/r/LegalAdviceUK is forced back open, vows to move the entire community off Reddit

As with many other subreddits, /r/LegalAdviceUK (which had been dark since the start of the blackout) has been sent a thinly-veiled threat by Reddit.

So they've reopened in order to start moving the entire community of 810,000 subscribers to somewhere else.

As you can imagine there are a number of legal professionals who moderate that sub, and they really don't take kindly to being threatened. They sign off their reopening message with "Fuck /u/Spez and long live John Oliver." but for the real fun you might want to look up a very famous British legal case they reference, Arkell v Pressdram 1971.

skip0110,
@skip0110@lemm.ee avatar

Mirror: https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/

Awesome! My favorite bit.

Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.

Meshuggah333,
Meshuggah333 avatar

The enemy being both weak and strong at the same time is pure far right rhetoric. Judging by u/spez being a Musk fanboy, I'm not surprised.

Untitled9999,
Untitled9999 avatar

Schrödinger's Redditor

IHeartBadCode,
IHeartBadCode avatar

Doublethink Reddit

to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again

resketreke,
resketreke avatar

Schredditors then?

ArtieShaw,
ArtieShaw avatar

That would be an accurate description of what I did to my posts and comments on Reddit. But with the uncertainty and chaos baked in.

I like it.

BlueBox,

deleted_by_author

    •
    gzrrt,
    gzrrt avatar

    Can highly recommend the LibRedirect browser extension too, to take care of that 100% of the time

    Kichae,

    Huh. That's the same behaviour Unberto Eco identified with fascist movements in his essay on the subject, Ur-Fascism:

    Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    It was not a coincidence ;)

    DarkGamer,
    DarkGamer avatar

    That tracks, given that Spez admitted in a recent interview that he's emulating Elon Musk, champion of the fascist right.

    bankimu,

    He will never be 0.1% of Elon Musk.

    Kichae,

    Elon Musk isn't 0.1% of Elon Musk's (former) public image.

    Widget,

    A whiny trust-fund baby who destroyed their company and image through compulsive lying?

    They seem equally worthless to me.

    GunnarRunnar,

    Not to blow anyone's mind but that's pretty popular rhetoric on Reddit. Usually when described how right speaks about the left.

    Litigant-In-Person, (edited )

    Hello, mod here. I am glad you enjoyed our post. It felt appropriate.

    Comments were also made to the admins in modmail directly too.

    vows to move the entire community off Reddit

    Regarding migration, we are obviously open to different options., though perhaps "vowing" is a bit strong.

    We have also made https://kbin.social/m/legal/ and https://feddit.uk/c/legaladviceuk (edit: also https://feddit.uk/c/legaladvice)

    These are not active yet, and they might never be, but they are options we are looking at.

    static,
    static avatar

    You do know that you can visit kbin from lemmy, and lemmy from kbin? You don't have to choose 1 of the 2.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    Had no idea what-so-ever :)

    static,
    static avatar

    I subscribed to the lemmy, it's here : https://kbin.social/m/legaladviceuk@feddit.uk
    With how federation works only new posts from now on will be synchronised, not the history.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    Christ, we're gonna have to learn how a whole infrastructure set up works.

    LollerCorleone,
    LollerCorleone avatar

    On top of the other replies, here is a short and simple video explaining the basic concept behind the fediverse (which is the umbrella term used to describe the network which Lemmy and kbin instances are part of)

    https://framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD?start=1m37s

    PS: The link above is to a Peertube instance, which is the fediverse alternative for YouTube.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    @LollerCorleone Much appreciated, thank you!

    static,
    static avatar

    syncing to other lemmy's and kbins is not that big of a problem if you're popular, the first subscriber from an instance will be quick
    you mod everything on the main instance.

    Sam_uk,
    Sam_uk avatar

    @Litigant@kbin.social

    Yeah, but it's not that consequential whether you choose a good Lemmy instance or a good Kbin instance.

    As a Kbin Stan I prefer this interface, the community is new, without some of the Tankie baggage/ perception of Lemmy.

    @losttourist @static

    spacedogroy,

    For what my 2c are worth, I think legaladviceuk is probably the clearest in terms of discoverability. Despite a community existing on a UK-focused instance, it's ambiguous as to whether it's UK specific.

    In the end though, it probably doesn't matter too much, as long as the instance is being actively maintained and is in tune with the values of the community.

    Setting up your own instance would actually probably be the best idea but if there's no one technical around to maintain it I'm not sure it would work out.

    jherazob,
    jherazob avatar

    Lemmy and Kbin are hopefully gonna grow and become better than Reddit has ever been, but they're not there yet and will be a while before it happens. Specifically, moderation tools in both platforms are reportedly weak at the moment, with a long list of features yet to be implemented. So while i do want the so-called Threadiverse growing, if you're in a moderating hotspot as your post mentions, you might wanna consider this detail and check if the current tools as present are good enough or not, it might be enough for your needs with what exists already but frankly the subs I've modded have been tiny and i don't have the mental model to tell you if they are already.

    I too urge you to not choose Discord for this community for all the reasons stated. Plus it's the wrong tool for the job, it's "chat", not "forums", it's by it's nature impermanent and for ephemeral conversation. Hell, a good old forum will be miles better than Discord for this.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    @jherazob

    you might wanna consider this detail and check if the current tools as present are good enough or not

    Yes, definitely - thats why we have made the spaces but are not migrating over for sure, we're just exploring options.

    athos77,

    Hello, LAUK mod! Thank you for all the good help you've given people over the years.

    whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

    I don't know if it's been forgotten in all the confusion, but two weeks ago, reddit since that they were laying off about 90 staff / 5% of their workforce, and restructuring some of the rest [ https://www.axios.com/pro/media-deals/2023/06/07/reddit-layoffs-hiring-ipo ]. And now, if course, in addition to the layoff/restructuring issues, in addition to the absolute insanity caused by reddit's stubborn reaction to the very people who populate and moderate 99% of the data on their site, their workers are also more having to deal with Huffman breathing down their necks, insisting that it's absolutely vital that they deliver a fully-functioning set of mod tools on the 1st - tools that they've repeatedly refused to even really look at for over a decade. [I expect a shit show.]

    But anyway, just wanted to point out that the reddit layoffs are already starting.

    NotMyOldRedditName,

    You should do a poll like pics and say should we only allow posts not requesting legal advice and any replies to questions to indicate it would be inappropriate to provide legal advice on reddit. Any legal advice will be removed.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    Nah. The mods spoke about it, but broadly they just care too much about the people that need the subreddit.

    CanadaPlus, (edited )

    Federated link to the UK one.

    Federated link to the generic one.

    Federated link to the Kbin one.

    You might want to remove your links and edit these ones in, as they currently won't work in a confusing way. There's still a lot of rough edges on the Fediverse.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    @CanadaPlus

    I changed them to -

    and now the links no longer work, lol

    404 Not found

    static, (edited )
    static avatar

    lemmy uses /c/ kbin uses /m/

    static,
    static avatar

    In the end the url structure is not important.

    Just use search:
    on kbin you would search on something like "legaladviceuk@feddit.uk"
    on lemmy you need to search prefixed with a !, "!legaladviceuk"

    Senseibu,
    @Senseibu@feddit.uk avatar

    It may be easier if you hosted your own Lemmy instance and guiding Redditor’s to that, check out oracle always free tier, I believe you can get a 24GB RAM Arm 4 OCPUs, which is definitely enough spec to hit the ground running with a few thousands subscribers. If you end up needing higher spec than that, you could start a donation pot, giving the help the sub provides, I feel safer in saying you’d get enough donations.

    https://levelup.gitconnected.com/a-powerful-server-from-oracle-cloud-always-free-cbc73d9fbfee?source=linkShare-e81cdeaa1304-1687204896

    You get a wan IP too, you just need to buy an instance domain, exactly the same as buying any other domain and point it to you IP.

    It would be the most seamless way to migrate imv, don’t have to deal with both kbins problems and potential problems of Lemmy, where you aren’t in control of the server hosting all your material.

    Happy to try and assist, pro bono, if you like this idea and need my help.

    CanadaPlus, (edited )

    Mmm. On Lemmy you can look at the comment source code, but in case you can't on Kbin:

    Federated link to the UK one.

    Federated link to the generic one.

    Federated link to the Kbin one.

    If you do it that way, Lemmy at least will fill in whichever instance the user is on, so they can participate. On the bright side, they clearly fixed the "can't respond to Kbin users" issue.

    The 404 thing is probably instance-specific.

    kill,
    kill avatar

    @Litigant@kbin.social you guys are badasses, you made my night. I wish you good luck. I love that you're competent enough to strike well. I hope to see you in the lemmyverse, be it on kbin or lemmy or anywhere. 😁

    Death2lois,

    Thank you!

    SkepticElliptic, (edited )

    I hope you finally decide to adopt a user-centric moderation approach. As of now the LA community on Reddit is pretty toxic and anti user, favoring mod circle jerking. Essentially, it seems that as long as you are a dickhead within the rules and you don't bother the mods, then you can fuck with other users as much as you want. It also favors nonsense stories, which are clearly a creative writing exercise for use on those automated YouTube channels and clickbait garbage that gets posted elsewhere.

    Spez is an asshole, but he's right about reddit mods. They think they are entitled to control everything.

    I kind of want everyone who has anything to do with moderating reddit to fuck off into the sunset.

    Kichae,

    Obviously I'm biased and would love to see the subreddit end up in the fediverse, but I'm glad you guys are taking your time and trying to figure out what medium and what platform is the best fit for what y'all do.

    If legaladvice is available on feddit.uk, you should try to snag that, too. As a UK-based (or focused -- I know servers are often hosted in other countries than the users they serve) instance, the UK is already in the domain. Though, I also get why you might want it right there in the community handle directly, given how which website a given community is hosted on is not always crystal clear in the current site designs.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    Just grabbed https://feddit.uk/c/legaladvice too, thanks for the comment/suggestion.

    I am cautious of taking ownership too much, as we might not end up using them and wouldn't want to domain-squat, so in theory I would be open to letting other people take control or decide to moderate them if they felt they were fully invested.

    Kichae,

    You can always ask the admin to purge the communities if you end up not using them. That will release the name for others to pick up.

    Litigant-In-Person,

    That is very good to know too!

    CoderKat,
    CoderKat avatar

    Probably don't even need to ask. I'm sure that eventually we'll come up with a means to snag dead communities, as there's gonna be tons of them.

    lemmy,

    Non Americans kind of get an extra benefit from being able to choose an instance from their home country meaning they get content related to their location (and in their own language for non english countries) without having to seek that out, or having a company use that information to sell you products. I'm speaking as an American myself so people from other places can chime in if I'm somehow wrong

    Perry,
    Perry avatar

    I'm absolutely baffled over how much of a clusterfuck Reddit and particularly Huffman personally has turned this into.

    Why in the ever loving PR suicide by not shutting the fuck up, did Reddit think that starting a war against their own moderators would be a good idea? I'm wondering if I have ever seen a company handle a situation this badly before. This is utterly insane.

    Huffman has somehow managed to take a mild inconvenience that would blow over in a few days and turned that into a major crisis and then turned that crisis into an existential threat to the future of the company.

    athos77,

    I made this comment in another thread last week, but I think it still holds up:

    I think what this entire debacle has revealed is how incredibly unfit Huffman is to be involved in running a major site, much less one with as much reach as reddit.

    I've read most of his comments and it's all centered around "reddit can't afford to keep paying everyone's API fees while everyone else makes bank". Which is fair enough.

    But it also reads like a CEO who simply hasn't been paying attention to much of anything and who woke up one morning to realize that they'd already handed away the company's most valuable assets by letting Google and ChatGPT and other LLM companies harvest everything they need to build their products while reddit happily and blithely pays the bills. And now that other companies are starting to look profitable by building off what reddit paid to give away, Hoffman is both massively jealous and panicking, desperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

    Only instead of going through every company that uses the API, figuring out how much they use and what they use it for and how necessary that use is for reddit's business, it looks like he panicked and tried to charge everyone the same rate. He didn't do any research into the issue and realize that Google harvests massive amounts of data that it uses in it's search results and to improve and program it's products and makes massive amounts of money, vs small apps that run basic queries that massively improve the reddit experience and that don't make much money at all. He just wants to charge everyone the same amount and keeps demanding that small apps pay the same as Google, because he's pissed he wasn't paying enough attention to notice what was going on.

    And he's scared shirtless because he's had an easy run of reddit CEO, and now people are asking questions about his lack of vision and he's afraid that no one will ever give him such an easy and lucrative job ever again. And $10 million in the bank plus whatever stock options he has may look like a lot of money to us peons, it really isn't among the people he wants to keep hanging around with.

    The one thing he's doing half-smart is the spin game. That's what that AMA was about, not to engage with the community, but to put out a dozen or so pre-written quotes that reddit could point to in interviews and say "look, here, this is what's really going on, and we've tried."

    In the end, I think Huffman's massive failings can be summarized in his comment that "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey. Which seems to summarize his period as CEO: just coast along like normal and surely some profits will arrive - and then panic when the profits start arriving for companies with CEOs who do they job and attention to their business.

    SgtSilverLining,
    @SgtSilverLining@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    "[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive" - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey.

    Is THAT how his comment is supposed to be interpreted? I'm an accountant, and I read it as "we're drowning, and we're going to go bankrupt without a new vertical!" If he said that as a sound bite for IPO news, he seriously miscalculated imo.

    50gp,

    add in some jealously towards 3rd party apps providing better service, wasting time and money on failed reddit NFTs and avatars, general cost-cutting moves with post-pandemic layoffs and closing API (like nobody is going to waste even more of their bandwidth with other types of scraping) and you have spez the prepper techbro playing CEO

    V4uban,

    Very good analysis

    Thetrademarq,

    Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. The last thing u/spez wants is a bunch of angry attorneys who want to fuck him over. If uklegaladvice makes a move legaladvice will too. If I were u/spez I’d be checking the strings on that golden parachute.

    Mjb,

    No-one is suing reddit for any of this. Reddit is a private business that can charge what it likes for it's API, can shut down 3P apps usage without warning etc.

    The only power we have is leaving the platform.

    Donjuanme,

    They are doing some questionable things regarding gdpr and the right to be forgotten.

    Rhaedas,
    Rhaedas avatar

    You're right on that part, but how they've handled people's data and deletion/restoring is questionable, especially from a European standing.

    heliosef,

    There is that aspect concerning spez's defamatory public remarks against the Apollo dev. I'm sure they can work that angle if Christian was inclined to do so. But I also don't think he will, unless Steve unwisely makes another non-PR/lawyer cleared statement.

    FaceDeer,
    FaceDeer avatar

    If that was the only thing Reddit was doing in the midst of this shitstorm, maybe. But they've also been slinging threats and accusations around. There are laws against some of those things too, Reddit maybe should try treading a bit more carefully if for example they want to accuse someone publicly of "blackmailing" them.

    ghariksforge,

    The mods there have balls.

    Satiric_Weasel,

    Yes. Good. Piss off the lawyers.

    I'm sure that'll go over well.

    iAmTheTot,
    iAmTheTot avatar

    The mods there are actual legal professionals. Would be interesting to see them stay closed and force reddit to act on the veiled threat. What mods would replace them?

    someguy3,

    This won't go to a legal battle. Reddit will just boot them as mods, then ask the community for new ones.

    iAmTheTot,
    iAmTheTot avatar

    I didn't mean to imply that they'd sue. I meant what other busy legal professionals will step up? And how shit would it be if they just get some schmucks who are only armchair lawyers.

    lasagna,
    @lasagna@programming.dev avatar

    If that's how they treat volunteers, imagine their paid staff.

    If my boss treated me this poorly I'd be packing my bags too.

    Cralex,

    Such an eloquently written statement summarizing the situation and the stance of the mods. It truly felt as though the mods of LegalAdviceUK are a force to reckon with.

    md5crypto,

    Nah, 90% of them will happily stay on Reddit.

    5redie8,

    Yeah, we're weeks in and there's still people walking in to threads that are either somehow completely oblivious, proudly don't care, or are outright angry that their experience is being interrupted. Apparently the overwhelming majority of reddit users do not use third party apps.

    tookmyname,

    Right now yes. But I think they point that things shift a bit will be when 3rd party apps and mod tools are more fleshed out. If Lemmy keeps up with moderate growth until then I think we could see a significant portion of posters moving here. Not saying most, but enough that communities could thrive. We don’t need millions of users.

    MyNameIsIgglePiggle,

    We don't need millions users

    You need just enough to sustain a conversation and for the place not to turn into a cesspool

    tookmyname, (edited )

    Ya I think the sweet spot was around right before digg migration. Top posts of the day received like 1-2k upvotes. This sight is probably only 5-15% of that time. But it’s a good start. And good apps etc could get it there.

    2009:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20090723105958/http://www.reddit.com/

    tamtt,

    For those who don't want to give Reddit the traffic:

    We’re back - and here’s what’s happening

    (Please don’t give any awards for this post - although it’s a kind gesture, that’s money that goes to Reddit!)

    Hello r/LegalAdviceUK.

    As you may have noticed, the mods have taken part in the Reddit blackout for the last week.

    For those not in the loop of the drama, there are a lot of concerns about Reddit's recent changes and their response to user concerns.

    LAUK took part in these protests, not only in solidarity with other subs and their issues, but we feel that these Reddit changes make moderating more difficult, and therefore present an increased risk of our users being exposed to harmful and dangerous advice, or influenced by idiots or directed by people looking to make financial gain.

    The mod team of LAUK are mostly employed professionals either directly working in law (e.g., Solicitors, Police Officers,) or in related professional fields (HR, finance, etc); who rely on well developed mobile apps to moderate, which the official Reddit app has never, ever been good at.

    Last month, the moderators manually removed over 5,500 unique comments that broke the subreddit rules - this is a very different subreddit to more casual subreddits and the mods take delicate care to balance the regulatory environment of giving legal advice in the UK, the Reddit platform, and trying our best to help people in need. This task would be impossible without 3rd party tool and applications.

    Like many other subreddits, LAUK was recently sent a vaguely sinister and threatening message from the Reddit admins, attempting to divide and conquer mod teams, re-interpreting their long standing rules in order to desperately leverage them against the moderators who curate and manage their website in their own time for free.

    Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.

    In response to these threats from Reddit, the LAUK mods have opened the subreddit under protest.

    The mods are in discussion about the following changes:

    Encouraging users to look at safer and more regulated advice options than Reddit

Supporting users to minimise supporting Reddit financially (e.g., use adblocks)

Moving our FAQ and wiki off-site out of a Reddit controlled location

No longer constructively working with Reddit admins - e.g., no AMAs, betas, surveys, mod council, etc.

    Additionally:

    We may decide to operate from whatever Reddit alternative turns out to be the most popular, or move platform entirely e.g. to Discord. This would be over the coming months

Some moderators may stop moderating Reddit to give their free time to the alternatives above

    Our initial reaction was - as we suspect it would have been for many of our users if threatened in that way - to refer the admins to the reply famously given in Arkell and Pressdram. However, the primary motivator for moderators (as well as being power hungry neckbeards) was to help people using our professional skills and knowledge. Reddit is actively harming this community but the majority of moderators believe morally we should continue to use the community we have built to help people as best we can.

    We encourage any admins reading this to look for other jobs at organisations who are not going to make you actively harm the community you are supposed to support, whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

    For and on behalf of the LAUK mod team,

    Fuck u/Spez and long live John Oliver.

    Timwi,
    Timwi avatar

    Discord is a private corporation just like Reddit. Moving to Discord is, as some might say, out of the frying pan into the fire.

    Trekman10,
    @Trekman10@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I'll follow whatever community on the threadiverse they make if they do, just to help boost the numbers (legal advice is also fascinating).

    MacDougal,

    Moderating on discord seems quite difficult

    MadcapRecap,

    Interacting with Discord when there are 1000s of people is really difficult. I’ve moved to the r/formula1 discord but I actively hate using it, as while threading is technically possible it’s never used. The posts+comments approach is so much more manageable.

    rikaxnipah,
    rikaxnipah avatar

    Moderating can be a bit of a pain, but there's bots to help with moderation etc. But yeah, agreed. It's a good space for a chatroom, but not to search for information.

    Laille,

    Yeah, one of the Discords I help with is >450k people. It's a gargantuan task to moderate, and a lot of it depends on having >20 people (which is another task in and of itself to vet >20 trustworthy people) that relies heavily on the community actively reporting things as well.

    It can work, but for legal advice, I'd probably recommend another option.

    Pseu,
    Pseu avatar

    There are moderation assistant bots and a number of settings that can be used to ease moderation. Because of the free API, big servers can make custom bots to suit their needs.

    Moderating anything with over 10k active members is going to be a lot of work, no matter how streamlined the tools are. People are very creative at finding new ways to be assholes.

    !deleted162668,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    dismalnow,
    dismalnow avatar

    @explodingkitchen

    @losttourist @MacDougal

    Discord has threaded discussions, but its truly a case of "jack of all trades". It's simply not built to manage they kind of content, and does nothing but realtime comms with any utility.

    Guilded is better, but still relatively unpolished.

    The only real apples:apples option for an exodus from snooville is a vbulletin site or federated boards like kbin.

    kokoapadoa,
    kokoapadoa avatar

    Guilded is also owned by Roblox, which has its own troubled history. If r/legaladviceuk wanted to go the chatroom route, it'd probably be better to go to a FOSS alternative like Revolt, Matrix, or Signal.

    ulu_mulu,
    @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world avatar

    Legends!! That's how everyone should react.

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