politicized issues. Most of us are morons about most things; and most of the time we don't even know it.
And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.
This issue is very clear - Huffman is 100% in the wrong. He's been caught lying about some very serious issues, like utterly falsely claiming blackmail - and then doubled and tripled down it. He has made his character known over the years, un-personing Swartz, editing users comments for giggles, letting bots and advertisers swarm the site, etc.
Most mods AND communities on Reddit are against these changes, strongly, and have made that abundantly clear.
Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over
Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.
You are the exception, not the rule. Overzealous or corporate owned reddit mods already killed the site for a lot of people. I feel bad for the mods of smaller communities, but I have no sympathy for most. I'm glad that people like you are walking away, you can make some other part of the internet a better place, or better yet, you can now devote your efforts to making some real place better.
The people invested in the community (or their vision of the community) enough to do that job for free, and do it well enough the community accepts it. I.e. people either not from the group I mentioned, or the least bad cases from it.
Right now (or at least before the blackout), you were looking at subreddits in a steady state. Some had excellent moderation, others less so. Users moved around according to their tastes, and as things settled, every subreddit ended having its own kind of flavor and quality level.
With the existing moderators leaving in protest and with Reddit shaking things up, everything is in flux again. It will take time for the worst, power/status-seeking mods to eventually get bored and drop out (thankfully Reddit isn't actually paying the mods, thus giving the bad ones little reason to stay), possibly destroying whatever subreddits they took over in the process.
People are always stepping up to be mods. Most shouldn't be.
The existing mods of successful subreddits are the ones who stepped up, should have been mods, and who demonstrated it by creating a successful community. If you replace those by random wannabe mods, on average the result will be bad.
Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.
Mods should be servant to their community; and not use them for whatever purpose they see fit. It's a thankless, ungrateful job. But here is the trick: no one is forcing you to take it. If you think Reddit changes are the straw that broke the camel's back, and that it's not worth it anymore you do have an option: step down.
But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.
>Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.
Yet I'm not hearing Reddit talk about hiring professional moderators
>Mods should be servant to their community
Why? They're not working for a charity. If Reddit expects free servants, there's regulations on things like internships, which Reddit doesn't appear to be remotely in compliance with. Servants generally get paid when working at for-profit companies or are otherwise subject to specific labor laws for things like internships. How many IPO shares are Reddit's servants getting?
>But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.
Yet there is a long history of labor strikes. Reddit could find itself facing a class action lawsuit by ex-moderators over unpaid wages. The more Reddit gets itself involved in managing free labor, the more it exposes itself to liability.
if you don't like what that the users of a sub (both unpaid moderating users and non-moderating users) decided to do with their sub, you can always start your own
honestly this is reminiscent of a certain group of people unhappy with the results of how The People voted in a certain election, and consequently complained that said results were illegitimate and should be overturned and the people they disagree with should be removed from power
The polls I have personally had a number of participants that was a single digit percent of the number of subscribers. Not exactly representative of the whole community.
If the participation rate in the US election was 3.5% because they announced it 3 days prior to the vote and only to a fraction of citizens, there would be good reason to be mad at the results
said certain group of people who contest said election use the same argument, among others, to push the view that they're the true majority, and so the election there, too, should be overturned and the opposite result instated, just with different arbitrary and ultimately meaningless thresholds
if you ask me, all those nonvoters would have voted to close down the subreddit. I'd guess you think differently, but since they didn't vote, we'll never know, and they don't count for either.
as a side note, if the result had been the opposite, would the same people be similarly rallying to have the vote overturned and flipped to "blackout" due to the low "turnout"? I doubt it.
And in many cases the results will be catastrophic. In other cases the people stepping up will have no idea what it actually means to moderate the subreddits of the larger sizes, and will subsequently fail.
Sure, if you also let the bots buy things and sell things, then it'll be perfectly reasonable for them to also click on ads.
At that point, however, we may find out that the global economy turned into a fully automated, circular optimization process, and took off, leaving humans behind to starve and die.
Sure, when we solve AI alignment (and I mean x-risk / Eliezer-style AI alignment, not the outrage-minimizing political correctness that's being called "alignment" by OpenAI and the others).
> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.
You mean "4 chan users salivating at the idea of trolling reddit" ?
You mean 'controlling' reddit. Folks like this have had tastes of power before. If you think about it, knowing that Reddit is a feeder to ChatGPT, it could be a strategic move to try and make it so that all the AIs of the future default to 4chan mindset.
Bold if true! Heck of a motivation.
And Reddit as it stands is clearly not optimal for delivering this, but with enough dedicated mods power-modding the heck out of everything, maybe it COULD be the ideal source data for the ultimate 4chan artificial intelligence…
I would be only mildly surprised if some group of channers would plan that. Despite their toxicity, they are the most focused and determined group I have ever seen. So bad it is always for destructive purposes. They could have been great people.
4channers are remarkably resourceful and effective at times, if any group could manage such an ambitious task as poisoning all LLM AIs it would be them. I've heard it described as weaponized autism.
You make some good points but if there's one fatal flaw these big tech CEOs and their boards seem to have it's hubris. Reddit doesn't have a moat and it also doesn't have data that's amazingly interesting. This may very well be part of a power play by Huffman but he's forgotten the only two things that really matter at the end of the day, which are quality and volume/scale. Screwing his mods hurts him on both of those counts, because bottom line is it will result in people leaving and putting their energy into rival projects. Tech giants can and do fall and it almost always happens because they lose sight of those two things which matter and get embroiled in their own internal political navel-gazing BS. If he is sacrificing quality and scale for anything he's slowly signing the death warrant of the business he manages.
Mind you this may even be intentional - "let's move this business into the maturation phase where it continually gets shittier and our margins get higher until it collapses and we sell it off or something" is a completely normal and regular strategy, happens all the time, businesses exist to make money for their owners. All businesses go through three phases, growth, maturity, and decline. But as a user or consumer if you see it moving toward the end of the cycle it's usually in your best interest to get the hell out sooner rather than later.
Reddit has a tremendous moat. Like any social network, its users are the moat. Its usability has gotten worse in the past few years but there simply aren't great alternatives. (Federated services like Lemmy are not serious reddit alternatives.)
Well it's the long tail of high-effort users, comments, subreddits, that are the moat. The vast majority of content is replaceable by tiktok, twitter, etc...
Users are a pretty weak moat. We know this because if they were a good one, Reddit wouldn't exist. We'd all still be on Myspace or Digg or wherever. Apple, Microsoft, Google, those guys have moats. Leaving their ecosystems is HARD. Leaving Myspace, Digg, Facebook or Reddit just because there are less users somewhere else isn't really that big of a loss. Once people have a good alternative they do it pretty quickly. The history of rapid turnover in social media giants compared to other tech sectors is the proof.
If you wanted to be edgy I think you could even argue users are an anti-moat for social media because they age, become uncool, and then the next generation doesn't want to hang out in your uncool boomer space and goes somewhere else. This is FB's current predicament.
As a general principle, people in that line self-identify as unsuitable for the role and should not be given it, unless your goal is to destroy the community.
Which I guess is fine for Reddit - people will escape bad mods by forking subreddits off, and things will eventually settle down. Just don't expect your favorite subreddits to be there once the dust settles.
> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.
Either those people will be bad mods who will shepherd their communities into further decline, or many of them will eventually come around to the position that Reddit's changes are bad for mods.
There's nothing magic about the current batch of mods other than that they got there first. The same things that affected their perspective will affect the perspective of their replacements.
While I agree that the situation described is excessive, good mods are non fungible, a mod will have to take unpopular decisions, and act according to experience to determine a best path to follow, what the mod team does determines the kind of discussion to be had in the platform and who's allowed to have it
It's the reason subs will look for "experienced mods", there's a learning curve and a taste you'll have to develop, specially with smaller communities
"The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out."
From the AMA by Reddit's CEO 6 days ago[1]:
Mod Tools
We know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.
And once it had gained momentum, it exploded into a power struggle with the owners of the site. It's now a pure tribal war: the mod tribe will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because - just like all major platforms - it cannot support adblocking alternate clients that are profitable while free riding on their infrastructure.
It's also very predictable who will win the war: whomever has the root keys of the servers and web domains. Major reddits like r/funny are providing very limited value in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the content is viral, not locally produced. So if a user is a r/funny subscriber and that goes dark, just present him with content from r/humor for a few months, they will get to see the same viral memes and 95% of the users will never notice anything went wrong.
Mods vastly overestimate their power here and underestimate the number of lurkers that form the backbone of Reddit viewership and are indifferent to this issue.
I take a different view in the sense that reddit has benefitted from the unpaid work of mods for 15+ years.
Mods have generally been either neutral or positive towards reddit as an entity in the past, now... I suspect a lot are asking themselves if continuing to be a mod is worth the effort, at least on reddit itself, I can imagine a lot of them are looking for alternatives or just thinking about giving up altogether.
> (users) will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because it can not support (servicing 3rd party clients)
To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)
They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.
There is a very simple way out that reddit could take, similar to what spotify does: Third Party Apps continue being allowed, but API access requires the user's account to have reddit gold. People would be unhappy and complain, but the protest would end, Reddit would increase their revenue, third party app developers wouldn't have to pay, and people would accept it in the end.
This is not a fight over access fees, it's a fight for data. The fees are prohibitive deliberately, to guarantee nobody makes more money than Reddit out of user generated data.
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate limits to use the Data API free of charge are:
100 queries per minute per OAuth client id if you are using OAuth authentication and 10 queries per minute if you are not using OAuth authentication.
Today, over 90% of apps fall into this category and can continue to access the Data API for free.
Premium Enterprise API / Third-party apps
Effective July 1, 2023, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app).
----
So users are happy to pay, say, Netflix $15 a month, but are outraged when Reddit tries to charge heavy app users $1 a month?
1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls.
Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps". They are ensuring that the only entities that would even be able to afford their API costs are large businesses. As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms. Do you want increased capitalistic control of the Internet? Because this is one further step down that road, that I fear we may already be too far down.
"1k API calls is nothing, and I severely doubt it costs them 24 cents to provide 1k API calls."
Whoever said anything about whether it cost Reddit 24 cents to provide 1k API calls?
This subthread is about whether what Reddit is charging for API calls is "prohibitive", not about what it cost Reddit.
"Besides, they're not charging "heavy app users". They're charging "the apps"."
They're charging whoever uses Reddit's API keys, and I don't understand why third-party app users can't just use their own API keys and pay for their own API usage.
"As much money as Selig was making from Apollo, even he was unable to continue offering the app under these terms."
Why couldn't he just pass the costs down to the users of his app? Or just ask them to use their own API keys?
If it was about the ads, then they'd tie the API access to the user account, and require a user to sub to Gold for the ability to use third-party clients, then ads wouldn't be necessary in the third-party clients. This just goes to show that advertising itself is out of control - either they make more money off ads than they do subscription revenue, or it's purely about control. Money and control are two sides of the exact same coin, so either way you look at it, this is pure greed.
I agree, they are clearly eying data access as a revenue source and company moat, and position themselves for the AI boom. But even a much smaller fee would have killed 3rd party clients, and they needed to do that anyway.
Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage, obviously have false assumptions given they’re actually implementing the plan.
Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage
You fool! Their projections are only garbage, because they haven't IPO'd yet! Sure, they're not profitable now, but once they IPO, they'll have the money to, uh... I mean, to become profitable! That's it!
Facebook was in a much better place when they went for IPO and they stock still fell by more than 50% on the first day. I can't see anyone that has google "reddit" since the last few days look at an IPO and go "ah yes, the website that went down from users leaving it, perfect".
i PRAY for them not to recover. the trouble is, the point with giving subs to IP owners, is extremely likely. though as likely is that reddit will be just bought whole by some ass or another...
i realize this sounds very harsh, but at this point: anything that drives people into federated services is a godsend
> Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.
There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this.
No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care about all of this stuff is a price they're willing to pay.
It seems pretty clear that they believe the people who will leave are not crucial enough (in function and number) to make the overall communities collapse, and that the result they want to achieve is worth the losses.
The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they were against things that fundamentally didn't matter outside of ethics, while this is, especially for moderators, a significant ask for their already unpaid labor. Moderators, emboldened by user support, are on strike because this affects them personally in a big way. The interpersonal bullshit spez in particular has been pulling was just the nail in the coffin for users who weren't quite sure who to support.
I am one of those users who doesn't quite know who to support. I absolutely support the end users generating and consuming the content. There are seemingly regular examples of both, admin and mods abusing these users.
What kind of mod tools do the apps allow that Reddit does not?
I do not know if these are mod tools I would agree are necessary (e.g. bans for repeated spam) or are these tools that I would agree allow mods to abuse their power (e.g. ban users are who mere followers of other subreddits).
Frankly, I fear unofficial mod tools could lead to much worse problems if at least portions of the API are not carefully rate limited. Here I include pricing as a type of rate limiting and this could be Reddit's attempt at reeling in this abuse (even if only for IPO reasons). A particular egregious example of such an abuse would be to download all new users' history of posts to make a race determination and ban a new user because of that. Sure, a mod could do this manually using Reddit's UI, but it would remain more difficult to automate this on a large-scale.
The threshold is being increased from 60 to 100 for bots which didn't delegate auth, but not for any tools that used specific user-ids. It's misleading.
> Important note: Historically, our rate limit response headers indicated counts by client id/user id combination. These headers will update to reflect this new policy based on client id only on July 1, 2023.
Historically, reddit rate limited by user-id, so if for example, both of us logged in using a reddit app, each of us had a rate limit of 60/min free queries. Each app only gets one client-id, regardless of the number of users it has.
Now, the rate limit of 100 is per app, not per user-id, which obviously doesn't work for any tooling that acts on behalf of the user.
Reddit can only make those claims by ignoring "moderator tool" which used user-ids. In a very real sense, reddit apps like "reddit is fun" and "apollo" were moderator tools, and those are the biggest losers in this change.
They are probably downvoted because the majority of developers of said moderator tools have pulled the pin and are shutting them down... seeing as the writing is already on the wall. Why spend any more effort maintaing the tools created when Reddit has said they will kill them off as soon as they have finished their own version? And anyone following what Reddit has been doing in the leadup to this stand-off, would be rightfully suspicious of whether Reddit even intends to uphold their pinky promise here and not just revoke API access as soon as this quietens down.
This is not even accounting for the fact that outside of business practices, they have completely alienated developers, by showing them they will take their words out of context, adversarially try to pit users against them and give them 30 days to comply or else. Why would anyone want to enter in a business agreement with a company that does this, before even looking at price?
Also: reddit pinky promises to implement mod tools they've been pinky promising for more than 5 years. Back when overwatch 1 came out, I became a mod for /r/overwatch_memes (now dead, the subreddit without an underscore ultimately was better) and even modding this subset of a subset of a gaming community would have been impossible without the API. Several moderation features that I ended up developing a bot for (using the API), reddit had been promising to implement for some time, and none of them are currently implemented. If you've been a mod all this time, you know that reddit promises to mods are completely empty. It's been fine until now because you could rely on other tools but modding anything with regular users without these tools is impossible without significantly restricting rules on allowed content.
Reddit destroyed any trust they had, so I'd guess it doesn't matter that much what they say in response at this point. It's too little, too late to say you'll keep API free for some people at this point.
I think there's still a remote opportunity they claw trust back, but it's getting smaller the longer they have their CEO out there telling people to get stuffed.
They made their intentions clear with the pricing change, they want third party apps dead. Why carry on making or supporting them with the shadow of the noose falling on you?
That doesn't matter if they previously broke the bot or the bot author took them down to protest the API price change. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.
• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.
• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.
• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.
• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.
Exactly. I canceled my monthly subscription and logged out. I mostly loved Reddit for long for pieces anyway, so I'm going to pay more attention to Substack and see how that emerges.
> But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.
Nope. The value of being a reddit mod is clout. Clout does not matter to me hence I would not want to skip $$$$ for a clout of one. It matters to them hence they do it for $0.00. As they do not want to do the work, they get no clout. I applaud reddit for nuking them.
They were done the minute mods broke their habit of moderating their subreddits. Some dedicated mods might come back, but it is really hard to return to a lost habits so the damage is done already.
Well, if I was Huffman, the question I would be asking is can I bring revenue up so much from api and other things that I can now employ a lot of mods?
He might have made that call already, and it might be possible.
The same echo chamber some of those very mods operate in. Pot, kettle, black. Suck it up. You think the hot air from those servers comes by magic? Plenty of them need replacing. The king is dead. Long live the king!
> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney,
This happened on the r/audible subreddit, the official audibledotcom customer service account became a mod and started deleting all the threads remotely critical of audible or amazon. The subreddit revolved and they were removed as a mod but it was a solid 5-months of nary a harsh word.
If they ever kill off old.reddit I'm out, I can't stand the cartoony new reddit design.
The whole reason to Google Reddit results is for independent enthusiast opinions positive and especially negative. Corporatised subs are going to kill that dead for many things. Another nail in the coffin of Reddit. Love of money truly is the root of all evil.
I think you’re right. The more I think about it the more I feel like Reddit to me is the comment section for thinks that either don’t have a comment section or have a bad comment section.
It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.)
As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?
Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.
Hacker News is written in arc. The first reddit was written in Common Lisp. clisp, specifically, I believe.
Aaron convinced them to do it in his web.py and it was rewritten in a weekend (or so the story went). Later, it was written in Pylons and open sourced. No idea these days.
This was pretty common back then even for extremely complicated (for the time) sites (graybeard here). FCGI rewarded having a single huge application that would gradually leak memory over the course of the day until you told the intern to bounce the service when certain red lights started going off too frequently.
I had the same impression as you until I listened to a podcast with Steve Huffmann about the early days of Reddit. For some time, he and Aaron worked quite intensively on the site. From the podcast, it rather appeared that they had different visions about the site. Aaron wanted to build a very different kind of community and experience. When Reddit started to become successful, there was less and less time to work on these „visions“ until he lost interest and basically left the team.
As far as I've heard, r/startrek already started their own instance at https://startrek.website and indicated they will close their sub for good. This may be the first major sub to be handed over. Paramount may then even sue startrek.website for IP infringement, etc.
Oh, and /r/DaystromInstitute moved there too. I guess I'll have to check this Lemmy thing out - that subreddit was more than 50% of what kept me logged in to Reddit in the first place.
Interesting that the stickied post on https://startrek.website mentions they have a Patreon setup to help with hosting costs.
> We’ve started a Patreon here: Patreon.com/treksite. There’s only one plan and it’s just $4. If our growth continues like it has, we’re going to need to upgrade our hosting very soon.
$4 is not outside of the realm of what it might have cost a regular user to continue paying for one of these 3rd party Reddit Apps on the new pricing [1]. There are clear benefits to paying your own way: owning your data, stronger community identity; when boiling down to money alone I found it an interesting comparison, since that's what this whole situation started about. However it is certainly no longer just about the money at this point after public comments made by Reddit Corp.
And now we get to the real reason for their bizarre behaviour. They want to push ordinary mods off the platform to be replaced by their own drones. You can tell which subs are modded by shills by who broke the strike. Like r/worldnews that was modded by Ghislaine Maxwell right up until the day she was incarcerated.
https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/
They could just do that anyway, (and I'm pretty sure selling influence is actually one of the things these protesting careerist mods do, just with more steps) the "real reason" is the API is generating less revenue than what it replaces, no big conspiracy
If that where true, they would have replied to those Devs who accepted the new API pricing. Instead, they ignored them for at least 2 out of the 4 weeks notice they gave.
Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I'll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.
Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment.
It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company.
FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with ads and most millennials & genZ seemingly using it as a glorified contacts list. It’s a shadow of what it was.
I disagree. Personally I still think Twitter is a goldmine for following the latest relevant releases of AI-papers (@_akhaliq), the current Stock market buzz (several accounts), and the Ukraine war from an OSINT and serious journalism perspective (@maxseddon).
I won‘t use it anymore since the third party shut down and the inferior product they themselves provide. And the heart of the Apple community migrated to Mastoton and it doesn‘t feel ethically right to use it right now due to right wing people being catered there.
I'd argue that Reddit is even more ideologically biased, especially on the largest subs. Personally, I quite enjoy both sites although they do have different types of content.
Example: Someone just talked about an alleged "crazy MAGA-crowd" on Twitter just because censorship has decreased. That sounds more like "low effort left wing fauxrage" than the opposite.
Yes, with "blocktheblue" installed it's easier than ever to block trolls on sight. Unfortunately some of the trolls are catching and choosing not to get "verified" by lord Elon.
you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter. Heads of states and scientists from around the world still communicate via twitter. Even tumblr-weirdo types still post there. You couldn't be more wrong.
> you have blinders on. Tucker Carlsens videos have tens of millions of views on Twitter.
Twitter misrepresents views and impressions. The "views" you see under the video are impressions. Presumably reached 24ish M views, 110ish M impressions on first episode.
Episode 3 has, presumably, 90M impressions and < .6M likes, < 0.170M retweets etc. The metrics (likes and retweets) are not particularly good for a supposedly high engagement video, are they?
No. I think that in the context, 600k likes is low engagement.
We are speaking about 2-3 orders of magnitude difference.
For comparison, MKBHD video [1], 1.2 orders of magnitude difference between views and likes; Adam's video [2], 1.4 orders; 40 minute long video essay on House Md [3] (1.5M views with subscriber count of 0.15M) , 1.7 orders of magnitude.
Carlson's engagement has 2.17 orders of magnitude difference, while being as long as [1], longer than [2], and far shorter than [3].
All of the videos above are supposed to be far less "entertaining" and are expected to have far less engagement value, yet outperformed Carlson's thing.
Yeah I'll take Twitter's metrics with a metric ton of salt. They cannot be trusted. A "view" could be two seconds of autoplay with the video half-in-view when it shows up in the "for you" tab. Not real engagement.
The voting culture on YT and Twitter could be different.
Everyone kept going on about pressing the like button and smashing the subscribe button on YouTube for years.
I would not be surprised if people on YouTube use the like button more actively than people on Twitter.
Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?
> Besides, is 1.7 orders of magnitude (from one of your examples) even significantly different from 2.1 orders of magnitude enough to draw any conclusions at all?
10^(2.1) / 10^1.7 gives us about 2.5x lower engagement in Carlson's video over some unknown guy's 40 minute long video on House Md.
I agree with you on all points, except to nuance your last:
(1) This may not be true of other parts of the world, and in particular, it may not be true of countries outside the 'anglosphere'. (Anyone care to report on international FB health?)
(2) Even within the Anglosphere, there are still very specific pockets of FB which are viable. In my experience, they are usually attached to queer community and/or leftist organizing. FB activity has in fact picked up since the Muskpocalypse. I imagine it will pick up again now that the Fediverse is hitting the scaling wall imposed by using a protocol that is arguably exponential-ish big-O with federated server count. (https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110198847653604631)
I'm sort of hoping that Nostr takes off before BlueSky figures out a way of owning the fediverse. Or even Secure Scuttlebutt! Now that would be a weird timeline.
Yeah, that’s all absolutely fair. That is, however, a problem for most platforms as—generally-the Anglosphere (or at least that plus Western Europe) is the paying customer.
Pivoting to cater to/exploit that market is not really possible for most of them now either.
This is not true in developing countries. From my experience, the poorer a country, the more likely you are to see extensive, serious use of Facebook. And the revenue growth opportunity is huge for FB in these places. It is already flat or slightly negative in highly advanced countries.
Kind of, but GDP per capita is way lower. It would take 35 average Nigerian users to replace one average American. Which still isn't exactly true, since there are high-margin items that are impossible to cross-sell that way. E.g. a $1k iPhone is affordable by a $70k american but not by any single $2k income Nigerian.
Sheer quantity of users doesn't replace higher GDP cohorts.
There are a LOT more MAGA "verified" troll bots on there on anything to do with politics. Why are MAGA people trolling on the Bernie Sanders feed for example? Anyway, it's okay if you only follow mostly "fact-based" accounts and don't bother with any political or news sources.
If someone has the words "manufactured consent" in their comment it's a dead giveaway that MAGA bullshitting is what they want, thinking it somehow represents "free speech". So, from the perspective of the GP Twitter is probably now more healthy than ever.
If you have the understanding of a 14 year old, sure.
Meanwhile, the understanding of the rest of us has moved to understanding that hate sketch, & toxic environments resulting from it, restricts the speech of minorities.
But you’re ok with that as long as no MAGA racist is told to shut up, apparently, so don’t pretend you’re pro-free speech. You’re simply pro-racists.
I direct you to Twitter's valuation. So, I take it you're a communist and don't approve of capitalism or a marketplace of ideas showing its preferences by financial support or lack thereof?
In fairness, both the MAGAs and the tankies are pretty happy, but then there's precious little difference (or none).
The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries. The current management just rolls over and claims nothing can be done.
I wouldn't call this state of affairs "free". More like spineless.
> The previous "highly-curating" management at least fought politically motivated government takedown request from questionably democratic countries.
The opposite is true, old Twitter colluded with the FBI in suppressing political information like the Hunter Biden laptop case, where the FBI falsely labeled accounts as Russian propaganda. There was a lot of stuff like this in the Twitter files, yet the media conveniently failed to report on it.
That's an imperfect correlate of user experience. A lot of sites have banned NSFW content for the sake of their valuations in ways that have obviously agitated their userbase.
Twitter is bearable just 1) never use "for you" tab, only "following" 2) don't follow trolls 3) mute reply trolls and llm autoreply accounts 4) maintain a biiiig blocklist of words.
FB: don't know but I surely see almost no ads. I use mbasic.
There have always been both liberals and conservatives on twitter, and they have always had fun socking it out. The only difference today is that there's no more orchestrated censorship of conservatives going on, since Musk bounced most of the crybullies out of the company, and put an end to the FBI payments for banning things the government doesn't like. The same cannot be said for Facebook.
Your experience of Twitter and mine are very different. I suggest following people who produce threads and tweets you enjoy and blocking, muting and unfollowing others.
If they remove old reddit, I'm done. The "new" reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.
Someone has to be using the redesign, most I'd guess, but I don't understand how. It's one thing that I don't like the look and feel, that's pretty subjective to a point, but the problem is that it doesn't actually work.
Something as basic as reading comments is still broken, after all these years. You can not navigate the comment section. Seems like a pretty big oversight, unless you betting the farm on doom-scrolling, and I think that exactly what's happening.
Reddit management left the community to it's own devices for years, now the ad revenue is drying up, they have an IPO around the corner (because no VC is going to throw more money into an anonymous message board). I don't really see any easy out for Reddit, they do need money, but I'm not sure they are going about it in the right way.
You're basically forced to hold control down, because expanding a comment might cause a page load, and the back button won't bring you where you originally were.
Most people dont even know about old.reddit. new users never hear of it, most of old users got served the redesign and just went with it. I bet only minority knows and actively uses old.reddit. its insane
New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.
I interviewed at Reddit around that time. They showed me what (I didn’t know at the time) was to be the new design & asked me to critique it (UI role).
I.. did not hold back. I was polite, and encouraging, but the myriad of flaws was obvious. They seemed rather put out & defensive.
It was around about them I realized that it was not going to be a good fit.
Some time earlier this year (I think; certainly before the API drama; wish I'd bookmarked it), I saw a comment here from a Reddit manager complaining that they couldn't find good developers. I think the reason is pretty clear.
Probably it was created by someone who prefer mobile environments and who also believe that bulky big interfaces are good. New design seems to be aiming at keeping users engaged with the site all the time by obstructing visibility of comments, for example
No point designing it for mobile browsers if they're going to block mobile browsers from using it, or at best irritate the hell out of mobile web users with relentless 'app nags'
The worst part for me is all the flashes and redraws as it gradually loads more and more separate resources.
"Hey look, here's a paragraph to read... nope, I just realised there's an image near the top that I think is going to be huge so I pushed that paragraph below the fold... no, wait, that image is actually tiny so here's that paragraph again... ooooh, but now there's a sidebar, so I've just resized and reflowed the paragraph that you had kind of started to read - good luck finding your place again!"
As for how broken the "back" button is, fuuuuu.....
Did Reddit forget why they were popular in the first place? Remember the Digg redesign? Seems like every Reddit update has been user-hostile in a way that was much worse than the Digg stuff.
Very true, I've seen the same phenomenon at other startups firsthand, when business leaders are eager to burn unlimited amounts of user goodwill to make number go up.
Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I've posted thus far. I'm running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I'm not really pushing for users.
Thus far, it's definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communities I have found.
Ah yes. There's no such thing as a safe party, which is why I always wear my stab vest and helmet to my mom's Thanksgiving dinner.
You might want to look up this thing called "civilization", where we've been creating safe spaces for the last 5,000 years. Maybe it's just a passing fad, but I'm hopeful for it.
Well, GP seems to have edited their comment to flip its meaning 180°; earlier, IIRC (don't have a cached copy up) they were advocating for establishment of "safe spaces" of the kind that people who use term "safe spaces" establish - which for everyone else are more like digital equivalent of Lebensraum[0].
I meant mozman's reply to your comment, not your comment.
And I'm absolutely in agreement with yours - I've seen this playing out on Mastodon first-hand. The federated model, as implemented by Fediverse, turns out to be extremely vulnerable to bullies.
(Kind of like a bunch of independent, friendly villages end up being vulnerable to a smart warlord. It's arguably a big part of what historically drove creation of countries and empires.)
From the comment I replied to. People getting up in their arms and attacking others for no good reason does not seem very jovial. It seems dumb, childish, and immature, which yes, is what I expect from a random sampling of people.
I don’t want safe spaces, I simply prefer to surround myself with people not being idiots and assholes, it makes life far more relaxing.
How is this representative of real life? Like where do you live where people are toxic to you to your face and harass you, honest to god I don’t really see that in my life at least. It’s pretty clear that people behave differently when given anonymity, shouldn’t we try to “emulate real life” at least in the way we interact with each other on the daily?
It happens. I know someone who was called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers for the sin of asking people to take political discussions to a different slack channel than the engineering team's main one. I know a few other people who work there, and can confirm it isn't just him; the place is just plain toxic.
Imagine his surprise when he was basically pushed out of the company in less than a year.
I'd normally say "good for him, he dodged a bullet, he's not going to be hurt by fallout once the company gets so rotten inside it collapses on itself". Unfortunately, this is not an isolated trend; if it keeps up, we'll see a whole generation of people with minds filled with hate, and I'm not sure the society can survive it undamaged.
> called a dictator, fascist, silencer and worse by his coworkers
That company's HR department must be fascinating
> to take political discussions
I'm really curious what you're considering "political discussions" here, and if it includes "please stop using ethnic slurs in git commit messages" or something like that
As soon as he found that this behavior was condoned by management there, he should have started looking for a new job. Obviously, he's not a "cultural fit" for that company.
There are a lot of really crappy companies out there with toxic cultures; don't stick around in one if you don't have to.
In real life, people who harass or assault get sued or otherwise. We have built spaces for XYZ set of people for thousands of years. If you can't behave with some civility, go live in the forest and away from society.
There's a lot of irony in expressing what you did in one of the most heavily moderated forums.
Their hardcoded scunthorphe filter blocks very common word in non English languages, such as the French words for late, delay, and firewood. The lead dev insists, rudely and vehemently, that those who have a problem with it are fascists.
You can select "All" (instead of "Local") on any Lemmy instance. You will then get a list of accumulated posts from some federated instances as well. The list is sortable by the usual properties. The details on how this works in detail and which posts are shown elude my right now, but the functionality is there.
It's going to sound dumb, but honestly? I filled an rss reader up with some of the best sources I could think of, and am actually really enjoying just quietly taking the world in again, instead of trying to come up with my latest snarky Reddit-friendly quip.
Yeah I did that too when Twitter died, shout-out to the fantastic NetNewsWire on mac.
But here's the thing, reading within your own walled garden doesn't expose you to radically new ideas as much. The rss only approach lacks the discovery aspect of social media. Now that Reddit is dying too I'm pretty much down to Mastodon and HN for finding interesting novel stuff.
I do miss the discussion in some cases. I'm an NFL fan in the UK so I don't have a lot of other NFL fans around me. /r/nfl and /r/greenbaypackers were both great for providing me with a community of people I could discuss stuff with, in addition to the news aggregation thing. When the blackout started and I considered what I really got from Reddit, /r/nfl was the only thing really.
News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.
Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.
Music: Pitchfork.
MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.
Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.
Still looking for more stuff. It honestly feels strangely better absorbing without commenting.
It's difficult to curate that list for me, I want high-quality blogs as well as news. But having ~100 feeds, ~20 of which being "news" each with ~20 posts per day, meant at least 2 hours per day catching up. I quit cold turkey last autumn but want to reinstate it, except with only the folks that post once per day or less.
News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.
Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.
Music: Pitchfork.
MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.
Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.
News: Chicago Tribune (a certain browser with a certain addition bypasses the subscription shakedown), New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC.
Tech: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, The Verge.
Music: Pitchfork.
MMA: MMA Fighting, Bloody Elbow.
Plants: Epic Gardening and Indoor Gardening, with plans to add some carnivorous plant forums.
I liked kbin.social a lot. It's a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have a ton of users, but I found that that's actually very ok. It reminds me of Reddit 10 years ago. Nowadays every thread in Reddit is either stupid memes and the same predictable jokes over and over, or some fanatical social wars stuff. Kbin looks like a place where you can actually have a conversation again, without being banned or destroyed for disagreeing even if done rationally and politely.
I hope it survives its technical challenges.
Each server (AKA "Instance") is kind of like an email provider, or like a bunch of individual Reddit websites. On Lemmy a "Community" is their version of a subreddit. Each server/instance hosts its own communities, but if you have an account on one server, you can still subscribe, read and post on off-server communities.
Each server is a piece of the federation. Some Instances do not federate with all other instances though. I'm not sure if there are any instances that access every other instance.
I'm not sure about lemmy, but I know that on other fediverse projects like Mastodon there were some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.
> some servers that were completely unmoderated, filled with terrible content and were defederated by most other instances. Most decent people don't want to see that stuff on their feed.
Why not solve that by blocking them yourself, instead of forcing everyone else to block them?
From a user point of view that would do just fine. Maybe server owners might not want to be associated with those instances for potential legal issues.
Some servers admins have also defederated from certain instances because they were receiving increased trolling/spam from certain instances and it was too much work to moderate with the current number of mods they had.
That's kind of the thing about the fediverse: that's basically not possible. Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block. You could, of course, run your own instance, but obviously that's its own can of worms.
So... It's tricky.
edit: also, sites like joinmastodon USUALLY just completely exclude anything too controversial, for pretty obvious reasons. Dunno about join-lemmy but I'd bet on it.
> Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block
Yikes.. damn. I haven't really jumped in to the fediverse yet, but I've been excited about its potential. But this sounds incredibly toxic. Basically it sounds like we've gone from having to conform to the corporation's rules, to having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off. Am I misunderstanding?
> having to conform to the center of the venn diagram or else you get shut off
There's no shutting off. The instances that are blocked still work.
It's like email. If cheapviagrapillz.com is identified as sending a substantial amount of spam, they will be blacklisted. Their server still works, they can still send emails, but many servers will not accept those emails.
It's not federated, but the UI is okay for now than the other alternatives that I've seen. It's ran by 1 dev who has quickly been adding features and listening to user feedback. It's also nearing 16,000 users and a few users are developing some mobile apps for it.
Not that I know of. I keep poking around all the ones that pop up here, some of which are nicely made but still small, and I've been contemplating joining a Lemmy instance or starting one with some friends.
Hacker News is till great though the more I get exposed to the whole ActivityPub fediverse thing the more I wish it wasn't disconnected. I was in a read only HN app earlier today and wanted to post a comment to HN and instantly wished I could post a link into jerboa's search and have Hacker News available as a community.
The technology is getting there. The problem is the communities need time to grow. Star Trek fans have made a real effort. The bulk of reddit content is lowest common denominator shit and those consumers want everything handed to them fully formed. They aren't going to deal with server instability and submit bug reports and try and build new communities. They will delete Apollo and install the Reddit official app.
Lemmy! I've been checking it out lately and people are moving popular subreddits to Lemmy's servers. It's a bit confusing at first but once you get it, it works like email. And it's... fantastic!
But I'll wait for this protest to die down to see its "real" value. Most of the posts now are about the protest and migration from Reddit. Things are on fire now.
kbin.social is really great. It’s the most active Lemmy instance and it connects with Lemmy and Mastodon so you’ve got both networks built in. The UX is, I feel, better than instances which use the Lemmy front end. The mobile site is actually functional. Sadly no app yet.
Of course the networks are much smaller than Reddit, but the conversations are much more qualitative. I honestly prefer it. Less soon scrolling.
Surprisingly no one has mentioned Tildes.net yet. It's something in between reddit and hackernews. Requires an invite to register, though they are quite easy to find.
be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit's initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become the website with most active users/content. You really don't want reddit users here.
Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit. However reddit did host that community for years (Spez claimed the creep mods were helpful in flagging cp throughout the site), and it's ironic you mention "problematic" communities migrating to 4chan in the same context, since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit. KiwiFarms even more so.
>Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit.
I stand corrected then. It's been seen many times in the last few weeks in many places.
> since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit.
While true, the time I was around there, the time of gaia online/SA/4chan (2005 to 09) it was also something that people joked about. There was even a popular character called pedobear that was often used as the butt of jokes for those who sexualized minors. Though reddit was a later phenomenon, and reddit was an order of magnitude worse, it wasn't like sexualization of minors was looked at as a crime at 4chan by everyone. There were some free speech absolutists who claimed to be against it, but were against taking it down.
I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It's a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.
When you’re a company relying on outsourcing moderation work to an army of unpaid moderators, it’s probably not a good idea to drive away said moderators. Especially when your customers (advertisers) really don’t like sites that allow bad content to slip through their moderation too much.
That would make sense if they wanted to emulate FB, which is questionable in itself, but how they're proceeding with these changes is completely killing the very thing that made them successful in the first place. It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.
It's a very dumb move, considering they had all the resources and power to do this right, and still increase their revenue. Now they will increase it momentarily, which will please shareholders, but eventually this will die down as people abandon the platform because it has become a shell of its former self.
> It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.
You're assuming they care, or ever cared. Maybe I'm getting too cynical, but I feel it's pretty clear Reddit leadership doesn't give a damn about Reddit the discussion/community site. For them, it's just a late-stage company that's been pumped and needs to be dumped. Where we see Reddit as its own unique artifact, they see it as just another money-producing asset, mature and ripe for harvest. They'll destroy it to cash out, as it has always been the plan - it's almost always the plan with startups in general - and find some other thing to repeat the process.
That makes sense now, as a scheme to increase valuation before the IPO[1]. But I wouldn't say that that has been their strategy all along. They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part. The API has been free since the beginning, after all, which has allowed the site to prosper.
Though it does feel like they're ready to sacrifice the community for short-term revenue, and that their mid-term plan might just be to cash out once the ship starts sinking.
> They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part.
IANAEconomist, but I think the current go-to explanation is that companies can remain unprofitable indefinitely, focusing on increasing growth and stacking more and more loans / investment rounds - as long as interest rates are near-zero, making money cheap. Now that they've gone up, there's enormous pressure to unwind the stack, and such companies need to start making money right frakkin now, hence the sudden squeeze[0] done by Reddit (and other SaaS businesses).
--
[0] - The so-called "enshittification". I dislike the term, but it was coined to describe exactly this direction of company evolution.
r/StarTrek is already surreptitiously controlled by Viacom. Any negativity is immediately shut down. If you want to be critical of Star Trek, you have to rub shoulders with people who got banned from r/startrek because their criticism was that there was too many black people in the new shows.
This hasn't been true in my experience. People were very critical of Picard season 2 and the whole of Discovery. I posted criticisms myself and never got banned.
Unless we'll find a way to have neutral sites that can run a discussion forum such as Reddit and others, this problem will be recurring.
Say Reddit goes under, there will be another company looking to fill the vacuum. It will play nice for a year or two until they have the majority of the market and then become an asshole company looking to censor whatever they don't like and become hated just like the company they displaced.
Somehow I think people lose their minds when they feel like they have any sorts of power over others...
>Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.
This is obviously not going to happen, and insinuations to the contrary are just sour grapes. The fact that this could even be upvoted speaks poorly to the Redditization of HN.
>Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.
He has been for years. These same powermods have been at the forefront of demanding changes that undermined his vision.
Ironically when the problems with bots allegedly writing unfavorable opinions came up, bots were quite a rare occurrence. When I look at some of the defaults now, it reads like the simplest AI generated flavor text that is tuned to the ever same topics. Brain dead market research output without any information.
You really notice this if you compare it to more specialized subs. Even if they are very active with thousands of users, the style of communication is different. It isn't trivial to detect bots, but I think some particular subs might be very infested. Another reason to perhaps scrap API access before someone takes a closer look.
This strategy of decline seems to be inevitable. When they distanced themselves from Swartz and did away with their principles to satisfy some other interests, it was the start of some form of decline, even if the official business numbers look different.
There are business numbers that show an increase in usage, but as a user you cannot feel that at all. On the contrary, it feels like it is moving in a different direction. Perhaps they changed their budgeting somehow to boost their revenue... Or some really rich clients bought a massive amount of reddit goodies.
old.reddit.com is the only way that I can use reddit. I tried the new interface and it's just so bad. The change isn't subtle either. It's like using a completely different site.
> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.
They have to be platinum ad partners in order to get their subs, of course. Just like how yelp extorts companies for reviews, reddit now extorts companies for comments.
That would be a dangerous game to play with Disney or Paramount/CBS. I'd sooner assume that /r/starwars and /r/startrek serve at the pleasure of their respective IP holders, and I don't believe Reddit has pockets deep enough to challenge either of them.
I mean, Star Trek fans are used to seeing every interesting creative fan project shut down by a C&D letter - and as for Star Wars, everyone knows you don't go up against the House of the Mouse.
So much user-generated content going to waste. Idiots at Reddit forgot who was responsible for everything that is in place today, and they forgot the unrewarded work and countless hours of time the moderators and everyone else put in.
This is going to be an upside down tumble, and we all know what happened to Tumblr.
Therefore, if mods want to retain their position, they need to poll their users for support, and then reopen the sub in a very limited capacity that continues the spirit of the protest while obeying the rules. I.e. mods are free to run the subs as they like, so they could limit posting to users with > X karma, or > Y account age. As long as the community agrees, it can't be considered vandalism.
The selling off of communities _dedicated_ to IP (Disney is an excellent example you give) is a genius move imho, and perhaps was part of the strategy for going IPO. Not only does Reddit slurp up more user data via official Apps, they have revenue from the IP owners.
They have the deep pockets to employ mods to keep the place clean, especially now 3rd party Mod tools are permitted - it's just the direct user-experience tools/apps which are kicked out.
I would bet the _vast_ majority of consumers don't really care about the blackouts/API changes. They just want to catch up on the latest F1 news, recent movie trailers or whatever their hobby.
This makes good sense sadly. I suspect even fan run alternative subs will be banned out of existence for spurious reasons. It's the 80:20 principle, as long as they can keep the big subs that drive the traffic open they won't care if the smaller ones have little or no moderation.
They have actually flirted with this idea. The Love Island subreddit last year was co-moderated by both volunteers and the show's social media team. But that didn't continue this year.
If they're unable to build a profitable product off of the existing foundations then, yes, I absolutely want them to fail. This is how capitalism works.
> Reddit is not profitable. They need a path to profitability to continue operating in a high rate environment.
They've had over a decade to innovate their way to success just like every other tech company of that era.
From a business standpoint, they are an abject failure and don't deserve to exist if they can't hire people smart enough to monetize without alienating the entire user base.
I'm very sympathetic. Doesn't seem like alienating all the volunteer labor is the way to go though.
Without much inside info, I think what they should have done is something like: 1. Make actually-good first-party tools for moderators, 2. Figure out how to monetize everything else.
But trying to make money off of the volunteer labor is not the way to go, IMO.
It really reminds me of Twitter. Why can't these super high traffic sites where all the content is contributed for free figure out how to make money?
Seeing as Reddit is already in the top visited sites in the US by many metrics [1] I find it somewhat hard to believe that they can't find a way to better monetize than astronomically increasing its API access.
> Now that the censors are coming for you there's no one left to speak.
Interesting how you are using words that remind of a famous poem about persecution.
> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
> Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
But here’s the thing. The poem above is about the the silence of people in Germany following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group.
The nazis are not the victims. The nazis are the aggressors and persecutors.
Hate and intolerance is not about free speech nor any other kind of freedom. Banning nazis and other people who do not respect the human rights of others is not a wrong, it’s how we protect everyone else from those who have no respect for others.
It’s ironic that you mention porn given the extent to which Reddit has so many subreddits devoted to porn topics that would be considered horrible racism and/or sexism if they weren’t hiding under the banner of porn.
> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.
This isn't an accurate extrapolation. In fact it's extrapolating in the opposite direction.
The moderators are taking a moral stand against an API policy. But the the actual users of the subreddits never consented to this moral stand. By removing these moderators that are working against the users, reddit is giving the subreddits back to the users.
Many, many subreddits held polls before deciding what to do. I know that kind of online poll is not scientific, or whatever but do you have a better idea? Not going on strike is also a moral stand that should get consent from the user base.
Sure, online polls have obvious flaws (non-response bias, how many people actually saw the poll, who was motivated to actually respond to the poll, did voters actually understand the protest would last more than 1 day, should logged out lurkers have any representation, etc)
But beyond that, shutting down a subreddit for multiple days is such a drastic action, it should require more than just a simple majority in a quick online poll.
For instance, to amend the Constitution, you typically need a supermajority (2/3 or 3/4 of different parts of the government). To convict someone guilty in a trial, you typically need evidence beyond reasonable doubt and a unanimous jury verdict.
The burden of proof that users want to shut down the subreddit should be overwhelming.
I think many people didn't see or care about those original polls. All the subs I'm in that re-polled their users after the initial 2 day shutdown are now open as a result. The two that have stayed shut have not re-polled (and one didn't poll in the first place, the mods just unilaterally shut it).
Thank you so much! We're still quite small, just a few hundred people on Discord. Invite link, if you want to join the fun: https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr
If you end up trying to product, I'd love to hear your feedback (and immediately fix any issues you run into). Get in touch via email: [email protected]
I love this so much. It's everything I want in a practical typeface. It's only missing a couple little things. Can we get an alternate 7 digit with the line through it, and 1 digit with the bottom horizontal line?
At least the article makes me discount the blowback I get when I claim the US to slipping towards a low trust society.
Notable Home Depot has motion sensitive cameras in the tool area that beep to remind me that the owners of the store think I'm a thief. They also remind me to buy my tools online.
Or used! I get most of my power tools used/refurbished.
I get what you're saying about the US becoming low-trust. This is just another example. I feel like it's the same kind of thing when a city erects hostile architecture.
"So, in the eyes of those in the future, we may or may not remain human."
You mean that, in the future, whatever we become may see present-us as closer to the monkeys?
At my office they want us to come back for social reasons, but nobody has time to socialize because we're always so backed up with tickets. Frankly it's easier to work overtime from home.
