The unfortunate thing is that in a lot of cases, the “Big Stick” approach actually worked. Many reddit moderators that were “leading” the protests caved under threats of replacement from the admins. Maybe it’s because they’re addicted to the little bit of power being a moderator over a reasonably sized community gives you. Maybe they’re just set in their ways and expected reddit to roll back their API changes. I can’t say. The one that really pissed me off was r/selfhosted. Like, your entire thing is autonomy and a very technical microcosm of DIY culture, but the second you’re faced with the possibility of just migrating to one of a million different other, self-hosted options, suddenly it becomes “too much of an inconvenience?” Totally pathetic.
The protestors aren’t organized, so of course some of them will respond to different things. It’s not surprising that a few have caved. I bet a few have joined the protests because they saw the big stick being used like that.
Reddit is totally justified in this. The users are actively and maliciously trying to hurt Reddit. However, this is in response to many many completely unjustifiable actions from Reddit. Mostly the lies.
If they had just come out and said “we’re killing the API in 6-12 months”, as others before them have done, they would have seen much less pushback, but they had to lie over and over again about “not killing 3rd party apps” and “working with developers”.
The hypocritcal thing here is that Worldpolitics did this years ago and reddit didn’t care.
A dog is justified to snap at a toddler if the toddler jabs it in the eye, the toddlers parents will still want the dog put down.
This is just a standard “clearing house” measure. Remove the dissidents, ignore the howls of complaint… surround yourselves with “yes men” and then you are set
Set with now not having competent moderators, and all the content generating users have left.
This is like having a golden goose, and cutting off its head because the HONKs were too annoying
Gonna go great for them…
@minnieo @tchambers It sounds like Reddit got their feelings hurt when mods they thought they knew and trusted acted outside the social contract and did something they didn’t like. Hmmmm wonder what that reminds me of.
I can’t blame reddit admins on this one. I support the protest and users shifting to Lemmy. But the sudden NSFW content is clearly going to get reddit to take action. Just the obvious response in my opinion. Just like killing third party apps causes a user base to leave. 🤷♂
But admins had previously said that reddit should be for the communities, and the communities voted to allow NSFW.
Spez only likes democracy when it’s in his favor.
though that’s the whole point of reddit ? if you don’t like a community, just make a new one. Like people feel like r/childfree is too aggressive, so they make r/truechildfree
It’s only because they were default subs. A while back one of the news subs (r/world news? ) got flooded with porn and basically switched to a random anime porn type of sub. That caused the population to migrate to r/anime_titties for all their news needs. Now when it happens to a special sub though it’s a problem?
lol, I witnessed that historical moment, essentially r/worldnews become a wild west where any post is acceptable, and it’s all 50/50 NSFW, you either get a naked lady or a butthole, while r/anime_titties are the proper sub for world news…
It was /r/worldpolitics, with anime_titties being the actual world politics sub. Similar to how /r/trees is for weed, and /r/marijuana_enthusiests is for people discussing actual trees
As much as Steve has already shown he’s willing to lie outright (especially we characterizing his talks with the Apollo Dev) I really can’t put it past Reddit to lie about the mods “encouraging” porn posts.
r/mildlyinteresting did not encourage it, and Reddit lied about that, and their removal and suspension was revoked by a different admin than the one who removed and suspended them. Here is the post, “The Reddit Admins are lying - r/MildlyInteresting did NOT allow or encourage users to post ANY sexually explicit content, see draft of now-deleted announcement”:
Given how that’s been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it
and apologising, it kind of seems like the admins aren’t really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.EDIT: No Apology, just an explanation.
I can’t imagine that everyone in the company is like spez.
Yet disorder and ambiguous goals/requirements by management tends to have a domino effect.
I didn’t see anything about an apology, where can i see this?
In the comments on one of the articles on The Verge about this, someone claiming to be a mod over there said they were reinstated. I know you can’t really prove that, but maybe that’s where this notion comes from?
they have been reinstated, thats confirmed and you ca go look and confirm for yourself, im talking about i never saw an apology from any admin or reddit
I think there was a comment later, in another thread, where all the reinstated mods later had their permissions changed so that literally the only thing they could do was modmail, nothing else. Don’t completely remember if it was the same group of mods, but I think it was.
It was. Seems the admins are infighting now. They were all banned and removed, then reinstated, then had all their mod permissions removed a few hours later
Reddit’s response to everything over the last week or however long it has been:
“Fuck you, we don’t care about you, we want to line our pockets, we literally think of users as dirt, we expect you to bow down and kiss our shoes”
It’s crazy how reddit’s run like it’s a 1-2 year old startup still trying to figure out how guidelines, communication, consistent rule enforcement, etc. work.
It’s becoming more and more apparent the site’s success was despite the company running it, not because of it.
Well, whether Reddit likes it or not, mods were a department of specialists working on some unique aspects of their business.
That whole department got told to get bent, in essence fired, but they don’t even have contracts in place preventing “disgruntled employee” stuff.
This is what happens.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
This is a great depiction of the reality, and I AM copying this comment to use it in the future.
If Reddit had just kept their mouth shut, 2 days after the blackout most subs would be back online and the others would eventually follow.
But no Spez had to open his mouth and take actions, forcing subs to open again, telling lies about the app creators.
Basically turning all of Reddit against him.Yeah, the angry irrational reactions show that all the talk about the protests just being noise was a bluff. It might have blown over, but it hasn’t exactly because it got a reaction.
He’s panicking. His biggest lie is that this protest doesn’t matter and hasn’t and won’t impact Reddit financially. It already has and will continue to do so. You can tell that the people who actually post content worth viewing are here and not there, despite the smaller numbers over here.
I mean it’s not just reddit. While investors probably don’t care, the fact that he lied about easily disprovable things that did or did not happen doesn’t bode well. I don’t think it’s going to hurt their bottom line any time soon, but that kind of spinelessness isn’t exactly liked.
I think its going to end up a successful move for them.
They built a platform. The users built the site over the years with minimal interaction from reddit.
They now have a platform, millions of users, and full control of what they want on that platform.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, they want the traffic but don’t want the problems that come with mostly community driven content.
All the profile redesigns, ability to “follow” users, profile pics, awards, all that has been an indication of the direction over the last few years. The last few steps was to kick out the problem users and be left with those who don’t really give a shit and just want to see memes on their phone while they take a shit. The people who hear about reddit and just grab the official app from the store. The people who don’t care about APIs and protests and modding or accessibility tools. Just eyeballs to look at their ads.Those people will stay. It doesn’t matter if 25% of the community leaves, because the natural growth in the next few months from the eyeballs will claw it back over time.
Once they have an obedient user base who are strictly bound to what reddit want them to see, think TikTok or facebook users, that’s when they will see off. And it will pay off handsomely.
I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.
Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There’s no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that’s going to kill the website.
The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.
Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That’s not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.
If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There’ll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won’t be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.
It won’t disappear, but it certainly won’t be a multi-billion dollar company.
But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it’s just a matter of months for it to die for good.
I think years instead of months, but the rest is spot on. 30M pics users and 50k voted on the Sexy John Oliver change. 0.16% engagement on one of the highest traffic subs. So much of the front page has become tiktok it just a matter of time before people get their content direct from the source. The rest are news stories with the same arguments over and over again (ChatGPT and comment repost bots are already driving those) and reposted videos and memes from the last decade.
I’m still convinced that Google is driving a great deal of traffic to the site due to the depth of problem solving in old posts. I got a comment or DM every week or two thanking me for a solution I’d posted 3, 5, even 7 years prior. Those are all deleted now, and I’m keeping my account to regularly purge any restored content. If the top 100k-200k posters deleted their content, many google searches would lead to a dead end. Eventually it will end up like pinterest - you’ll put -site:reddit.* in your search (or add an extension to do so) just to avoid getting the useless results.
A site a large as reddit doesn’t die overnight, any more than Digg, Twitter, Usenet, or any other platform that is past its prime. But it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future value or IPO success.
And the mods are the ones that fight the phishing scams, disinformation bots, t-shirt spammers, etc. If reddit were capable of automating those away, they wouldn’t still be so prevalent.
I straight up don’t believe reddit staff is as technically competent as those at Meta/IG or TikTok. They can’t pull it off without a volunteer army filling in the capabilities gap.
Reddit has no problems pushing war footage though. Real people actually dying is totally cool!
