Reddit Admins Deny Subreddit Users the Right to Vote for Further Blackouts

Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.

However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed:

Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future

Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation

However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.

I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.

vyvanse,
vyvanse avatar

Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up

CrexisEnnex,

At this point I don't know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.

GraceGH,
GraceGH avatar

I think it's theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they've slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that'd get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.

Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won't happen.

nzodd,

Every single asshole on the board of directors needs to go. I guarantee you this is not purely u/spez. And even then I'd be hesitant.

SirNuke,
SirNuke avatar

I doubt this is really from spez. It's the investors who've poured money into Reddit as they've dicked around for 15 years. But now money is expensive. Personally I think they are looking to tap into the sweet, sweet VC money being pumped into LLMs (for which Reddit's API is prime training material), which might go down worse than "hey we're going to not so discretely kill the apps you all have built and love!"

So spez is an idiot, but replacing him wouldn't change things.

On a side note, my god was Digg's Kevin Rose also an idiot back in the day, but he was such a far better class of idiot. He did care about the site, even if he was hilariously incapable of running it. You just don't appreciate these things until they're over.

WalrusDragonOnABike,

But they want users to vote out mods?

They don't want subreddits to close, but they've closed several.

Seems almost like their complaints actually don't make sense given their own actions are just an excuse...

LostCause, (edited )

Spez vote:

Do you want your moderators to be replaced?

A) Yes
B) Not no

chaorace,
@chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I love democracy...

elvith, (edited )

Do you want your mods to be replaced?

A) Yes
B) Affirmative
C) Yes
D) Sounds good
E) Yes
E) OK, do it
G) Yes
H) Also Yes
K) NOn't

static,
static avatar

Seems so,
There will never be a vote, it's just a smokescreen.

density,
density avatar

Have any of these referendums happened? I have not been able to follow all this

GreatBigJerk,
GreatBigJerk avatar

Not yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to build an automated way of doing this.

SirNuke,
SirNuke avatar

God I hope they are dumb enough to follow through with this. Going to be hilarious when a subreddit votes out a Reddit employee who was installed as a mod.

Izzgo,

votes out a Reddit employee who was installed as a mod.

That won't happen until Reddit decides to pay mods.

jclinares,
jclinares avatar

There are admins who are listed as mods in some subreddits, even if they probably don't do any moderation these days. Spez is a mod of r/HighQualityGifs, for example.

can,

No they've just starting removing mods directly.

Jon-H558,

I've seen quite a few on everything from DND forums to niche TV shows I follow

density,
density avatar

can you link to any? I am v curious about how it looks

FaceDeer,
FaceDeer avatar

It seems clear to me at this point the Reddit admins are just making up whatever spur-of-the-moment idea they can come up with at any given moment. They had no idea that this shitstorm was coming and have no actual plan in place for dealing with it.

Keep the shitstorm spinning, I guess. The creativity of Reddit users collectively exceeds that of the admins.

liminis,

Christian Selig's receipts (Apollo's dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.

Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators' right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.

KKSakura,
KKSakura avatar

Reddit: "Democracy is what I say it is"

BuddhaBeettle,
BuddhaBeettle avatar

Honestly, If I were the mods Id nuke the whole subreddit: delete anything of importance, especially any important asset you made for that community (say, FAQs, resources, links, banners, logos, etc.) or better than delete it, edit it out with information as to where you are migrating, leave the shit behind. When you are done leave the sub closed till they take it away from you, and best of luck to anyone that has to rebuild again from nothing.

brownpaperbag,
brownpaperbag avatar

If anyone is going to do this, it needs to be done in stages so it can't be easily reverted back like we're seeing with the one-shot comment delete scripts. Slowly dismantle the sidebar information and links, fuck up the automod and other bot settings. Tweak the CSS and flairs. If you're going to go nuclear, make sure they can't easily get it back.

BuddhaBeettle,
BuddhaBeettle avatar

Im not a mod, but on a smaller scale on my own profile, I grabbed all my most upvoted comments (started from the really upvoted ones until I reached 20 upvotes or so) and edited them out to only leave the first few phrases or words. Then inserted a message that read:

"This used to be a full comment, you can find more resources in the link bellow since I have moved to kbin and reddit doesn't deserve my content! Bye reddit, you won't be missed!
For more [subject] advice, find me on https://kbin.social/m/[subject]"

Bonus points if I could cut the comment out at the exact time it was about to become useful "Whats actually going on here is that..."

Did that sorting by most upvoted and also my fresh, since it wass manual I only managed to do so much, But I liked the approach better than just deleting it all or editing with "fuckspez" so that they could get back and revert it.

brownpaperbag,
brownpaperbag avatar

That's a great alternative to the scripts for your own content! Thanks for the suggestion!

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Again, not a surprise. Totally awful, outrageous, and immoral.

But sadly, par for the course. The mods should allow a vote to move to the fediverse, and leave the sub permanently private in that case.

Or if reddit won't give them the chance to vote, just do it anyways. Like the admins just do what they want, so turnabout is fair play, amirte?

keeb420,

But I thought we were a community. Spez said we were a community. Ho wouldn't lie would he?

axtualdave,

"We're a community" is the same lie employers tell when they say, "We're a family."

billiam0202,

"We're a family here!"

"Yeah, but I hate my family, so..."

PugJesus,
PugJesus avatar

Ho wouldn't lie would he?

Ho lied.

i_cant_sports,
i_cant_sports avatar

Cue the Anakin and Clueless Padme meme

The_Empty_Tuple,
The_Empty_Tuple avatar

I'd be surprised if there was ever a time the admins cared about the opinions/rights of mods or users. It's always been about freedom until freedom threatened their 'bottom line'.

Kakapo,

If people want to move to the fediverse, they need to move to the fediverse, not wait for everyone else to move first.

awsamation,
awsamation avatar

Yes, but you're preaching to the choir here. The number of people who are willing to take that initiative but haven't yet is only getting smaller. So now people are thinking about how to help along the group who isn't unwilling to move, just maybe not move alone.

Part of that is building the fediverse up, more communities, more activity, more of the stuff that made us want to go on Reddit beforehand. But the other part is seeing if there's a good way to motivate the next group migration.

phosphorik,

I dunno man. I just jumped over today. Bummed about the way things went but I’ve been in denial about what Reddit has become for a while. There are more coming.

slybird,

If they do come it will be out of curiosity. If the communities are not built and active they won't stay. So far the only active communities I've seen are the Fuck Reddit communities. The vast majority isn't interested in that.

JickleMithers,

It's just loud right now as it's the hot topic while we watch the fire burn (and the fact a lot of us have just moved over.) It'll die down and people will flow to other communities with the ebb and flow.

lohrun,

We just have to keep making communities and content here that doesn’t revolve around Reddit. I spun up a kbin instance and have been posting news articles I find interesting on my News magazine. Those are manually curated links that I go out and find. I also set up a bot to pull news articles and automatically post them to a different dedicated community on my instance.

Part of the issue with the fediverse is content discovery. You don’t know what you don’t know. Part of the issue is, to subscribe to content from another server you have to search the url or community slug for your instance to find it, pull it, and all you to subscribe to it. It’s slightly less of an issue on the “main” instances because some of the power users are likely going out and searching for new content to subscribe to from other servers.

Are you supposed to go to other instances to make promotion posts about your content on your server? Idk that feels bad and people generally don’t jive with self-promo/ads (maybe it’s more similar to when people would comment stuff like, “oh this belongs in r/ELI5 instead”)

Anyways just sharing some of my morning rambles. I have seen people recreating subreddits on kbin and Lemmy, which is a way to bring new users in to familiar content but it’ll be nice to see some original content and communities also form.

Mereo,

Nothing is immoral when you're capitalist platform wanting to make money.

Fediverse is the only platform that will offer freedom.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

Nothing Everything is immoral when you're a capitalist platform wanting to make money.

Fixed that for you.

Thorned_Rose, (edited )
Thorned_Rose avatar

Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with "No, wait, not like that!!" and the mods adapt again.... this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:

The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.

People are already in open revolt. It's only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)... and Reddit's journey towards enshittification will be complete.

TWeaK,

Users don't own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don't like how a subreddit is run, you're supposed to make your own, not take it over.

Reddit's admins are making up the rules as they go along.

Thorned_Rose,
Thorned_Rose avatar

Reddit admins acting in complete opposition to Reddit's own Content Policy 🤦🏻‍♀️

metaStatic,

Redditors don't have rights. What are you talking about?

experbia,
experbia avatar

Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.

grue,

Reddit is also arguably invalidating their Section 230 protections by exercising too much editorial control over content.

whitehatbofh,

That's less a regulatory thing and more of a shareholder lawsuit after the fact thing. Which I think r would be even more hilarious, rich fucks suing arrogant moronic assholes like spez and his Admin lackeys

crowsby,
crowsby avatar

My guess is that the admin who sent that just copied & pasted the same message they're sending to other subreddits without editing it first. They have a limited amount of admins, and there are a lot of subreddits that went (and remain) private, so they're definitely not writing bespoke messages to each and every subreddit.

I suspect they have some rough templates depending on the scenario each subreddit is operating under:

  • If sub is private > send message A
  • If sub is restricted > send message B
  • If sub is NSFW but not normally > send message C
  • If sub is proposing letting the community vote > send message D
density,
density avatar

For scale:

According to wikipedia the population of finland is 5.6 million.

whitehatbofh,

Maybe the world just loves Finland that much.

Right, Russia? 😏

Nadya,
Nadya avatar

The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.

Which is it fuck-u-spez?

jalda,

The enemy is weak and strong

MrFahrenheit,

If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards.
Checkmate

rovingnothing29,

https://gfycat.com/warmheartedmellowfallowdeer

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

Is it possible to delete a subreddit easily, just curious if its an option mods have ?

WarlordSdocy,

Reddit could probably easily just restore the subreddit after they do so and give the subreddit to mods that will do what they want.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

Yes I figured as much. It was more of a curiosity.

originalucifer,
originalucifer avatar

wont someone think of the chil...community!

dandb,
dandb avatar

Turns out that owning those means of production is the only way to be sure you don't get kicked out by some snotnosed wannabe dictator.

fupuyifi,
fupuyifi avatar

Based on that logic, how do the powers to be at Reddit feel about American Presidential elections?

Whoever is on the team working out all these strategies are just copying rules straight out of an authoritarian Government’s little red playbook.
“You are not allowed to protest!”
“You are only allowed to protest using Government approved methods”

Lells,
Lells avatar

TBF, American Presidential elections are already pretty controlled to guarantee certain outcomes, given how only 2 parties are ever really given any sort of legitimacy by the media. Throw in gerrymandering, and voting fraud, etc.

ilex,
@ilex@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, but Reddit isn't a government. If you start protesting Target's treatment of child workers while inside a Target, they're going to kick you out.

Reddit is being two faced though. If Target invited you to protest in their store, and then kicked you out, you would think that's shitty.

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