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.”
Edit, there seems to be conflicting reporting on this issue:
While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout
Yes, I got the “message” from the Reddit CEO, and decided to pre-empt that, and I spent a few hours today manually deleting each and every post I made in my subreddit. The content is already anyway on my blog, on The Internet Archive, and on the Fediverse. So my subreddit now looks like this (he is welcome to let someone else take it now):
As of now, more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities (by DAU) are open
I’m a bit paranoid that this could be a technical truth because the communities still closed have dropped in DAU.
Edit: Checked the blackout tracker, of the ones listed 205 are still closed or restricted, so it’s probably an accurate claim, though it seems about half of the participating subreddits are still closed.
the idea that a cabal of mods were going to take things in a good direction was always unsound
Notoriously mature and level headed mods that spend all day on the internet putting an excessive amount of emotional energy into something most people barely care about… Who could have predicted this?
The least they could do is make it less obvious who they will replace the mods with. I expect this kind of blatant takeover attitude from a place with less legal department. Like twitter.
Hahaha you know before this many people didn’t think of reddit as corporate corporate. They scewed themselves and ruined their goodwill
I have to admit, it has changed the way I think of reddit, both as an entity and as a source of information.
I swear Reddit is not only not learning from history but purposely trying to repeat it again thinking oh the previous guys were just too weak…
the fuckening just doesnt stop. u/Spez lost complete touch with the platform itself.
But hey, they own the joint. they can make their own decisions.
He has not lost touch, he doesn’t care. He’s bought and paid for. If shit does go south, he’s the fall guy.
Yeah and we own this joint! I’m going to open my own instance, with blackjack and hookers
So much for moderators being “free to run their communities as they choose” as this article outlines
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204533859-What-s-a-moderator-
It’s pretty obvious they’re given free reign until they happen to disagree with admins and then it’s “they’re holding subreddits hostage”, “they’re just Stewarts” etc
Reddit admins will legitimately say and do anything to frame this as not their own fuck up
Lol stewards.
When r/WorkReform sprang up overnight and proposed to elect moderators, Reddit’s admins threatened to ban the subreddit for that
Fuck Spez. Fuck Reddit. Build kbin.
Build
KbinFediverse.I like Lemmy more than Kbin, personally, but we can federate together and build up the fediverse 😄
I like the fact Lemmy seems to have a ton more instances, but I like the look of Kbin.
I’m the opposite haha, I think Kbin has some cool communities and stuff but I way prefer the look of Lemmy. To each their own! Beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose our own platform but still interact 😄
Any mobile web apps for kbin I can use for iPhone? Like wefwef for Lemmy?
Idk maybe, I implied I don’t use Kbin with that comment from 25 days ago. Not sure why you’d ask me tbh.
Reddit is already dead. Old.reddit will be removed soon.
Spez claimed that there are no plans to shut old.reddit down. We’ll see.
They already removed some mods, it’s not a threat it’s Spaz being a jerk and awful person.
I’m treating the blackout like a strike, and I don’t cross picket lines, and neither should anyone else. No scabs. No one should be agreeing to moderate a sub that has lost all of its moderators to forcible removal.
I agree, but at the same time, the people who are willing to cross the picket lines are facists. They are desperate to take over any spaces they’re able to and turn those places into hellholes. A bunch of subs are about to be destroyed by right wing nutjobs forcing their way into the top slots. A former T_D mod has already set his sights on aww, which would be the death of a wholesome sub like that.
Well the more fucked it gets, the quicker it burns. After what they’ve done I’ll be glad to see it go. Spez poured the accelerant, he struck the matches and tossed them around. All the while being pled with and warned at the same time, that what he was doing was wrong. Burn, baby, burn.
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.
He was referring to app developers who charged for license or for premium features. Those people “profited” or at least, took in revenue.
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.
The thing that really disappointed me was that they pretended that he tried to blackmail them.
They clearly were not expecting that Christian would have recorded the call and that it was not going to be “he said, I said”.
Very proud of him.
Good luck with that! I’m excited to see the fireworks as their brand-new mod teams use their brand-new mod tools right as they go public. Should be quite a show.
There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate
Sure, but let’s keep in mind eagerness does not equal competence.
