As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
They can’t keep their story straight. First the protest is “noise” that will “blow over”. Now they’re forcing subs to re-open.
Look, even if the protest “fails”, they stick to the API pricing, and forcefully re-open subs, some things will be obvious and for everyone to see that weren’t before:
spez is lying and isn’t trustworthy
reddit cares more about IPO positioning and money than the health of the community
people are willing to explore alternatives like this fediverse
Their handling of this situation has been piss poor. It feels like every step along the way, from the initial announcement about API pricing to his awful Reddit AMA where he replied 12 times and then fled, it's been a terrible look.
I'm hoping more people see alternates like kbin and give them a go.
To investors it also portrays utter ineptitude and an open hostility to the adminsitration of the site by a large portion of the users, and that Reddit is utterly reliant on said users to generate its value. Lord knows I wouldn't dare want to take any stock in this company, social media in general makes little profit and Spez has admitted, before a fucking IPO, that Reddit is not profitable. What fool would buy stock in this?
He's like the dictator with the secret police who "disappear" people but who outwardly makes grand statements about protecting democracy and protest. Bad vibes all around.
Yeah - obviously Reddit isn't going to go down in a fiery blaze, wiped from the internet, but it's entering a long, slow, spiral, imo, after having made a series of terrible decisions and bad PR moves that are likely significantly reducing its value as a company and casting doubt on its longevity as the power house its historically been. As far as I'm concerned, the protests were a success because it's forced Reddit to show its hand in a very public way (after all MSM picked up the story).
Funny how he repeatedly uses phrases such as “the extent that they were profiting off of our API” but has never used the phrase “the extent that we rely on freely provided content and freely provided moderation. If it weren’t for the tens of millions of people who are giving us free stuff we wouldn’t even exist.”
I have yet to profit a single dime off of Reddit. After over ten years (11th Cake Day is coming up), and nothing to show for it but piles of worthless Karma.
I'm deleting all my free content off reddit. It's not particularly exciting content, but I have answered a few questions people probably ask on Google (recipes, cleaning tips, etc) that will now be gone. Just gotta back up my most important stuff first
I nuked the past several years of gif making from my account. Felt like slicing out a troublesome family member and it still weirdly hurts to have done that.
What's endlessly fascinating to me is how quickly Reddit (spez) dug this hole for itself. I'm (or was) an Apollo user, but didn't pay close attention to the finer technical points of app use, and was only half paying attention when the API changes were announced. In a matter of about two weeks, I went from not having particularly strong feelings (like a shrug personified) to be vehemently anti-Reddit and Steve Huffman. And it has literally all been based on the things Reddit (spez and his mouthpieces) have said and done. In other words, there hasn't been any "persuasive propaganda" that swayed me. Just them, in all their idiocy, taking me from neutral to bury them in an incredibly short period of time. The level of incompetence is truly impressive.
It sounds like total incompetence, but I can’t believe that they don’t have a bigger plan. Like they’re burning the forest to promote new growth. Only the way they are going about it is to pull the rug from under our feet and ruin their brand.
Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
Honestly entirely predictable. Should really be a wake up call to moderators and communities that haven't gone dark that Reddit, Inc is not trustworthy (just like how spez has been willing to edit posts).
Good luck to Reddit trying to moderate 5000 new communities and not devolve into Twitter 2.
Moderate 5000 new communities using unpaid labor specifically. Because we all know Reddit doesn't have the employee power to commit to moderation and they definitely don't have the budget to hire it out.
allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable.
Oh, I know this one! A bunch of Nazis are going to get together, vote out the mods of transgender/gay/Jewish subreddits, and turn them into uber-right-wing hate parades.
The most likely thing i'm expecting is people will vote out the r/adviceanimals /wholesomememes mod because of how much it was advertised that he took over the subreddit from the original mods.
Then they will put him back and disable the vote feature.
Optionally it just immediately becomes found out that certain mods can't be voted out to begin with
Lol one of the 10 AMA questions he answered linked to a meme making fun of him.
If he used a functional app that showed links, he could have noticed and not embarassed himself. But because he used the trash Reddit puts out, he had no idea.
I like the concept, and so far I like the implementation, but it's still far too early to gain mass adoption based on what I'm seeing from bugs (account creation silently failed on multiple instances, and login can also silently fail) as well as how registering can feel like jumping through hoops. I wanted to register for beehaw but don't much care to go through an interview process. Then I wanted to make sure I could access beehaw content, but saw they recently defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I had to make sure not to register on either of those.
I don't know this will catch on. Currently each instance is so small, and the communities are even smaller. I worry that content won't update often enough to warrant checking more than once or twice a day. We'll have to wait and see how much this all grows and matures. I'd like this to be my Reddit replacement, but we'll see.
I'm tempted to say it's better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it's not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that's anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There's no shift+select, ban.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be here, and Lemmy's great, and there's far less toxicity (so far). All I'm saying is, (1) there's work to do, (2) don't gloat.
We're not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we're going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.
Reddit was pretty unpolished when I joined 13? years ago. There is something awesome about being on a frontier where posts are getting 20 comments instead of 2,000. Everybody gets a chance to contribute and be heard.
I feel like normie fed-based socials need to start going live like bluesky so people can finally get off these shitty platforms. We need a leader in the federation space.
Would still be poetic justice. Remember when they threw Ellen Pao under the bus? They forgot to hire a scapegoat for this round of unpopular decisions.
Yeah, moderating a large sub isn’t as shake-and-bake as the admins seem to think. They might “hire” scabs, but the scabs are probably going to slack off pretty hard and might not even understand the tools and procedures that can make it effective but not stifling to content.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said. “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
And remind us who's been maintaining that system for so long? I seem to remember spez saying something to the effect of "it's democratic because you can just start another community".
Funny. When my 10 year old account gets banned by some 6 month old power tripping mod account I'm told "moderators get to decide who can participate in their communities" and given zero recourse.
Now when mods go on strike, they're told it's undemocratic and that mods shouldn't get to decide who participates in their communities just because they moderate those communities.
Its probably going to end up like facebook.
A big lumbering thing, still heavily populated but ad choked and overrun by bots and bad actors, indoctrinating unsuspecting users. Even if it stays big, hopefully its reputation will suffer enough to keep most new users away.
I would argue that the default subs already suffer from a lot of those problems. What's kept me around in Reddit is definitely the more specialist subs.
Have you checked out the official app? Last I looked, it defaults to about 1 post visible at a time. You can adjust it to about 4 posts visible. Last I check, 1 of those posts was an ad and another was a recommended post.
I feel like Reddit already turned into a general social media underneath us already, with so many reposts from TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it had nowhere near the amount of original style content as it used to.
The comments became no longer worth reading, with the same lame jokes populating the top of the thread, the atmosphere became toxic and not like a community.
What Reddit are doing is intended to turn the existing known entity into a profitable social media app, they don't care about the quality decline. The existing owners will slowly sell as the valuation increases and they will get their winnings at the expense of the decade of free labour from the content creators, moderators & developers.
It feels a lot like Reddit wants to be Facebook, especially with the recent changes it made to the official app to remove control over what Redditors read.
However, I don't think Reddit can afford the moderation required to be Facebook.
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