While I'm quite left wing, I have huge problems with them (as well as the main dev) being authoritarian, genocide-defending tankies. That praise China, Russia and DPRK. It's maddening.
You're being downvoted because people don't understand you're not talking about "far left" like some Trumper. You mean literal tankies, which absolutely yes some of the Lemmy Devs are as well as Lemmy.ml. It's also a reason I selected Kbin.
That’s like saying you don’t recommend Linux because you disagree with Linus Torvalds. Using Lemmy or Linux does not advance any particular political agenda. And for the record, I like kbin.
You know what does potentially advance a communist agenda? Buying a phone made in China. Which phones do you recommend?
Now you've got me wondering what Linus Torvalds thinks. The only opinion of his I know is that https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg that used to do the rounds "Hello this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux".
agree. Part of why I liked reddit was that I could customize my feed to ignore political diatribe (left and right) and just read the feeds that interest me. Lemmy is so infested with leftists that it spills over into every part of their community
I haven’t had that experience on lemmy and have found a diversity of small communities, just like on Reddit. But I guess I don’t subscribe to any news communities, so maybe the monoculture you describe is present there.
One is the instances is owned by people who praise Stalin. Lemmy.world is not. And the code is open source so Lemmy is not really owned by anyone. All you have to do is switch instances.
In my experience, lemmy.ml and feddit.de (for example) are in more left wing then milquetoast progressives. It's faszinating and refreshing, and I don't mind people speaking their minds. But I prefer moderate, too.
I would rather say that the average Redditor is milquetoast progressive. Heck, I start to really enjoy this phrase 😉.
As my feed is populated by a lot of German threads it is worth to note that moderate depends a lot on the country you are from. Bernie Sanders would probably be considered part of the moderate left in most of Europe while he is considered to be far left in the USA.
It also depends about what specific topic we are talking about.
In many places in Europe, being a social democrat when it comes to economy (like Bernie) might be considered pretty moderate. But then certain attitudes about non-binary pronouns or supporting special considerations for specific groups of people, are seen closer to "far left".
You don't see the amount of virtue signaling in Europe that you see in USA media productions, for example.
I'm liberal, but I'm not at the "censor users criticizing the Chinese government because they're communist" level. I was also skeptical of what people were saying about the lemmy.ml admins (the original lemmy devs), but they're anything but miquetoast progressive.
That doesn't represent all of Lemmy though. I just wouldn't recommend joining .ml
What's left wing about simping for dictators? Just because they called their countries "communist" to keep people from realizing, they were both effectively totalitarian dictatorships, and that's about as right as it gets.
@Crankpork they're left wing dictators? The wings are about economic policies. Communism is an ultra far left economic system like pure laissez-faire capitalism is an ultra far right economic system. You can be authoritarian or libertarian in either group. Or you can have more moderate economic views and still also have more authoritarian enforcement or extreme libertarian/anarchic lack of enforcement
Communism almost inevitably leads to dictatorship though. History has proven this. Capitalism can at least coexist with democracy to a degree. For all practical purposes, communism and dictatorship are a package deal.
Not necessarily. Kerala is a state in India that democratically elected a communist government for the first time in history (in 1956). They’re currently the ruling party in the state.
My viewpoints are moderate. And I’m in a state governed by a far-left government in a country governed by a far-right government. Honestly, the best of both worlds! They both keep each other in check and everything is moderate!
I mean, that's exactly my point though. People seem to be knee jerk assuming that the "leftist" accusations against the .ml instances are standard issue right wing hyperbole against progressive liberals and that's not the case. It's just as much that progressives are complaining because we have no interest in associating with tankies.
I think the only real way for anyone to get it is to experience it. I thought it was bullshit propaganda too and I also thought I was relatively far left before first arriving at the .ml domain and further lemmygrad. I am still kind of surprised that we have a community out there that large that seems to legitimately identify with the 'tankie' ideology.
It's a bit of a culture shock realizing that you might just be a progressive moderate.
That's actually really good thing. In the U.S. not wanting to kill trans people makes you a "far left" person according to right-wingers. real "far left" people are pretty nuts, man. The vast majority of us are moderates who are now labeled as "far left" in the U.S. political discourse.
I dunno mate. Does identifying with a side lay out your viewpoints on every issue? I live in a communist-ruled state in India and I know of communists who don’t agree with the trans ideology. Due to religion and stuff, we also have far-right people here that consider trans people as gods.
You need to do a little research before you get up on your high horse. They’re literal, self proclaimed communists. Lemmy was made because Reddit wasn’t left enough. They enjoy censorship and deny basic human right violations, and parrot CCP propaganda. They’re tankies. That’s why the devs instance isn’t federated with many of the major ones.
This is partly why kbin exists.
Wtf. I accidentally deleted my comment two times. Lemmy mobile UI fail!
Thought I was getting déjà vu while reading your comments lol. Glad you explained why I saw it so many times!
I agree with your foundational stance on using kbin vs. Lemmy due to the political beliefs (‘Tankies’) of those on Lemmy.
But, I’d never heard of them referred to as far left before. In my mind, Bernie is generally considered far left in the US (even though I wish he wasn’t).
I am glad that others provided their explanations of left vs. progressive because it helped me to better understand why you said left (instead of right).
You need to do a little research before you get on your high horse. They’re literal communists. Lemmy was made because Reddit wasn’t left enough. They enjoy censorship and deny basic human right violations, and parrot CCP propaganda. They’re tankies. That’s why the devs instance isn’t federated with many of the major ones.
I’m not exaggerating. This is partly why kbin exists.
You need to do a little research before you get on your high horse. They’re literal communists. Lemmy was made because Reddit wasn’t left enough. They enjoy censorship and deny basic human right violations, and parrot CCP propaganda.
I’m not exaggerating. This is partly why kbin exists.
Oh don't even get me started on the downvote brigades from angry leftists around here. Don't you dare hold a moderate opinion around them, or they call you a nazi and tell you to go back to 4chan. You can read my post history. All I've ever expressed is the same sentiment expressed here, and I've been met with nothing but absolute vitriol.
Because we saw what happens with Reddit. People come in claiming to be “moderate”, and very quickly shit like T_D starts popping up. Also center of the road politics in the US has had rights taken away from millions of people in just the past year, and it’s going to continue to erode them from more. I’m not telling you to change your political stance, but I am telling you that people see them as an attack because they have literally been attacked by “moderates”.
"Moderate" doesn't necessarily mean centrist or unalienable, it's antithesis is extremist. Being moderate and supporting peoples rights to be who they are just means taking a more practical and slow approach.
You need both moderate and more extreme views of progressivism, otherwise you get drowned in either. They support each other, they don't necessarily oppose each other.
What you call "moderate" is likely viewed very differently by other people, since I assume you're from the US, and US politics has become a far-right fucking shitstorm. The overton window has shifted so much over there that "moderates" are degenerate cunts to more reasonable people.
Your post history shows you are solidly on the right end of the spectrum based on your expressed opinions while trying to justify yourself as moderate.
How? Why would you resort to lying? I'm pro choice, I despise Trump, I'm pro gay and trans rights, I believe in UBI for everyone (as well as keeping the free market in place), pro legalization (of every drug), pretty anti gun but I still believe it's peoples right to own them, I think police should be completely reformed and prisons fundamentally changed to be places of rehabilitation. What opinion of mine shows I'm on the right end of the spectrum? Because I believe in nuance and civil discourse? That I think all humans deserve forgiveness and a chance to grow and become better? Please, do enlighten me.
The forced distillation of every single position to being somewhere on this "left" to "right" spectrum is the single worst thing to happen to modern political discourse, IMO.
I'm a fan of the "8 Views" test, which tries to position views along four different axes instead of just one. Four is still too few but it's way better than what we've got now.
You have the freedom of speech, not the freedom to be free from the consequences of that speech. I read your post history and couldn't really find a 'moderate' position, mostly far-right talking points and splitting hairs about semantics. If the shit that you're saying is indistinguishable from Nazi and fascist rhetoric, I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you that you may have to reexamine the people you caucus with.
I also saw that you claimed downvotes and disagreements are an important part of online social interaction, and yet you're here complaining about "downvote brigades." I thought that was pretty funny.
Pretty insidious of you to imply that what I have expressed here is far right, nazism, AND fascism. Do you have any examples where I haven't been moderate? This is what I meant by downvote brigades, it's not just the downvotes. It's the snakelike way in which people (such as you) are arguing with me that I'm disturbed by.
It's not splitting hairs about semantics when I've been called a nazi (multiple times now) for espousing NOTHING in the realm of nazism, and have in fact only condemned it. That's a huge problem, and it's my current focus here.
I'm against authoritarianism from any side and I'm also against the deceptive bullshit you're trying to pull.
I think part of it is that leftists (myself included) don't like being lumped in with tankies. I didn't downvote though.
The lead devs of lemmy are tankies, basically meaning authoritarian communists of the genocide-apologist variety. They also run the lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml instances.
This is also why I signed up on kbin instead of on lemmy. The other lemmy instances are fine, but I don't want to contribute to the influence of the lemmy devs any more than necessary. Hopefully they try to pull something stupid and get forked off the project.
@cacheson This exactly. It’s why I didn’t join there and wound up here instead. Communism is a misnomer at this point - all that is left is the authoritarian/totalitarian/Putinistas. Tankies and Putinistas are the same to me. Trumpists are the same to me. The only time I’m associating with those people is across from them at their next US insurrection.
Why would anyone downvote for that reason though? That reason is why I upvoted. I'm firmly left-wing but absolutely not far enough that I can support their BS views.
It gets weird when we talk about this stuff on only one axis (left-right) rather than two (left-right/libertarian-authoritarian, though that's still a simplification). Specifically, I'm an anarchist, which means I'm part of the "far left". Anarchists, along with "ultra"-communists, are seen as being to the left of Lenin/Stalin-style communists. Saying that the problem with the lemmy devs is that they're "far left" implies that people like me are the same as tankies, and we kind of resent that.
Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.
What's the moderate position between "trans people should not be allowed to exist in society" and "trans rights are human rights"? You have to understand every time you or anyone else says some shit like this you're basically crying that people are taking a position instead of just watching the right wing try to ruin peoples lives.
The supreme court literally ruled to allow businesses to discriminate against people based on sexuality yesterday.
I mean, you don't have to be a tankie that defends North Korea or the uighur genocides, to respect those values? Which is the main problem with Lemmy devs and main instances.
You're gonna need to be a bit more specific than that, because "defends" often does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to issues like that being discussed from a leftist perspective. Did they outright say North Korea is perfect or there was no human rights issues with the treatment of the Uighur people in China? Or did they say the situation in Korea is more complicated than is presented by the west because we've embargoed them for more than half a century at this point and point out how the Uighur genocides are not that different from what happens in ICE camps in the US to this day?
Bad things happen all over the world, and I don't think China or DPRK are perfect by any measure of the word, but presenting them as the axis of evil and ourselves as the good guys is just silly. It's not that they're good, it's that we're cartoonishly evil too.
The problem is that nobody (or at least very few people of actual influence) are legitimately saying that trans people shouldn't get to exist. I have yet to see any politician, for example, express such a belief.
Michael Knowles called for the "eradication" of transgenderism at CPAC this year. Please shut up (E: corrected the wording he used, because he said "eradication" not just that it shouldn't exist)
No, it's not an important distinction. If you remove the ability of trans people to transition to their identified gender then you're relegating many of them to suicide.
I firmly believe everyone has the right to live freely and to find their own path, provided they don't harm others. Hate speech and violence have no place in our society, and I wholeheartedly stand with the trans community in advocating for their protection.
Nonetheless, here's a viewpoint I have that I know is not accepted, but I'll share it anyway. I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
That said, I believe it's important to work towards a society that respects every person, but without mandating how we perceive them. Life's journey is all about confronting adversity, and part of this involves learning to navigate the world as it is, not necessarily as we'd like it to be. Instead of dictating specific definitions, it might be more beneficial to cultivate a culture of empathy, understanding, and open dialogue around these issues. This perspective is unpopular and contentious, but it is a conversation that we should be willing to engage in.
Anyways that's what I see as the moderate take, and it's what I believe. I had to tiptoe pretty hard there and I'm sure what I said still comes across as hate speech to some but I don't feel it is. It's just my opinion. I wish there was a place I could express it and have an open debate with people about it. We can't eliminate half of society, and we're going to have to learn how to empathize with people we disagree with in order to actually see where they are coming from.
I believe this is indeed the moderate stance to take. People leaning towards either end will disagree with this statement! Lemmy, being a new place, is of course left-leaning and the disagreements here do reflect that! Nothing out of the ordinary!
Nonetheless, here's a viewpoint I have that I know is not accepted, but I'll share it anyway. I believe the compulsion of speech, particularly insisting that all of society adapt their language to accommodate individual identities, is a terrible approach. The notion of forced speech is problematic to me, and worries me greatly.
Is this the fucking Jordan Peterson position? Whose speech has been compelled? A man walked into a Philosophy of Gender class this week in Canada and stabbed three people, so sorry if I'm a lot more concerned with the constant hate speech being levied against LGBTQ+ people than I am with the anomalous concept of "compelled speech" which has not as of yet been an issue and only exists in the fever dream of transphobes who want to actively misgender people while working in public positions in Canada.
I agree with you, but this is a really bad counterargument to what they said. Even widely agreed politeness conventions to a degree 'compel' speech, so the debate is really around what speech is acceptable for society to encourage/suppress, rather than whether cultural changes are changing what people are compelled to say. Also, I don't think they said anything that suggested they are more concerned by that than hateful violence?
That's a lotta words for "I don't respect what people want to be called". When you call someone by the wrong name and they correct you, is that also compelled speech to you? Because that's all pronouns are. By your definitions all of language is compelled speech, because you're being forced into using specific words to communicate.
It can be your opinion all you want, but it's one you should evaluate and change, because it doesn't make any goddamn sense.
It's actually even stupider than they're presenting it to be. The speech that was being "compelled" was explicitly not intentionally and repeatedly misgendering someone after being informed of their identified gender while working in a publicly funded position. I.e. when someone is acting as an agent of the government of Canada, they're not allowed to intentionally misgender people.
They can literally quit their jobs if they don't want to do that, our speech is constantly compelled in similar ways in the workplace but they never care about that, because that's how jobs work. I may want to tell customers to go fuck themselves if they're rude, but I'm compelled to smile and nod and keep that for the break room afterwards if I want to keep my job.
This. While things are new, and nothing has taken the place of "service that everyone uses", LGBTQA+ people are going to avoid the unsafe places which is going to push discussions further and further right. A "moderate" position that treats the bigots the same as people who just want to live and feel safe isn't moderate at all.
An actual moderate position there is to just not go out of your way to be an asshole. But some people want to be assholes and vilify those who may not be able to protect themselves. I can't stand the people who want to 'debate' human rights. No, that line of thinking isn't welcome going forward.
Turns out people who work on open source in their free time to make the internet a better place for all are usually left wing, while the righties try to make money and fail.
Thank you for posting this here. Really heartwarming to receive so much kindness.
Let's be optimistic for the future of Internet communities. Technology evolves and puts more power into the hands of the users. Excited to see what's next.
I saw that you were developing an app for Tildes. I believe it was called 3Cheers or something along those lines. I just wanted to say good luck and I hope your future endeavors are way more successful than redditisfun.
I'm on both here and Tildes so I'll be looking forward to where this leads.
Jumping on the bandwagon here. Sad to see the current state lead to the end of RiF. The app has been a huge part of my internet addiction. Thank you for all the years of development and patience.
You're seriously an unreal dev. I have loved your product and have used it every day for a long long time. I can't wait to see what your next project is! I will be supporting it 100%
Glad to share it! Thank you so much for your hard work, I cannot overstate how much I loved your app. I'm sure you've been getting this bunch but seriously the experience on Reddit is fun was what made Reddit. I have barely used it ever on a computer and have never really experienced it any other way. It is by far the number one used to have on my phone and losing access to it is losing access to Reddit for me. I'd love to know about any other projects that you're working on because the quality and simplicity of your product was what made the experience so great all these years!
Thank you for giving us such a good mobile experience on reddit. RIF suited my needs perfectly and I am both sad to see it go and excited for whatever the future holds.
This is your app? You're awesome dude, RiF was the only way I browsed reddit on my phone. Thank you for the years of joy and I wish you success in all your future endeavors.
Hey, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I don't want to force anyone to stay here ;) I believe that kbin can be a stepping stone to a wider fediverse, which is great. However, I'm trying to keep the entry barrier as low as possible so that everyone can find their place here. The rest will come with time. Currently, we're working with contributors to make setting up and maintaining your own instance less of a nightmare, and it should change for the better soon.
He's had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.
He's had every opportunity. He's fucked it up at every step.
Remember the threat that Reddit presented to capitalism's status quo around the height of antiwork and GME.
If Reddit falls, it will be on purpose. Same as the 180 of Twitter as a somewhat legitimate forum - Twitter being a key organizing tool during the Arab Spring (with the Saudis being the largest investor in Twitter behind elon of course).
Billionaires do each other favors to keep the class war in balance.
yeah i’m not sure this theory holds water… it’s pretty obvious the community won’t just give up: everyone saw what happened with mastodon
the fediverse is ideologically opposed to corporate and capitalist interference, so they’re just pushing people to a platform that they have even less control over, in a manner that pushes people to be more anti-capitalist, to a platform whose very existence is about being anti-corporate!
mayyybe you could say that combined with threads the “long play” is to embrace, extend, extinguish essentially moving reddit to facebook? but that’s a stretch and a half
i agree with hanlons razor here: spez is just a fucking egotistical moron
he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue
Let's call this what it actually was though, there was no attempt at making money from the API. This was entirely to shut down 3rd party apps. Smart AI companies will just scrape reddit. The only people affected by this are 3rd party app developers and users.
This is even more amazingly incompetent. There are a near infinite other ways they could have handled 3rd party apps not showing ads, but they instead chose the brute force method that makes no one happy.
Fair point. And yes, there's just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn't make any sense to me at all.
A business brain would have followed the money. He's just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don't think he really realises or understands what he had.
The thing that gets me is that rif used to have a revenue sharing arrangement, which was axed when spez came in. He literally had a functional way of profiting off of third party apps and he threw it out.
I don't know that they would have when you consider the goal is to prevent a revolt. One reason so many people revolted is that they killed a bunch of third party apps and tools without an acceptable alternative. If they had an internal app with the quality of Apollo, certainly many people would be mad but you would find significantly fewer people mad enough to leave.
I agree with your last point so much. I also used the official app and had a 12 year account, but fuck if I am going to just stand by and watch another corporate board make our world a bit more miserable for the sake of their profit. Let them have dust.
Pretty much the same. I didn’t mind the Reddit app and even paid the monthly fee because I wanted to support a site that I used daily. I also had Apollo and used it and was pretty indifferent between the two. Each had their positives and negatives and don’t mind paying a fee as long as it is reasonable but I can’t turn a blind eye to the bullshit u/spez is pulling.
I'm a Relay user. I found the amount of ads and pushed content/gimmicks on the official reddit app and 'new' mobile website (which is already straight up hostile to browser users, very intrusively pushing the app) aggravating and found old.reddit not super usable on mobile, where I spend most of my life (RIP).
I was hopeful the Relay dev could find a pricing mechanism which would enable him to continue, but to be honest, as long as I know where my main communities will migrate to I'm no longer broken-hearted that I wont be on reddit - although I feel for the devs who have had so much work ripped out from under them in this way. The direction of Reddit as a company is clearly laid out before us with spez's and admins' responses and what is looking to happen with piracy, NSFW etc content, and they do not want to support all the things that make it great. They seem to almost hate its whole raison d'etre - its widely open and extensive community forums, development/tech led userbase, its potential for a very easy-to-read but user-specific or incredibly niche experience if wanted.
I understand how this means they are not profitable like more algorithm-intensive and centralised social media companies with stronger ad platforms, and I would, like the devs, very much understand some sort of pricing for API access. But their aggression and lack of communication, the kind of PR- or IPO-led choices they're making and general 'snoo'tiness (sorry) makes it clear that they're a company I no longer really support. Especially if they're taking anything Elon says seriously, blimey.
I support the reddit userbase and community, I'm not loyal to a random brand - I've been on there for >10 years as well but only because it felt like the website was just the vehicle for the underlying communities, rather than the headline company plastering itself on everything (apart from the occasional r/place sort of event). Now they're pushing their branding over the content so much I'm glad to be rid of it, just like meta and twitter.
Similarly, had no 3rd party add but was so disgusted by how the company has acted that I'll never be able to use them again in good conscious. It feels like these sort of corporate moves of "eat a bag of shit or don't eat at all" have been really ramping up as of late. You do things that you know your users or customers won't like and then see how they'll react. Did a lot leave? Some did but now I know that the ones that are left will take whatever financial or TOS curveball that I can think up. I can make more money by providing less options, and shittier service, but I'll say the exact opposite. And when the thing we do brakes or charges you 5x the amount you signed up for then our customers will need to take half a day to get around every dead end automated messenger and customer call line that takes 2+ hours because of "covid."
They say, as if there aren't an immeasurable & expanding number of alternative options on the internet besides eating off their plate? Like I'm just going to eat across the street lmao reddit users are not a captive market.
This is similar to me. I used Reddit's official app, so initially I wasn't bothered by 3rd party apps going away. But seeing Reddit's response, which is basically "users will bow down and do what we want, they will generate revenue for us and not complain, and we will never listen to them", is what made me not want to use Reddit again. So now I'm not using it.
Same here. I feel so bad that Christian is having to deal with all this. He’s doing a spectacular job at defending himself from the corporate attacks but he shouldn’t have to. I really hope he gets more visibility in the media, because all the articles I’ve been seeing in the mainstream are from spez perspective and that’s a shame.
Between misrepresenting their conversations with app devs and mods, and trying to spin a different story in media outlets, and lumping me into a "database of human conversation"... I really don't want to contribute to or engage with a company like that in any way. None of it directly affects me but I see no reason to help assholes out with free content, ad views, or votes.
The moderators were recently contacted by u/ModCodeofConduct, who had this to say:
We noticed you recently marked your community NSFW. This action is likely to confuse your community members, as people subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. This is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2.
While we recognize communities can gradually change as they grow, when your content suddenly changes from generally safe for work to sexually explicit, it harms the community members.
While we can see you haven't taken the step of approving sexually explicit content, we need to separate your community from the communities that abruptly become NSFW and post sexually explicit content, situations in which we immediately take action. Please correct the NSFW marking on your subreddit so that we can separate your community from those violating sitewide rules.
Thank you.
As subscribers to r/PICS are aware, the moderators here have worked very hard to ensure that the community adheres to every mandate and message that Reddit has surfaced. Unfortunately, we were unable to state as much to u/ModCodeofConduct, as they disabled the ability for us reply.
We do not wish Reddit to think that we have ignored their attempt at contact (which would be very rude of us), so we will be offering our response here. We apologize for locking the thread, but as Reddit has yet to answer our previous letter, we are operating under the assumption that it went unseen amongst other comments.
We appreciate your concerns regarding r/PICS being marked as NSFW, and we hope that you will be reassured by our response. In short, the shift in question was not a sudden change, nor is there any risk of users being confused… and most important of all, an abrupt reversion would itself constitute a violation of the site-wide rules that you cited.
On June 16th, 2023, r/PICS (then r/Pics) asked its subscribers to vote on the state of the subreddit, and they overwhelmingly decided to feature only “images of John Oliver looking sexy.” On June 20th, 2023, a second poll was held, and it was determined that “any and all media featuring John Oliver” would be allowed. This also precipitated a change in the subreddit’s name from “/r/Pics” to “/r/PICS,” with the latter being an acronym for “Posts Illuminating Comedian’s Sexiness.”
As we moderated r/PICS, however, we discovered that large amounts of profanity and offensive content – both of which are listed as NSFW by Reddit’s policies – were present in non-NSFW threads. This was problematic, as users expecting work-safe experiences were very likely to encounter non-work-safe material. Rather than abruptly alter our rules without first consulting the community (which would have confused users), we asked on June 26th, 2023 for subscribers to refrain from offering any NSFW content in non-NSFW threads.
We also requested a response from Reddit on that same date.
By July 3rd, 2023, the amount of profanity and offensive content in r/PICS had not declined, and Reddit had not responded to us. It was publicly announced that we had no choice but to mark the subreddit as being NSFW, so as to adhere to Reddit’s own mandates. It was also made clear that our longstanding rules – rules which should have seen r/Pics (in any form) being a NSFW community from the get-go – would be unchanged; that neither gore nor pornography would be allowed, but that tasteful nudity, profanity, and “offensive” content would continue to be acceptable. To reiterate, while we do celebrate a British comedian’s undeniable allure, we do not allow anything sexually explicit to be posted.
Our surfaced resources – our sidebar, our rules, our wiki, and our announcements – make all of this exceptionally clear, but since Reddit provides no method by which users can be required to read said resources before participating, the visible marking of r/PICS as NSFW is vital to establishing reasonable expectations. Furthermore, as Reddit assures its partners that their advertisements will not run alongside profanity or offensive content, the aforementioned marking is also in said partners’ best interests. That same assurance indicates that moderators “set their own standards for conduct and ‘appropriate’ content,” indicating that r/PICS is solely responsible for determining what is and is not offensive (and policing accordingly). A failure on our part to appropriately list r/PICS as NSFW would therefore run counter to what advertisers have been told.
We do understand that the shift may have caused some minor issues for Reddit, however, and as we have no desire to harm the platform, we are more than willing to discuss the situation with you. Please respond to our previous request for communication, and we will look forward to exploring productive paths forward. In the meantime, to ensure that r/PICS is adhering to all of Reddit’s guidelines and requests, we would be happy to revert the NSFW setting, restrict posting, and remove any and all content that could be considered “offensive” by anyone. If this compromise does not meet with your approval, please offer a publicly visible comment in response to our open letter. We understand that you are likely very busy, so we will wait until Friday, July 7th before taking any additional steps.
Reddit will replace the mods with those friendly to Admins/Spez and revert back to the way the sub was run prior to the blackout and malicious compliance. This is unfortunately, the only way it's going to end now.
Replace the mods with who? Reddit doesn't have an endless supply of compliant free labor they can just assign willy-nilly to whatever subs they desire. Especially now that the masks are off about what Reddit admins really think about moderators.
I'm giving the most plausible scenario. They don't need a mod from r/pics to take over; they can use anyone who is power hungry enough to do the job.
Not saying I like it, or agree with it, just giving the most plausible option for Reddit to take at this point.
Because, let's be clear about this, Reddit is winning this battle even if they won't win the war. This overall event spells the end of the site as we know it...or knew it. The malicious compliance, changing to NSFW, the broad interpretation of the rules...it doesn't matter. Reddit is going to win this, or appear to win this in the short term, even if it entirely kills their future. They'll kill a 20 million subscriber subreddit to do it if they need to.
And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?
And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.
In the meantime, to ensure that r/PICS is adhering to all of Reddit’s guidelines and requests, we would be happy to revert the NSFW setting, restrict posting, and remove any and all content that could be considered “offensive” by anyone.
Hmm. So they are superficially giving in, they won't keep NSFW on to avoid ads money for reddit. But by going restricted, and going after all "offensive" content (could I read that to mean all John Oliver content? i.e. all content since the protests started) they stand to cause a massive drop in traffic to the sub, which should still hurt the bottom line.
This is exactly what they're gonna do. I'd love to see them implement something like what /r/politicalhumor did and set up automod to react to user comments. So for example, if anyone says "the is offensive" it deletes the post and bans the user
Note the statement to remove any and all offensive content. If they're still going the malicious compliance route, they're implying they're going to nuke the sub.
The app still works for me. But I've been hearing Reddit has shut down the old mod API token, but not the regular token yet. So that might explain a little. However, RedReader was granted accessibility exemption so who knows what's going on.
But also, remember not to automatically assume someone with negative reputation is a troll. Given kbin currently doesn't calculate reputation correctly (it counts boosts not upvotes).
I'm putting this as a top level comment, but I mean to be talking here to the people suggesting to report or block, or moderators looking at this and thinking of taking action against trolls.
Honestly, I don't think we should bother checking their reputation score even if it was working correctly. They're either engaging in shitty behaviour or they're not. All of us engage in shitty behaviour sometimes - we all get hangry, we all have bad days, and we're all suffering in some way or another - and the fact that someone has a record of saying popular things doesn't mean their shitty behaviour needs to be accepted or engaged with.
Call it out, ignore it, or report them. If there's a pattern of shitty behaviour, the mods or admins can have a chat with them about it.
I’m not sure why anyone cares about karma or points or whatever they are called over here. I don’t ever look at that for other profiles, and only noticed that it even existed when I finally logged into my account on a computer rather than a mobile.
I think to tag on to what you said…I think it’s fair to say that a troll can only be labeled as a troll based on the content and responses they create.
Yup, I've got significantly more upvotes than downvote in total (only one reply of mine so far got downvotes, from the bigots it was calling out), but my overall score is still negative at the moment. Which I personally don't really care about, I just wouldn't want others assuming I'm a troll because of it.
Edit: looks like these last few replies got me off that negative rep lol, thanks
(I don't have the brain power to figure out any thing of any significance from this but if anyone is interested: 20 upvotes on replies today got me from -3 to +1)
Edit again: though having now posted an article from an indigenous perspective on a Canada day celebration post, I am already worse off from when I started lmfao
If you're using kbin, the reputation is calculated between your boosts and downvotes. This is a flaw from how this instance tried to retool the platform, but will be rectified soon so that reputation will be the simple arithmetic of upvotes minus downvotes.
In other instances, the upvotes are called boosts, but here on kbin, the functionally of boosts is how your content is getting promoted in other instances, from what I understand. Boosts are like retweets on other users' activity feeds here in kbin.
I've already felt the sting of the protests when googling solutions to various issues. I used to be able to include "reddit" in the search and would almost always find relevant information quickly, but now as OP mentioned many posts and whole communities have gone dark.
It's all been really eye opening about the potential negative consequences of having so many communities and information in the control of so few.
My thinking is that because it is decentralized, even if sections of the fediverse decide to sell out to our corporate overlords, it wouldnt compromise the entire platform.
I wouldnt go so far as to say that the fediverse is completely immune to manipulation, but i do think the nature of it makes mass tampering\control more difficult.
Google's VP of searching has even mentioned that, which really is Google's fault as it was an issue long before spez caused Reddit to crumble - Reddit was just propping up Google's bad choices, then Musk bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, now Huffman sees both of those as examples to follow somehow... plus Stackoverflow is on strike, and the internet archive / wayback machine is facing legal troubles and may have to cease existing b/c of some decisions they made during the pandemic as well. So it's not just Reddit: it's enshittification of the entire internet.
I know what you mean, but also it's kinda fun to solve my own problems lately, even if it takes 100x longer:-). Fortunately cached copies of many Reddit posts exist, although unfortunately those do not always include comments:-(.
I do wonder if the Fediverse will ever be able to replace Reddit in terms of searchable terms for niche questions. I hate that a lot of niche communities that I’ve been apart of recently have been on discord or reddit. If those communities stay there then all that tech support will be lost; like tears in rain.
If Reddit remains the place for those kinds of niche questions that probably means spez will win in the long run. That’s what brought me to reddit, whenever I had a question reddit was always the best result.
I avoided Reddit like the plague because of how often it came up.
Quora and Yahoo Answers combined with the popularity of Facebook scared the hell out of me.
Then I dipped my toes in and found old pre-2015 Reddit, it was great for about 6 months and then The Decline started.
I remember when Reddit ran from selling gold, there was a little counter on the side saying how much they still needed.
All you got was no ads and access to the lounge IIRC.
This feels a lot like that.
Hell, we already have our own version of the poop knife, and new Star Wars movies are coming out too, we might get to revisit the Swamps of Dagobah while eating Jolly Ranchers.
The problem is that people ever bought enough gold to cover costs.
Admitedly, its also reddit problem that they went from hosting links/text to also hosting images/video which is a completely different (and more expensive) beast.
Man, remember when Reddit would complain that it was summertime and all the kids off of school were flocking to it and it noticeably affected the content? Then it was just so big it was summertime all the time.
At least it isn't our job to make google better. They are incentivised to bring content from fediverse to the users. You can't get addicted to a search engine the same way as to youtube tiktok and Reddit. They need to keep the results somewhat useful and relevant.
I’m unsure what the glitch is, but I got something weird. I’m also getting the unable to load message on RiF, so I was getting ready to delete the app. As a sentimental moment to say goodbye, I clicked to log out. Then bam - pages start loading? I can browse Reddit but can’t interact. Is this just some cached glitch?
Really was unique, I tried other apps just to trial them but RIF always came top for me. I missed it so much when I had an iPhone, was the first app I downloaded when I went back to android!
Rif was reddit for me. It was how I accessed it 99.9% of the time. By far the most used app on all my phones for more than a decade. I'm extremely sad that this is how it dies, but all things must end, it seems. Rest in peace old friend. And rot in pieces reddit, for killing the best goddamned app I've ever used...
As soon as I heard RIF was shutting down I left reddit altogether. I don't have strong feelings about the official app one way or the other but the way in which the execs at reddit decided to handle this situation was more than enough to get me to move.
I'm sure I had it many years before this image from 2016 - it's always had a place on my home screen since the original Galaxy Tab 1. (which is still going today as an SMS device at a radio station.)
FTFY. The only time I didn't, was when I was accessing it for work, or when somebody sent me a Reddit link after the company started infesting all mobile web users with that app-only bullshit. :(
Same for me. I originally downloaded some rage comics app on a Galaxy Gio which basically just pulled from f7u12 (remember those days lol). I kept seeing references to reddit and went and downloaded the first app I could find. 11 years later RIF has been my most used app on every device and I'm gonna miss it
100% agree. It was the only way I viewed Reddit for 11 years.
The day that pop-up appeared saying it was shutting down I set all the (small) subs I moderated to private, deleted my account, and came on over here. What a fucking shame.
Yes, I'm sure Apollo was great, but I never even knew it existed until this whole fiasco, because I jumped to RIF when it was still "Reddit Is Fun" and never looked back, because it did everything I needed, perfectly.
I used RIF, Boost, and Apollo. Whatever. I'll try anything once.
We didn't hear from RIF or Boost as much because I think they thought reddit was negotiating in good faith, and they would come to a compromise that didn't shut down their app. That was never in the plan for reddit, and they lost a few weeks of talking to people about what was happening.
I’ve used both RIF (10-15 years ago) and Apollo (last 8 years or so). They are and were light years ahead of the official app. At this point I’m just like, “OK, bye bitch” with Reddit.
I used Apollo the last years, but I had an Android before that and used RiF, I‘m sad about both and sad about the death of all the others I never used too. Reddit has lost me as a user forever and hope they enjoy their corporate curated ad experience over there. Goodbye to all the talented devs, may their next projects be even more successful.
Word. As an Android user, Apollo wasn't on my radar. Christian certainly made a name for himself throughout all of this - he was a phenomenal David against Reddit's Goliath, but I RiF was the backbone of my Reddit experience and will be dearly missed. Excited to see what apps for kbin rise from the ashes of Reddit.
To add: we are not paying (for) anything, we are not the product, all the costs are covered by volunteers. So if a server is a bit wonky or slow, remember that you're not entitled to anything.
And as you said, the software needed to go from 20 to 100 in a blink of an eye. Where they thought they would have time to handle everything gently and in due course needed to be done much faster.
Furthermore, most developers also run an instance (which suddenly needs to be scaled and troubleshot), need to answer questions, moderate, handle PR's on github and solve bugs. All while also having a family and other acticities to attend to.
Thanks for that, it's true, I need to remember especially about that last point. Later, I will write a few words about what was happening behind the scenes during these days. I wasn't there alone. Not anymore ;)
kbin is much older; it was a side project. Recently, I took it more seriously :)
That would be a really great read about the behind the scenes. Looking forward to read it, whenever you have the time (and motivation) to write about it.
Reminds me of the earlier days of reddit when it felt more like a message board alternative that existed just to exist and just do enough to cover costs. Added more of a desire to help out as opposed to it being seen as the efforts of a billion dollar corporation.
And here it is just regular people hosting and running stuff. It's pretty cool.
Thank you@ernest, for giving us somewhere to go.
Hope you're still having fun working on /kbin after the explosion of traffic.
You know, given how hobbies turning into work can take all the fun out and all that.
I swear it said this was in feddit.uk when I posted. I think it's that websocket bug, where sometimes part of the information on one tab is loaded from another.
Like all ADA stuff its fuzzy and up for argument. If old.reddit still works they are technically offering an accessible access, even if most of us would argue its not the same.
scanning over this page it looks like ADA laws apply to physical access, but websites are currently under a 'try your best' guidelines policy
The Department of Justice does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards, but the Department’s longstanding interpretation of the general nondiscrimination and effective communication provisions applies to web accessibility.
Businesses and state and local governments can currently choose how they will ensure that the programs, services, and goods they provide online are accessible to people with disabilities
Reddit Migration
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