It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.
The point is the lurkers subscribed there are going to get bored of steam pictures and unsubscribe, if it happens to enough subs then a lot of the passive userbase will end up either spending less time or leave entirely. Since the vast majority of users are lurkers, it'll outweigh the number of people creating these rebellion posts and Reddit should see a net loss in traffic. At least, that's what I've gathered. Please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong or it's a stupid idea
I'll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you'll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don't understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is "that's just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing".
By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it's not common knowledge.
If people hear "Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate", investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they're currently talking about) they'll remember "we need to be careful with changes or we'll have a reddit moment"
I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he's made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It's absurdly unlikely (not like he's releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).
But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash
This reminds me of the early days when you would goto steam.com only to realize that was not the correct website. I just checked and it seems like steam.com has been taken down but if I remember correctly it was some engineering company. I wonder if they are holding out for more cash from Gaben.
I dunno, I think just remaining closed would have worked better. This will attract additional attention to Reddit. Also, the subreddit wasn't 'forced' back open, the mods just caved under a bit of pressure from the admins (which we don't even know is true. why on earth are they asking the steam subreddit to open back up when there are so many largers subs still private?). Smells like slacktivism to me, and mods who don't want to lose their power. Meh.
They sent mail to every moderator of a closed subreddit I think. I wasn't specifically targetted. I doubt reddit would really care if /r/piracy opened back up, but they got the threat mail
This is what I want to see from every subreddit that is forcibly reopened. The admins can try and force mods to 'do their jobs', but they sure as shit can't force what can be/gets posted!
I modded one that was like 20-25 active at any given time and even that was a pain in the butt, I can only imagine how much harder it gets as you increase the orders of magnitude.
Especially since it is super easy to both open a new community on Lemmy with yourself and your friends as mods and to also advertise it as the official new home to all users.
I mean makes sense they might be a little cautious about what they do, cause like if they get removed the people reddit replaces them with aren't gonna let anything supporting the protests go through.
Well, right now they aren't supporting the protests so what's the difference? "Oh we don't want new mods because they won't protest, so we will stop protesting to avoid that!" the only difference is who gets to be called the mod.
I was talking more about the subreddits that are reopening but still doing stuff to effectively keep their subreddits not usable. They're at least trying to toe the line so they can still do stuff like that where as if they just ignored what Reddit says they would just get replaced with mods that will go the complete opposite direction and stop any talking about protests.
Ah I didn't know what they were doing, I assumed it was something similar to what r/pics is doing. Haven't been back on Reddit since I uninstalled it the day before the blackout started.
I think they could if they wanted to, I know that some subs actually hide your posts with automod until they get released by the mod team so it stands to reason you could do that on one of the core subs. It wouldn't be fun for the mods and would definitely cause a lot of frustration and issues with people all trying to be the first to post something but then they have to wait 8 hours for a mod to wake up and approve it.
I'm not sure how they are actually anticipating this not to go negatively. If they are pushing active moderators and replacing them, that seems like a PR nightmare waiting to happen on top of all of this.
So done with reddit I finally took the time to figure out how federated platforms work. Just started on kbin, and I've been seeing a lot more of what I actually want to see.
@AtomicPurple
Is that stylus one? I tried on chrome desktop and kiwi on mobile, but doesn't look any different, seems like I'm not able to get it active somehow
I didn't mean to imply it wasn't active. I'm happy with the activity so far, mostly. My top requests would be comment collapsing and linking to specific comments with context.
It looks like ass on my phone and there aren't yet equivalents for all my favorite subreddits and I find the whole thing kind of confusing, but these are all issues I expect to improve with time as the platform grows.
The people who care have left. The people who don't care stayed and they obviously won't give a shit. The only way they're going to give a fuss is when the content torpedoes, which it looks like it's already started.
People who are fed up need to not leave. They need to go become a mild nuisance. Give nonsense answers to people (those who need casual assistance anyway). Pollute the data without contributing anything useful. And use an ad blocker the whole time.
Quality content creators are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content submitters are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content commenters are mostly gone from Reddit.
So what's left?
Mods who think they have value and for some reason care about their /r , and working for free.
Ads thinly disguised as posts. Bots spamming and upvoting those fake posts.
And nobody important reading.
The quality difference on lemmy/kbin is staggering. This is the perfect time to be part of it.
It's inevitable it will start to slide once critical mass of users have been reached though. I'm curious if federated and smaller instances will keep it agile and fresh and big corp influence free.
Yeah my big question is what happens when the replacement mods start taking bribes or posting spam? Without moderator tools, mods get a much more raw deal.
The thing that bothers me is the number of people on the r/steam announcement commenting that the mods are doing this to hold on to power and have sold out to the admins. Speaking as someone who has previously run a community (though a much, much smaller one) there is a lot of hard work and effort that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that these kinds of internet spaces stay clean and healthy. It's easy to say "Look at the power-tripping mods", and yes those do exist, but to pretend that every mod is like that sells short the people who sacrifice of themselves for the betterment of the community. A lot of metaphorical and occasionally literal blood, sweat, and tears go into managing an online social space, which I can attest to. Does that excuse poor mod behavior? Never! However, we shouldn't cut off our own nose to spite our face. I just hope that we can stop fighting ourselves and direct our collective vitriol at the real perpetrators; spez and his cronies.
The point is more that the writing is on the wall for that website, and should just quit moderating them and go to one of the alternatives or come here. Saying oh well and giving in to this strong arming from the admins is just making it worse for them down the line.
It's time to jump ship. The longer these people keep denying that, the more power they give to the admins.
While I appreciate that point of view, and it absolutely feels that way, I can relate to the reluctance the r/Steam mods to torching everything. They have carefully cultivated the sub like a garden, and even though the local HOA (the admins) are threatening action, the mods aren't happy with the idea of immediately ripping out their prize-winning tulips and replacing them with cardboard cutouts just to be spiteful. I'm sure they want to try less extreme measures to salvage as much content as they can before making a riskier decision. Again, I get that things seem hopeless from the user side of things, but I know if I was in their shoes I'd be searching every avenue for a solution, even ones I wouldn't normally consider.
It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.
Honestly I think all of these subs should just spam the whole spez moderated jailbait thing and have nothing but that in the front page. Even if these subs reopen, they would ruin spez's image even more.
maybe not but his intent is profit and making reddit open for public trade, and I don't think investors are going to like having something like that flooding all of reddit which might cause them to rethink their choices. I mean with the global reddit population declining and having something that fucked up about the owner of reddit flooding the website, I wouldn't want to buy reddit stock lol.
edit to add on: I'm pretty sure the main objective of these protests is to make reddit lose so much money that it pulls back on the api decision. With most subs blacked out and the ones that have been reopened doing a lotta trolling, why not spread that shit to add some more damage?
I just broke my protest since the blackout began to see if PCGaming was still closed and it is. Nothing but respect for that team. Hope they see it through until reddit decides to go nuclear. I'll gladly create a new account to shit all over the new version.
Next step would be moving beyond pictures of steam / John Oliver and simply jamming subreddits with worthless AI content which forced-back-but-striking mods would no longer remove; the more AI crap is there, the less useful the site is for training AI models, and the whole API scam goes out the window.
The admins sent us a message today saying we must open or get removed, so here we are.
For those of you browsing this subreddit on non-official apps (Reddit is Fun, Apollo, Sync, Boost, etc), they will break on July 1st due to reddit's new policies.
We're opening back up but will leave permanent stickies in the subreddit and threads to keep folks in the know.
Our Discord server is active, don't forget to check it out.
Either open it up or they'd do the same they did on /r/piracy, ask if any of the mods is up to reopen the sub and remove the ones who aren't. Like this https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35555
The big admins just flip a flag somewhere. Probably remove the existing mods or threaten to do so if they close it again. I would then assume that either way the mods aren't going to be giving reddit free labor any more. Not sure what reddit's plan is to moderate at that point. Maybe get a scab mod to run things or something.
They’re removing the mods that keep it closed and install whomever they choose to run the newly reopened subreddit. That or sufficiently threaten the mods in place into making it open. Bad optics either way
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