/r/videos announces that it will be entering it's blackout early - and indefinitely - given recent events
Think this case in particular is pretty interesting. Former default subreddit and one of the largest on the site (Top 20 at least).
I think /r/videos is where we'll see how things actually play out with the reddit admins. I'm guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
Yes, that's what it means. If you look under the names, you'll see "public" or "private." The way they are going offline is to make the subreddits private. The green ones are labeled private.
Can mods on a subreddit go through and delete all posts before privateing? I know they might want to preserve some posts just in case things get better. But I think a scorched earth approach would send a much stronger message
No they can't. Reddit mods have the ability to remove posts which means they're no longer visible to the average user, but the removal can be reverted at any time.
Mods can't delete anything. They can only remove it. When anything is removed it's there. The only ones who can permanently 'delete' something are the admins. So even if a mod went through and nuked the whole sub, the admins could just restore it.
I did that before leaving, although there's very little I ever posted that will help anyone. If I had posted a lot on programming subreddits, I'd have been a lot more apprehensive about deleting my post history Shreddit (rust)
Replacing mods with a decade+ experience at the job and are known-quantities for being able to keep advertisers happy? Good luck finding replacements. I hope they do try.
I don't see what's stopping protestors from taking mod positions and on purpose wrecking shit. Could be an option for you if you haven't deleted yet nor complained too much about spez on reddit, lol.
Then the users will need to join in the general strike and post a lot of off-topic and rule breaking content. It's pretty trivial to overwhelm things with garbage.
They 100% will. The sad truth is that, despite all the protest threads, there's still a lot of users who have no clue what's going on. In nearly every thread, I'll see comments from people saying that this is the first they're hearing of it.
The fact is that Reddit knows that a LOT of people have no clue about any of this, that they don't care, and that they will continue using the site on the official app and won't notice anything has changed even though the mods of all their favorite subs are being replaced with scabs.
If a substantial number of old users and power users leave reddit, it might trigger a noticeable slowdown in traffic and a decline in quality (I'm not so sure about this as the quality had been going down the shitter for a long time anyway). Maybe that will alert people as to what's happening.
I deleted all the content and comments I posted from my 12 year old account after the AMA spez did yesterday. I will delete the account at the end of this month if nothing changes (I doubt anything will).
I'm currently running 'Nuke Reddit History' in another tab right now on my account too. You nailed it, the people who will be angry about 3pa's and /spez are the ones who use the site a lot, not the casual users who browse and reply. I guarantee that /r/all will suffer in quality post-30th.
I've noticed a sharp drop in quality on the front page in the last couple days. I feel like momentum is building but it's hard to say for certain. The memes seem even more stale when they're alongside shutdown and protest announcements.
Yeah, I'm tempted to delete mine, as well. 15 years on that platform, kinda hurts to think about deleting, but I really don't feel like there's much left for me there.
I just wonder if there's any way to quantify the impact that deleting an account actually has on Reddit.
I posted a slightly longer comment about this downthread but unlike other websites like twitter, reddit relies on users to be moderators. This is the one site that can't afford to lose their power users, you can replace them with scabs but the scabs probably don't know how to moderate a community that large and if enough big community mods quit reddit will never catch up. This is one of the only sites right now where the power users being happy actually does matter more than the average user, because they're essentially staffing the site for free.
See this is the problem with reddit. On a site like Twitter, pissing off your power users doesn't matter much. If anything you lighten the server load some if they leave. You have plenty of users to replace them.
On reddit, pissing off the power users means losing the unpaid volunteers keeping your site running. Sure, reddit can just reopen the sub, and probably will. But who's going to moderate it? A sub that big needs a serious mod team. What happens if several other large subs follow them? How is reddit planning to staff all these subs? Will whoever they grab know what they're doing? If enough mod teams resigned in one go reddit would have no way to keep the site working. Even if they find new volunteers it doesn't mean they'll know how to moderate a huge community.
Jokes aside, I think the events of the past 24 hours are definitive evidence Reddit is going down the shitter. They slowly ran out of their competent staff and are now reduced to the figureheads who no longer have any grasp of the situation at hand.
Their very first point in the Q&A section is an interesting point that I think many of the old-guard Redditors may take, especially those in moderator positions. It is well known that Reddit sub moderation is all done on a volunteer basis. If a substantial number of moderators across some of the larger subs also feel this way, Reddit could see a big decline in the quality of posts and also, possibly, a rise in rule-breaking/hateful content that would severely degrade the quality of the site. I remember seeing a handful of r/SubredditDrama posts about rogue moderators doing something akin to a 'power trip'. I think some large sections of Reddit are in for a wild ride in the coming weeks/months.
Even if Reddit kicks these mods out and brings in their own, a lot of this moderation has been a labor of love and the replacements won't be 1:1.
I mean the same thing is happening at Twitter, but most users are staying there because there's nowhere to go. Bluesky is invite only and mastodon doesn't have whatever celebs and influencers they follow (and no shade on these folks, I originally joined Twitter for a single person's tweets).
This place is cool, but people will stay on Reddit as long as their communities do. And frankly I think most people are going to go to discord if Reddit does actually die, because most subreddits already have an associated discord channel
I agree, although, I think the difference is a reddit-like site needs a far smaller critical mass of users to get by than twitter/mastodon. You just need enough to people to fill out some major communities, and enough that you can find a group of people for your niche.
It's why I'm sort of not worried if there is some mass exodus from reddit. We are getting enough to bring life to this area of the fediverse and that's great.
Twitter just needs warm bodies. Reddit relies on users to run the communities. That's the difference. Reddit is the only big site right now where a small number of users leaving angrily can cause serious structural issues for them.
I hope the current mods are serious and have a fail safe process to remove all sub reporting rules, AutoMod, and other restriction.
If reddit admins resort to forced take over, let the sub reset and be open to all videos extreme, nsfw, gore, and bot post. Let's see how well the sub is without mods.
Would be sorted out in minutes.
Everything posted/done on reddit is stored. If a mod/mod team goes rogue reddit removes the mods and hits the big "go back an hour" button, installs some new mods and most people wouldn't even know something happened
Only if those new mods know what they're doing. Reddit will run out of people who know what they're doing very quickly. Filling mod positions with randos isn't the same as successfully running a community.
I hope the current mods are serious and have a fail safe process to remove all sub reporting rules, AutoMod, and other restriction.
If reddit admins resort to forced take over, let the sub reset and be open to all videos extreme, nsfw, gore, and bot post. Let's see how well the sub is without mods.
I wonder if the API changes will break Auto mod and the other bots? Those bots rely on the API to function and I don't think for most of them that their creators or maintainers are willing to pay to keep them running.
Why should the mods pay for bots to keep working? There's quite a good argument that 3rd party apps should pay (although IMO with reddit, the users really do provide the reason to keep coming back so I'm unsure what I really think), but the mods and their bots are actively doing the work that other platforms pay people to do for free.
/r/music announced the same thing a few days ago. Hopefully other major subreddits join in as well. But as already mentioned, admins will probably just reopen them and throw in new mods.
You can't throw just anyone in to moderate a gigantic subreddit. They can get a user on the mod list but that doesn't mean they can mod and a poorly moderated subreddit doesn't keep users around long.
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