Reddit's response about the actions they took against the subreddits (note: r/mildly interesting DID NOT encourage nsfw content and their suspensions and removal have been revoked by a diff admin)
huh, I remember they actually banned a sub (WatchPeopleDie, IIRC) about footage where people actually dying, like the sub is full of videos of people's last moment, not like the PeopleFuckingDying which is a funneh sub, or WatchPeopleDieInside which is another funneh sub. Maybe it's too morbid.
That's more a prudish American culture thing than a reddit-specific thing. We went to see the latest Guardians movie over the weekend, in which they foleyed out the line "classy hoes" from No Sleep Till Brooklyn, and showed all sorts of violence, gory deaths, and lots of pretty fucking serious child abuse. And finally dropped the first f-bomb in any MCU movie, in the line "open the fucking door," which was said not in anger, but in exasperation.
America loves its violence, but don't you dare make any reference to anything close to sexuality.
Ehhh, sort of. Yes, a group of Puritans came over on the Mayflower, but they were about half the passengers. The other half were in it for the money, going to set up shop in the new world for mercantilist purposes. Which explains kind of a lot.
Combined with personalities that were ambitious enough to leave literally everything behind and make a rather perilous trek just for the opportunity to access and potentially exploit those resources.
law and order:svu was a great example of this, imho. you can show someone getting murdered but they are always fully clothed or positioned so that nothing is revealed.
Reddit's response to all the protests and stuff is that it's a small minority of users. These moves by mods were meant to thin the herds of casual users (perhaps relying on American prudishness) but they followed all the rules around NSFW content. This response by reddit is more lying and gaslighting.
It's crazy how reddit's run like it's a 1-2 year old startup still trying to figure out how guidelines, communication, consistent rule enforcement, etc. work.
It's becoming more and more apparent the site's success was despite the company running it, not because of it.
They got the wrong references. Spez thinks he is a Musk look alike but he did not realize Musk paid more for Twitter than the company will ever make for him, even if he does make it become profitable.
He's emulating a guy who is running his own company into the ground. They're both going to be left with empty shells of what they first inherited. I can at least give the slightest benefit of the doubt to spez's original intentions years ago, but it hardly matters now.
And if course there will be no consequences to either of them that affect them directly. They'll both still have more money than they know what to do with.
the '4D Chess defense'. we can't keep saying that mistakes are actually intentional when there are so many examples of the mistakes, being made for the same reasons, by the same types of people (out of touch CEOs with terrible judgment)
If you go by Spez (Hoffman) literally saying recently "We're 18 years old. It's time we grow up" and "It's time we grow up and behave like an adult company", it can give you insight into how he thinks of Reddit (and age, as he was a former /r/jailbait mod). The idea of 'age' in a company is such a man-childish way to think about it. The idea that after 18 years you, as a co-founder of a company, apparently have just such little thought into this is mind boggling and shows he's basically just coasted the entire time. He apparently hasn't:
Determined the vision of the company (therefore the guidelines, rules, etc)
Have a roadmap about where this is going (short of the sudden push for IPO)
Figured out how to turn a profit without alienating the user/mod base
This should evoke no confidence from any current or potential investor and while I initially hoped for this guy to be forced out, so I could come back. I don't think it will get rid of the issues of platform and community stagnation, toxicity, bots, or the push to make a profit. At this point with this whole Kbin/Lemmy/Threadiverse-era on the horizon, I'm actually excited. This is a great time to reflect on what worked, what didn't, and where we want to collectively go with these platforms and how make it work for us. I'm looking forward to the future and to shake off the malaise that clicking on Reddit basically everyday for the past 18 years has done to us.
At this point with this whole Kbin/Lemmy/Threadiverse-era on the horizon, I'm actually excited.
Same. People always opine about how reddit was better X years ago, but it really was. Over the past dozen years, I've gradually unsubscribed from every default sub and most larger ones. They always turn into meme-factory shitholes full of puns, recycled one-liners, and totally irrational explanations why you're wrong (many of these seem to come from intentional contrarian accounts/bots). There's a demand for that stuff, sure, but it's gotten harder and harder to find sincere, thoughtful comments.
I'm planning to delete my reddit account next week, but already finding myself coming here more frequently because the quality of the interactions is better. I can't recall the last time I received a comment there with as much time/effort as the one I'm replying to right now.
I always found Reddit to be more enjoyable in the niche subculture stuff anyways, hopefully some of those communities move over here. You would think that the admins for Reddit would understand the "innovate or die" mentality, but that unfortunately does not seem to be the case. I too am looking forward to what Lemmy/KBin brings as a replacement.
Not gonna lie. I've gotten in a few arguments here and people are surprisingly polite. Like, for real. People respect and talk to you like you are a person with different opinions, and not the enemy. It's been great.
you are a person with different opinions, and not the enemy
This is the mindset that's bothered me the most, seems to be growing over time, and is what I meant when I mentioned contrarian accounts/bots. Seems like it stemmed from political subreddits, but it's everywhere and about everything now. Even related to the api changes, I've had people reply to me with totally asinine things like defending forcing ads on users (even paid users) and how blind people don't need special consideration because their screen readers should be able to scrape the website, and it's their problem not reddit's if they can't.
So much ridiculous hostility and dehumanizing over such dumb shit.
I think its going to end up a successful move for them.
They built a platform. The users built the site over the years with minimal interaction from reddit.
They now have a platform, millions of users, and full control of what they want on that platform.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, they want the traffic but don't want the problems that come with mostly community driven content.
All the profile redesigns, ability to "follow" users, profile pics, awards, all that has been an indication of the direction over the last few years. The last few steps was to kick out the problem users and be left with those who don't really give a shit and just want to see memes on their phone while they take a shit. The people who hear about reddit and just grab the official app from the store. The people who don't care about APIs and protests and modding or accessibility tools. Just eyeballs to look at their ads.
Those people will stay. It doesn't matter if 25% of the community leaves, because the natural growth in the next few months from the eyeballs will claw it back over time.
Once they have an obedient user base who are strictly bound to what reddit want them to see, think TikTok or facebook users, that's when they will see off. And it will pay off handsomely.
I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.
Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There's no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that's going to kill the website.
The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.
Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That's not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.
If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There'll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won't be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.
It won't disappear, but it certainly won't be a multi-billion dollar company.
But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it's just a matter of months for it to die for good.
And the mods are the ones that fight the phishing scams, disinformation bots, t-shirt spammers, etc. If reddit were capable of automating those away, they wouldn't still be so prevalent.
I straight up don't believe reddit staff is as technically competent as those at Meta/IG or TikTok. They can't pull it off without a volunteer army filling in the capabilities gap.
I think years instead of months, but the rest is spot on. 30M pics users and 50k voted on the Sexy John Oliver change. 0.16% engagement on one of the highest traffic subs. So much of the front page has become tiktok it just a matter of time before people get their content direct from the source. The rest are news stories with the same arguments over and over again (ChatGPT and comment repost bots are already driving those) and reposted videos and memes from the last decade.
I'm still convinced that Google is driving a great deal of traffic to the site due to the depth of problem solving in old posts. I got a comment or DM every week or two thanking me for a solution I'd posted 3, 5, even 7 years prior. Those are all deleted now, and I'm keeping my account to regularly purge any restored content. If the top 100k-200k posters deleted their content, many google searches would lead to a dead end. Eventually it will end up like pinterest - you'll put -site:reddit.* in your search (or add an extension to do so) just to avoid getting the useless results.
A site a large as reddit doesn't die overnight, any more than Digg, Twitter, Usenet, or any other platform that is past its prime. But it certainly doesn't bode well for the future value or IPO success.
I agree, memes are fun but they won't keep a site alive. Reddit had it all which is what made it so compelling. You could catch up on some news between the memes while still keeping tabs on the current meta for Hearthstone.
When I "left" Slashdot for Reddit it was the depth of the site that made it so interesting. Slashdot was just people who were commenting on articles vs Reddit that had whole communities based on just about everything.
Reddit may recover to a degree but once the 3rd party apps fully die and people are forced to suffer the Reddit built app alone on mobile I think we will really start to see what kind of trends will emerge.
due to the way statistics works if you can get a truly random sample then a sample of 9600 voters can predict the US presidential election to an accuracy of 99%
The problem is getting a truly random sample though. The subset of users who voting on those polls probably includes a decent number of angry folks watching for news on such protests here on Lemmy or other platforms, and excludes a lot of people just scrolling for funny pictures
If Reddit had just kept their mouth shut, 2 days after the blackout most subs would be back online and the others would eventually follow.
But no Spez had to open his mouth and take actions, forcing subs to open again, telling lies about the app creators.
Basically turning all of Reddit against him.
Yup, every time he said something it escalated what I did. I was initially just not going to post during the 2 days, then I decided to stop using it altogether and found Lemmy, then I went back and deleted all my posts, submissions, and votes. I'll make sure to do another mass deletion sweep on the 30th while the API still allows it.
Yeah, the angry irrational reactions show that all the talk about the protests just being noise was a bluff. It might have blown over, but it hasn't exactly because it got a reaction.
He was right that Reddit is "too big to fail", but he's doing the equivalent of keying a car he's planning to sell every time he opens his mouth. He'll still get money for it, but he's completely unnecessarily lowering its value.
I'd say it's kinda like having a "10-second" car that everyone loves and wants, but then you start ripping out some of the best performance parts and installing inferior parts in their place.
Does the car still run? It does. Is it slowly imploding because you've upset the engine's balance to the point where it's becoming dysfunctional? Also yes.
It's only a matter of time before the pretty paint job no longer hides the garbage under the hood.
I mean it's not just reddit. While investors probably don't care, the fact that he lied about easily disprovable things that did or did not happen doesn't bode well. I don't think it's going to hurt their bottom line any time soon, but that kind of spinelessness isn't exactly liked.
He's panicking. His biggest lie is that this protest doesn't matter and hasn't and won't impact Reddit financially. It already has and will continue to do so. You can tell that the people who actually post content worth viewing are here and not there, despite the smaller numbers over here.
They're flexing on the people protesting and bailing as "bitchy power users" that make up 2% of the user base.
That 2% provides and moderates probably like 70% of their content, they think they'll coast forever on the past content but googling "question + Reddit" will become useless faster than they think when those "power users" aren't having all their techy/expertise laden discussions on Reddit anymore.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
I am starting to realize it's not "work" I want to get away from, it's Wall Street.
I mean it's not my boss or their bosses who are saying that my work won't help cancer patients unless they pay a 100 bucks for something I can make for 3 bucks, it's the Wall Street investors who bought the company.
And it's not the corporate hierarchy at Reddit that tells me that they need to blast ads in my face and make me argue with bots, it's the Wall Street investor valuing its IPO.
As much as Steve has already shown he's willing to lie outright (especially we characterizing his talks with the Apollo Dev) I really can't put it past Reddit to lie about the mods "encouraging" porn posts.
Yeah the r/interestingasfuck mods didn't encourage porn either. They just said they were going to stop enforcing all rules but site wide rules and the users posted and upvoted porn. What the admins really want to say is that they need mods of successful subreddits to fall in line and keep running the site how the admins want it to be run.
r/mildlyinteresting did not encourage it, and Reddit lied about that, and their removal and suspension was revoked by a different admin than the one who removed and suspended them. Here is the post, "The Reddit Admins are lying - r/MildlyInteresting did NOT allow or encourage users to post ANY sexually explicit content, see draft of now-deleted announcement":
Given how that's been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it and apologising, it kind of seems like the admins aren't really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.
I wonder how many people were hanging around hoping to cash out after the IPO and are realizing it's not going to go as well as they thought because they're being led by spiteful idiots.
Just once again shows that, as always, users are the one that makes Reddit Reddit.
Polarized actions like this is just Reddit showing off their inability and ignorance to the community.
All I can hope for right now is that every shitty things that happened so far is all because of spez and spez only. He’s the one and only almighty CEO and nobody can disagree him (basically Zuck 2.0?)
In the comments on one of the articles on The Verge about this, someone claiming to be a mod over there said they were reinstated. I know you can't really prove that, but maybe that's where this notion comes from?
they have been reinstated, thats confirmed and you ca go look and confirm for yourself, im talking about i never saw an apology from any admin or reddit
I think there was a comment later, in another thread, where all the reinstated mods later had their permissions changed so that literally the only thing they could do was modmail, nothing else. Don't completely remember if it was the same group of mods, but I think it was.
It was. Seems the admins are infighting now. They were all banned and removed, then reinstated, then had all their mod permissions removed a few hours later
I'm so fucking sick of people using 'protecting vulnerable people' as a front for them being shitty. It's so obvious that they don't actually give a shit about them.
I think its an early test version of a script to automate the process of demodding subs that turned on the NSFW tag.
It was a small scope test to see what could happen.
The quality of the test environment isn't guaranteed though. I ran a production system that had a shell of a "test" environment with no data from prod. I repeatedly told the vendor testing in their "test" environment was worthless because without the prod data I had no real way to recreate so many of the situations that naturally came up for my users in the production software. The vendor refused to correct the problem, so I told them - with all the relevant managers present - to stop asking me to waste my time testing new releases when doing so was effectively useless.
I have felt this pain before. The approach that I took was to restore backups of our Prod environment into the test environment so that it's a 100% match to Prod. I don't/didn't do it on a regular basis though, only when testing a change.
Tech companies can’t help but abuse people. They passed the law allowing gig workers to be a separate class in California and some immediately tried to dictate start times and schedules.
All Reddit has to do next is tell their volunteers when they need to do their jobs and where.
And this is why the fediverse is better. Tell a few mods to fuck off or bend to the stick for insertion and on the fediverse they can fuck off to host their own instance with rules just as they want it. On reddit, you can't do that without losing the community.
I'm just curious what the fediverse will look like in a year. It's still the same year Musk bought twitter and now reddit is driving users away too...
I mean, as a parent, I sort of agree that pushing sexual material to subs that weren't in the past, sort of a dick move.. but at the same time, removing/firing people who were moderating the sub for free, is just stupid... What's going to stop people from still posting porn/nsfw material to these subs now that their normal gatekeepers are gone?
I think the point of this was to mark it as advertiser unfriendly so they cant make money off it, not to post actual porn. Also maybe john oliver aroused spez a bit much it seems
Wild, they are acting like the users didn't actively vote for this. Anyway reddits worst problems are to come, once API is revoked, lemmy will actively just be a better app overall even with its growing pains, it will be a slow drain for reddit.
None of these communities violated rules. They didn't just encourage users to post NSFW content, they switched the subreddit setting to NSFW which works with the visibility user controls reddit has had for years.
It does highlight the futility of waging a war with the owner of a platform on their platform though. These mods did everything right: abiding by all rules, ensuring by vote that their user communities overwhelmingly support the changes. But it doesn't matter. Because it's reddit, the admins hold all the cards. This has been kind of fun to watch and there's really some brilliant moves by mods in these cases, but at the end of the day for real results the only way to win is to build a better community elsewhere.
Reddit is totally justified in this. The users are actively and maliciously trying to hurt Reddit. However, this is in response to many many completely unjustifiable actions from Reddit. Mostly the lies.
If they had just come out and said "we're killing the API in 6-12 months", as others before them have done, they would have seen much less pushback, but they had to lie over and over again about "not killing 3rd party apps" and "working with developers".
I don't know that they are breaking any rules, but regardless they are malicious in intent, which is really what matters. And if you're going to argue otherwise, you're being completely disingenuous.
I've still been peeking in while RIF still works and it looks like everything in those protesting subs were correctly marked as NSFW. It might be different in other apps, but from where I'm sitting, no body saw anything that they didn't choose to click on.
I'm happy that this finally created enough drama to shed enough users to make reddit alternatives viable. It's a good think they exploded so spectacularly and Im glad that mods are fighting back because the subreddit drama created again will cause reddit to shake off more users.
That said its reddit's right to close their api, and I dont even begrudge spez for wanting to sell out for a fat check. It would have still rubbed a lot of redditors wrong and the result would shake off a lot of users, but if they handled it a little more tactfully they could have gotten less heat. Still despite being technically correct and despite making things worse by being dipshits I cant imagine it would have blown over all the way.
This is what happens when we centralize our entire message board and community and fan experience in one 1st party controlled private business.
When tens-of-thousands-strong communities are voting overwhelmingly in favor of these "malicious" actions maybe we should look at what they are responding to.
Yes it's intended to hurt Reddit. How else are protests supposed to be actually meaningful or result in any actual negotiating leverage? These subreddits have power in their numbers and they're just using it.
When tens-of-thousands-strong communities are voting overwhelmingly in favor of these "malicious" actions maybe we should look at what they are responding to.
Yes I mentioned what they were responding to in the comment you replied to.
Add comment