I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They've already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it's time to cut them loose and move on, but you won't be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
i.e. whatever you post, we can completely remove your name, do whatever we want with it, make you say whatever we want, claim you eat dead puppies, etc.
I don't know HOW that can be legal. That's certainly NOT the user agreement I signed when I joined (2018 version). At the least it should not apply to content made before June 2023. (ianal)
True. We can make them pay to develop a solution to sift and present it coherently.
If they undelete threaded content, they have to undelete the context. If the go full minimax solution and undelete everything.. they have caused serious problems.
There seems some confusion over its legality though, and people talking about reporting it to attorney generals etc. But that protection if private information: the information that they put on a public platform, agree to display publicly, to strangers; that's not private information at all.
You may as well say that people on the street have no right to observe that you walked into the McDonald's next to them, and you will report them for stalking. It's not merely unenforceable, it makes you look foolish to even threaten that it is.
I wouldn't put much past Hoffman or his admins at this point, but what people are suggesting as malice is extremely unlikely. The idea that Hoffman has commanded the few admin staff he's decided to keep on staff to go through arbitrary users to restore an arbitrary number of comments is farfetched.
It's far more likely that comments are from locked subs becoming visible again, and/or that the sheer server load from so many users making requests to delete/edit their content is leading to 503 errors, or database writing issues. Reddit code is basically one long string of spaghetti at this point.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn't have the "and I live in the right place" question.
If you read the TOS, no, the content does not become Reddit’s. The user retains all ownership rights, but grants Reddit a very broad license to use the content. There’s another section that allows users to delete their content (which is consistent with them retaining ownership rights, although of course this doesn’t mean Reddit loses its license to use/copy the content).
This distinction is important—what Reddit is doing here is not taking the content and copying it and reposting it from its own Reddit accounts, it’s putting it back under the user’s original account. Under the TOS, they do have a license to use, distribute, etc. the user’s content. They are not required to give credit to the original poster if they do so. But this does not mean they’re allowed to put content back under someone’s name/account/original comment, thereby attributing that content to the user, after the user has deleted it.
I don’t know all the details of their TOS, just what I’ve read from it. And I have no idea if anyone is going to sue them or anything, or even whether a suit could be successful.
But as far as whether you give your content to Reddit, you don’t, you just give them a license to use it. If you want, you can read down to #5 and see the part I’m referring to. Reddit Terms and Conditions. I think the other part about being able to delete your content is in there somewhere as well.
I mean, sort of? They do technically own the servers and the code, but all of the content and moderation was provided by users. The idea that this should be a unilateral decision by the company is like saying that Fiverr and UpWork freelancers should not have a say in how those platforms are run. Strictly, narrowly, letter of the law as written, it's true. But it completely ignores where both the revenue and the value for those platforms actually comes from.
It's their decision...but arguably it shouldn't be. And that's also an important aspect of this conversation.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I’ve been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn't the only choice.
On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn't work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
While there may be cases of actual restoration of deleted content, I've been purging daily since about 5 days post-blackout on my (220k karma) main account, and the "restored" content I'm having to clean up is, afaict, exclusively from single subs at this point, some of which I know have switched their privacy/blackout status between purges.
I think this is incompetence and gross negligence, not intentional misconduct. So far.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that's what it seems to me.)
For what it's worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven't seen anything get reverted yet.
"The person that spread that?" Are you being serious? That's happened to a lot of people. It's happened to me repeatedly. In fact I'm right now yet again deleting a bunch of posts that stayed deleted for days and are mysteriously back again.
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!! Work when WE tell you too!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
Looks like they're holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform's big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I'm being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don't think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it's pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
Yeah I really don't want everyone or even a large percentage of reddit to migrate over here. Leave the trash behind. The users here are way less hostile and problematic
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won’t sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn’t done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.
Reddit's big and recognisable enough at this point that I don't see it "dying" any time soon, but it's certainly possible that this situation can result in some serious issues for their future growth potential and user activity. If a meaningful percentage of the site's most engaged users (the ones posting the content people come for) leaves or cuts back their usage, and the moderation on subreddits deteriorates as a result of the available moderation tools getting worse, Reddit might find its valuation moving in the wrong direction.
Just because we're unlikely to kill Reddit doesn't mean we can't affect the thing Spez and company are interested in - that IPO money. If the site becomes a Tumblr-esque wasteland of repost bots, AI-generated spam comments and OnlyFans sellers, it's a lot less appealing to users than when it was a real, living website with engaging content. And if users are on average less engaged, would-be investors are going to see that and pause. Remember that Reddit's taking its notes from Musk's handling of Twitter here - and Twitter still isn't any closer to profitability than it was when he took over.
That's what reddit simps want to happen, because they're still in the fever dream that reddit is in control of the situation.
The truth is, the value has already left, and now the cattle left behind are waiting to see if the bullshit reddit has to generate to feed them competes with the user generated content
Once the masses realize reddit isn't capable of that, they'll evaporate out into the best suited alternative.
Particularly as reddit starts enforcing more of their enshitification schemes, which the API access block is meant to support by blocking alternative access.
You think people left now? Wait till they block anonymous browsing on adult subs, and require a government ID to get in, which they're definitely moving toward.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn't what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going "Meh" when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
Sounds hard to bore someone like that. Vapidity culture doing work means content producers don't have to :-\ Maybe won't be hard to keep some (many?) Reddit remainers amused with a handful of chat or repost bots.
The mods make the community. I have modded a few subs and it is a pain to do well, so I stopped doing it. I have definitely had issues with mods (who hasn't), but if large numbers of the good ones leave Reddit is screwed.
I don't think I've ever had any issues with a mod. I got mad at one back in the 90s on GameFAQs, but, in retrospect, they were completely in the right and were kind in their response to my complaint about their moderation.
I was banned from a sub for mass editing my comments, but that's totally fair; I had no idea it was spamming their mod queue.
Anyway, agreed. I have complete respect for the mods that make the online spaces I frequent safe.
Don't understand why other tech sites didn't follow this story as closely as The Verge did. They are witnessing the downturn of one of the largest websites in the world.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
Or they're just, you know... children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I'm willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don't see the need to be involved in this because they weren't on the site when there wasn't an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don't think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don't understand the effects here because to them "third party" isn't something that they knew existed. "API changes" isn't something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn't care, because in their minds, they don't need to. It's "not their fight". Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We're in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit's users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It's not a simple "with us or against us" situation as some like to believe.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”
Is not just age (like im in my late teens and still gone to kbin) but generally, some people have not really taken action about stuff that doesnt affect them i think you are right about that.. For me, i did not use 3rd party apps, really just used mobile site (eww i know. On light mode too can u believe it?) but bc of finding out what was going on it would just be sad to stay there. Especially how they lied about Christian! A fellow Canadian! But some ppl didnt really read much about what happened or just werent concerned cause they did not use those apps, so maybe they found it easy to ignore..
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
I don't think that the blackouts were spineless. People tried talking, a protest, and then variations on telling the community that they're migrating or quitting.
I saw mods say that they were reopening their subs instead of being replaced, often long enough to ask the community a few questions. Some of them burned down their subs regardless. Others are still trying to protest in creative ways, although I don't know what will happen on July 1.
They have a bot running that listens for certain commands in comments, so any user can lock a thread or do a bunch of different stuff just like a mod by commenting
I feel so unappreciated. In fact, if sticking around means that I need to take orders, I'm going elsewhere. It's possible to convey your message without treating me as an underling.
Yeah, Google is just under the Mouse when it comes to companies not to mess with. Especially after they changed removed "don't be evil" from their code of conduct.
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