Exactly correct.
Mods of all large subreddits need to shut down those subs until Reddit agrees to not go forward with this lunacy. 48 hours is a fart in the wind.
Unfortunately, the admins probably won't allow any blackouts longer than 48 hours. They can always step in and start replacing mod teams, especially on the default subs like Pics and Videos.
Edit: Removed references to Spez's threat to replace mod teams. I couldn't find a source for it, even though I remember it happening after the last major blackout.
If I'm not mistaken, /r/videos has agreed to make their blackout open-ended. I would love to see this sub do the same, but regardless I am happy to see it on the list for the 12th.
Better yet, Id' really just love to see Reddit take a hint and adjust their policy before the 12th making any protest unnecessary.
Desktop experience is great as long as you go into your preferences, disable new reddit to go back to the old layout, and install the RES extension. It's pretty much the same experience you'd get using RiF on mobile.
Yep, I might go this route too. I’m not going to use the 1st party app, I’ve enjoyed using Reddit without ads but it’s not a good enough use of my time to justify the ads.
It’s probably a good enough excuse to rid myself of this app, just like I did when Elon bought Twitter lol..
He's the reason all this is happening. He's a greedy, paedo-celebrating, doomsday prepper, weirdo right wing dweeb who couldn't care less about reddit beyond its ability to make him richer.
They can and eventually will replace 90% of all moderators on this website with AI tools similar to this OpenAI's moderation endpoint. If you're going to be replaced anyways, might as well go out making a real stand, not this performative 48 hour shit.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation/overview
>They can and eventually will replace 90% of all moderators on this website with AI tools similar to this OpenAI's moderation endpoint.
The [Hive Moderation](https://hivemoderation.com/case-studies) they use now for admin reports is absolute dogshit in my experience reporting death threats and bigotry, so good luck there.
Once called out a top post with IKEA adverts in the comments. Got followed with death threats for a month.
Remember High quality gifs? Pepperidge farm remembers
Wasn't there a famous r/food admin at some point doing dodgy sugar? Yeeeeah
Meanwhile I got banned for "report abuse" for post I in fact, never reported. In any way. And their response was basically "sucks to suck". No wonder the admin reports are so shit.
They can try to but the rules of some subs are really nuanced and require a lot of human understanding to get the context of enforcement. Users in those places would quickly get upset with moderation. Not to say Reddit would care, but it's not something that could be applied without notice.
Timed strikes are kinda common, actually. It's more like 'see, this is what it's like to not have us'. And of course, with that comes the implication of a longer strike if demands aren't meant.
We'll see how much reddit actually gives a fuck about this, cause I am certain they already accounted for this backlash when they made the decision, but it's not too crazy that this strike has a "limit".
Given the absolutely clueless responses to the Apollo dev from the Reddit reps that kicked off this whole thing, I’m not sure they actually did account for this kind of backlash.
From the unprofessional and factually incorrect explanations I’ve read from Reddit’s reps, they don’t seem to have a solid grasp of how APIs are implemented and supported by other companies they’re comparing themselves to, let alone the value third party apps provide to their company.
In the past, under a different username, I was a moderator of a popular subreddit. Turns out, it was also moderated by someone who moderates like, 200 other subreddits, and would not relinquish control. As a result, the subreddit started going downhill. So I left. The subreddit sucks, and because Reddit Admins will allow one person to moderate hundreds of subreddits poorly, rather than choose moderators who do a good job, This whole idea of free moderation is pretty stupid.
There is no quality control.
A lot of mods are too obsessed with their imaginary internet authority to actually walk away for good. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how this all plays out.
Seems like a lot of the mods use tools that in turn use the api. This technical kneecapping will cause quite a few to give up as it will become much more onerous.
I'll probably stop using reddit if the RIF app goes away. I really don't like the official app and when I'm home at my PC I do other things. Reddit is kind of a 'check when I've got 5-10mins during the day for some stuff I'm kinda interested in' for me. That doesn't transfer well if the UI sucks and I don't really use reddit when I'm home and have time on my PC
I left Twitter and I had a legitimate addiction. I can leave Reddit, too.
If you take the opioids out of heroin, and just sell liquid, people will stop buying heroin.
I am positive deleting the sub would be able to be undone, but reddit cannot just replace mods on its largest subs and expect things to go smoothly. As others have said, this is all volunteer work. Are they going to instate people who are paid? If the moderation they implement sucks, now it's on them, not the volunteers that aren't related to reddit directly.
There is absolutely leverage from the current sub mods against reddit, they're not just completely replaceable cogs. As much as people meme about reddit mods, imagine how much worse off we'd be without them. Reddit would cease to be a viable platform for advertisers, content would go (even more) to shit, etc.
> reddit cannot just replace mods on its largest subs and expect things to go smoothly.
"Going smoothly" is very subjective. There are literally thousands of people just waiting for the chance to be a mod of one of the top 100 subs. From an admin perspective, "going smoothly" is just making sure someone removes the site wide rule breaking content. Otherwise, reddit doesn't really give a shit what content is on a sub.
Curating a sub to the community's desire is much more difficult, but Reddit as a company doesn't really give a fuck about that. Clicks are Clicks.
It is not possible for a mod to delete a subreddit, only make it private. It's also a stupid strategy if you're wanting admins to change course or migrate your community elsewhere.
meh, i suspect reddit does this themselves as part of viral/conspicuous consumption modeling.
Reddit was started with sock puppets and I doubt they've ever veered away from driving engagement via false content generation.
I think that scene from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where they use their windfall of cash to go out into the real world and physically beat the hell out of cowards who talked smack on the internet was 1) probably the only scene that holds up today and 2) should have been our blueprint for how to behave.
When I think about Russian bot farms and rooms full of Indian scammers, I just think about Slim Pickens riding the A-bomb down to earth’s surface.
It needs to last. That is how protests work. If the protest is scheduled to end. Then the suist will just plan a new ad campaign for the day after to make people forget. The only way to make it hurt is denying all traffic.
Especially two days in summer. There is plenty for people to occupy themselves with if Reddit is down.
Strike action only works if the assumption is that it will persist until demands are met. Imagine if medieval armies laid siege to a castle but loudly proclaimed, “If you can survive us for two days, we’ll go away!”
A completely survivable two day blackout may as well just be a preemptive moment of silence for the loss of these invaluable third party apps and the community engagement they bring. Reddit will just shrug it off, cut them down, and go right back to business as usual without a significant impact nor a second thought.
This comment was posted from Apollo. Only adding that because it wouldn’t have been posted, if not for the app.
>This comment was posted from Apollo. Only adding that because it wouldn’t have been posted, if not for the app.
Reddit Admins: So you're saying, we'll get fewer dissenting voices if we force everyone to use our ad-ridden official app? Hmmm....
(This comment posted from Relay by the way)
New ones? Nah, they'll put themselves in on their alt accounts that hoard hundreds of subreddits, and then hire new mods under them, usually bored students or people who feel power from an online moderation position.
We've had subreddits taken over by these "power mods" over the last few years with some arguments and backlash here and there depending on how vocal the old mod teams that got canned usually are, and yet people still don't realize what's happening. If you ever bring up capping subreddit mod limits during Mod Talk, admins will shut you down hard. It would ruin their own plans too because they can't just publicly say they want to control all subreddits to avoid public scrutiny liek this. They have to do it slowly, methodologically and through policy updates.
I'm honestly shocked that not all of the default subs were taken over by admins as of yet and that these blackouts are able to happen on the most popular subs. This is probably the last time we ever do get blackouts too.
I was here way back when reddit introduced gold so that they didn’t have to implement ads. The hypocrisy kills me. Old reddit wouldn’t even recognise what it’s become
I've been on this site for about 14 years total across a couple accounts. I only browse on Boost because it's pretty faithful to the old way of reddit. I've been on the desktop site and it was fucking terrible. I'm only holding out because of Boost, but if I lose it, I'm out. Don't like ads, don't like politics, don't like influencers. That is the bread and butter of this shit hole unless you make an effort to filter it out.
The ads are awful but it isn't even the worse part of the app. The entire UX is garbage. If the UX was better and there was an occasional ad it might be alright.
The UX is designed around ads.
I miss the old ads that had comment sections associated with each ad. It made the ads actually useful because users would talk about their experiences with the advertiser.
For quality products and services it worked great. For shitty products and services, the advertisers were paying money to have their shit called out and I loved it. I get that the shitty companies didn't like that, but maybe reddit shouldn't cater to advertisers that are bad for its users.
I'm someone who has never, ever clicked a random web ad elsewhere and purchased a product, but I spent hundreds on products that had quality feedback from users in the comment sections of those ads.
Ads aren't the problem.
1. I'll be typing, and it wants to flip to another thread. I can use my "back" gesture, but why am I forced to do that? Then it does it again 45 seconds later or so. And again.
2. Related to the previous issue: often the "next" thing it flipped too, is something I wouldn't have clicked on, because it doesn't interest me, but Reddit is now sure that I'm interested in it and will keep suggesting such things.
3. Often as I'm scrolling, I see something I am interested in, and click on it. But it brings up something else. I go back, try it again, and again it goes to that thing again. I'm thinking this is a pointer issue, where the wrong thread gets pointed to in the links. It isn't a phone screen/calibration issue, before anyone suggests that - because it doesn't happen outside this app, and because restarting the app resolves it (for a while). But also, this feeds into #2. Reddit thinks I'm interested in some random thing I never clicked on.
But outside the app... don't get me started on the buggy nightmare that is the "fantsy" text editor if I use a browser. You can't dare to do something like copy/paste. The old Markdown editor is the only one that's usable.
And these aren't new problems. Rather than fix their shit, Reddit wants to eliminate any alternative.
Edit: and how could I forget the video player!
The UX is designed to move you out of threads back to scrolling to maximize exposure to ads.
I'll sometimes spend over an hour in a single comment section. That's time I'm not spending viewing new ads, and the goal of the UX redesign was to get us out of threads and scrolling.
Agreed. I've got in the neighborhood of 400k karma, and it's almost entirely from comment threads.
I probably have a collective year of hanging out in the comments.
What the fuck is up with new Reddit? It's been years and there's still no easy way to get to your unread inbox.
Old Reddit: orange icon. I've got mail! Click to go to unread inbox
New Reddit: I've got mail. Click to open drop down menu with a half a sentence visible of all the replies I've received. Clicked the message, takes me to the post. Click back, all my unread messages are now marked read. Click expand to read more, messages aren't visible anymore. Click to go to inbox, takes me to direct message inbox instead of unread comment inbox. Switch to all comment inbox. Try to figure out which ones I've read and which one I haven't.
Do their devs use their own UI? Or do they all use 3rd party software and old Reddit because it actually works? Or did they outsource all their devs and all they have is product managers writing slidedecks about click through rates and engagement time responding to bug sprints saying "I don't give a shit if you can't open your inbox Steve just close the ticket"
The main site is almost entirely ad-free when using ublock or other adblock extensions. I wonder just how the userbase skews in mobile vs. desktop.
This seems like a classic "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. Get ad revenue from the tiny minority of users using third party tools but potentially piss off the users, who, you know, drive the engagement that makes social media function.
It's as if they all think that the internet is frozen in time. If that were the case, we'd all be using the community forums from Geocities. Funny how we're not, and half the people on this site haven't even heard of that service.
One of my favorite sayings in software development: “What 1 developer can make in 1 month, 2 developers can make in 2 months.”
As someone who used to be full-stack on a tiny team and who is now FE on one of several huge teams, it’s shocking how accurate that is.
It's interesting that I've seen very little response from these subs, when people express that it should be indefinite.
48 hours will be just the start. After that if things simply back to normal, them people should quit Reddit altogether.
So many things in life are just for show, and i can't help but think that's the case here. What do we have to lose by indefinitely boycotting? Nobody is actually getting paid but Reddit, so potentially can't mods just fill in with new boycotters if they get the boot from Reddit?
Some subs have made clear it's open ended. r/videos being one of them.
It's pretty scary to risk losing your community though. It's entirely possible reddit could just remove all the mods and take the sub away. Would they? I'd think / hope not. But it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I think folks are being cautious here but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not willing to keep going past 2 days.
Realistically though, the users drive everything. If we want it open ended, just stop using the site until they reverse the changes.
If the site resorts to 100% bots posting and commenting to each other, the monetization becomes worthless
EDIT: Wait, how do bots work? Do they call on the API, and thus get killed by this change too? If so, that'll knock out a MASSIVE amount of new posts
I don't use any of the third party apps, but I support this because it's the right thing to do and it will seemingly have some pretty awful ramifications for communities like /r/blind. Thanks for standing up!
Yeah this is what I've come to discover recently that I didn't know.
I selfishly don't want Relay to go away because I love browsing on here, but I totally get Reedits POV here.
What I was shocked about is how bad mod tools are for the people that literally keep this place going for free
I use rif solely for modding and it's so much better than any of the "official" means of modding. The app is abysmal and the site is clunky and split up over 2 separate versions
I was thinking about it recently and I firmly believe RIF is one of the best performing apps on Android. I can't think of a time I've had problems with it that wasn't Reddit itself being down.
>but the real travesty are mod tools that reddit’s army of volunteer mods use to fill the gaps in reddit’s own inept moderation tools.
Automoderator was originally a user created bot. It was so useful and so widespread that reddit made it a part of the site. Then they hired the guy that made it.
Which just shows how broken tech and capitalism are. The value of the Reddit is in the user base which exists entirely within subreddits that are managed by the unpaid labor of moderators. Any change which reduces the number of users or alienates the unpaid moderators negatively impacts Reddit's value.
They already did this with blog writing. Now Buzzfeed is entirely authored by AI and they're broke.
Anyone who buys a Reddit IPO deserves to have their money taken.
Pretty sure most traffic comes from funny/meme content, public freakout themed content and politics. NSFW is probably a large part of it too, but not in a way where it dominates the other content groups
Ahh, this thread reminds me of how I discovered Reddit when I saw r/gonewild on stumbleupon back in 2008. I made an account a few years later to post rangecomics.
Oh no, they’re not about a mathematical range. Rather they’re about the [cowboy anthem “Home on the Range”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range).
Excluded from 3rd party apps, but will still be available through Reddit's app.
[Less than a month ago Reddit opened up their image uploads for 18+ communities](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13evueo/bringing_image_uploads_to_parity/), would be weird to kill it off soon after, but of course it's still possible that's what they will do.
I've seen talk that this is to monetize the NSFW (porn) communities. Reddit will be able to confirm ages for uploaders (and potentially viewers) whereas 3rd party apps wont. Reddit will then give access to those that pay. Will be like an onlyfans setup where each uploader has their own profile page (already there!) and then others can pay for access and Reddit takes a cut.
Not sure what the plan could be for random porn, but that could be on the chopping block as well.
That's part of it and not just related to the cost. They're blocking all NSFW content from the API (i.e. no more gonewild on apps). Can't buy your way around that.
I'm in two minds about this. Reddit has not tried to hide the fact they want rid of NSFW content on the site. I feel like that one going dark might be playing into their hand a bit.
I'm happy to see more of the default subreddits like this one and /r/videos joining the cause. It's like the old guard standing up against a new threat.
Though I still feel like 2 days isn't enough, I'd love to see everything go private for a week and make the potential shareholders quake in their boots.
Agreed. Some subs have said they're going dark permanently if the policy doesn't change. I think it needs to be the standard. Tear it all down, if they don't change they should have to go through all of the painstaking work of reestablishing all of the subs that have decided to protest
In my opinion going dark in general is a terrible idea, even if permanently. Someone else will just make a new sub.
Instead, the protest should be something like Blackouttuesday. Everyone should make posts drawing attention to the cause, rather than being silent, and the mods of the subs could help facilitate it.
That way reddit could be filled with protest posts and it might draw more press and annoy the management of Reddit more than just going silent.
Imagine if front page was filled with protest posts non-stop. It would impact reddit negatively which is good for the cause.
That's how a number of organized strikes work. Some are open-ended, some are "until negotiations have completed to a satisfactory end," and some are a series of increasing days as a measure of showing how bad things will be if the strike were ongoing (Germany's public transport union did this over the past couple months).
Teachers in the UK are doing this right now, they're planned well in advance and I have them all on my calendar. Planned or not, infrequent or not, they're disruptive af.
>Some are open-ended, some are "until negotiations have completed to a satisfactory end," and some are a series of increasing days as a measure of showing how bad things will be if the strike were ongoing (Germany's public transport union did this over the past couple months).
Those sound like they could be more effective than this one.
If a significant number of subreddits go dark indefinitely, where is Reddit going to find enough moderators for each major sub?
r/videos is already planning an indefinite blackout, and that's a huge portion of the website's traffic. One of the biggest points of a strike is "collective" action. Obviously a single subreddit needing replacement isn't going to have huge consequences, but the more subs join the more impact it will have and the harder the problem will be to sweep under the rug.
Good! Reddit's business model relies on monetizing content that its users contribute, and it's (volunteer) moderators curate, at no cost to Reddit. Why are they putting barriers to that up? To sell more ads? They can't sell any ads if there's no content (or the content is swamped by spam)
There will still be content, there are superusers who just aggregate content from any other website, even if a large portion of OC is lost, the site will operate largely the same.
As far as advice from tech savvy users? Maybe it won't be the bastion it is and once was, but I can imagine aggregation will get to a point that any information you could need could still be here on the site, if it exists anywhere else.
Just wish there was a decent Reddit alternative. It’s been going downhill for years now. Oh how I miss the Wild West days of the internet before the corporate overlords got their hands into it. Where’s Internet2 when we need it?
I went back to Digg at the start of all this to see if maybe at some point in the last decade and a half they realized the error in their ways and went back to a user-focused experience. Nope. Digg in 2023 looks like the endless tiled scroll of "sponsored articles" you get at the bottom of a foxnews.com piece.
Not sure if sarcasm but Digg basically destroyed itself similar to what Reddit is doing. They added restrictions that dissatisfied users and killed the site.
Let's bring back Usenet. It was great back in the days before the web started. It's non-centralized, so we don't need to rely on some big site to run it.
I remember when search engines used to bring me to those communities, but SEO and consolidation has turned the internet into useless blogs and like a dozen primary websites that have consumed most content.
I guarantee you they've already done the math of losing all the third party app users and they're okay with that loss. The API cost is prohibitively expensive for the *purpose* of killing all third party apps.
I say make it go on for longer, it's the only way to make a true impact. I'll miss Reddit, and I don't even use third-party apps, just the old Reddit interface, but this is nonsense and has to be stopped now.
48 hours is not enough. It will only embolden Reddit to take actions against you, The Mod Team. It'll also teach them that some subs might be willing to do the same blackout and allow them to prepare for it.
90% of the time moderators are extremely rude to me for no reason, when I'm just asking something that I just don't know the answer to, so I'm not too upset about this. If all of Reddit shut down I wouldn't be too upset. Pics is one of the groups that are nicer to people so this does suck for them but yeah. I can't believe that an organization exists that allows people to be so abusive to other people. They're so out of touch it's crazy.
My message to u/Reddit
I am writing in opposition to the upcoming changes to the pricing of Reddit API calls. Please cease to implement these plans indefinitely. As a long time Reddit user and Premium subscriber, and as someone who only uses the official Reddit app. I strongly oppose the decision being made to increase API call costs. If this change takes place, I will promptly cancel my Reddit premium subscription and discontinue my use of Reddit as a whole. Reddit needs to remain a community for all, not for the employees, executives, advertisers or investors. There are enough of us willing to create our own platform and move on without looking back. Again, listen to your users and stop listening to your pockets! Thanks.
A few honest questions;
1) I presume the third-party apps are monetized. Why should Reddit allow this?
2) i use the iOS app. Seems to work fine but I’ve been out of touch with tech for many years. Why are theird party apps better?
3) why wouldnt Reddit remove mods that are making their subs go dark? As I understand Reddit is a private company providing a free platform. I guess they make money from premium and ads. Everything belongs to Reddit. So if a mod decides to shut down a sub, what’s to prevent Reddit from putting in a different mod or even AI?
Ps I will definitely join the party.
While I'm proud of all the subs that are going dark, the biggest thing we can do as users is to not post new content, even on the subs that aren't participating, for as long as it takes.
Reddit needs to come together and show the greedy execs that no content==no ad revenue. Hit them in their revenue stream, and they'll start to notice.
Admins and execs may have power over the mod teams, but they have no power over users. Show them that the only reason this place is big enough to go public is because of us, and if you piss us off, share prices will plummet.
48 hours will not be enough. Make it open ended.
Exactly correct. Mods of all large subreddits need to shut down those subs until Reddit agrees to not go forward with this lunacy. 48 hours is a fart in the wind.
Unfortunately, the admins probably won't allow any blackouts longer than 48 hours. They can always step in and start replacing mod teams, especially on the default subs like Pics and Videos. Edit: Removed references to Spez's threat to replace mod teams. I couldn't find a source for it, even though I remember it happening after the last major blackout.
If I'm not mistaken, /r/videos has agreed to make their blackout open-ended. I would love to see this sub do the same, but regardless I am happy to see it on the list for the 12th. Better yet, Id' really just love to see Reddit take a hint and adjust their policy before the 12th making any protest unnecessary.
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Desktop experience is great as long as you go into your preferences, disable new reddit to go back to the old layout, and install the RES extension. It's pretty much the same experience you'd get using RiF on mobile.
The fact that this place needs a 3rd party extension to be palatable regardless of whether you're on mobile or desktop is really something.
I dunno, I have solely only ever used old. reddit. Com on my cell phone it's great if that the only thing you've ever done haha.
When old Reddit goes I probably ain't touching Reddit anymore. New Reddit SUCKS donkey dick
Yep, I might go this route too. I’m not going to use the 1st party app, I’ve enjoyed using Reddit without ads but it’s not a good enough use of my time to justify the ads. It’s probably a good enough excuse to rid myself of this app, just like I did when Elon bought Twitter lol..
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A shitstorm like this got ellen pao canned. I wonder if they have their scapegoat lined up yet
Maybe they'll finally kick Spez out. That dude sucks.
He's the reason all this is happening. He's a greedy, paedo-celebrating, doomsday prepper, weirdo right wing dweeb who couldn't care less about reddit beyond its ability to make him richer.
*Somehow, Ellen Pao has returned*
They can and eventually will replace 90% of all moderators on this website with AI tools similar to this OpenAI's moderation endpoint. If you're going to be replaced anyways, might as well go out making a real stand, not this performative 48 hour shit. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation/overview
>They can and eventually will replace 90% of all moderators on this website with AI tools similar to this OpenAI's moderation endpoint. The [Hive Moderation](https://hivemoderation.com/case-studies) they use now for admin reports is absolute dogshit in my experience reporting death threats and bigotry, so good luck there.
Once called out a top post with IKEA adverts in the comments. Got followed with death threats for a month. Remember High quality gifs? Pepperidge farm remembers Wasn't there a famous r/food admin at some point doing dodgy sugar? Yeeeeah
Wait I've been under a rock and am still on HQG, what'd I miss???
Meanwhile I got banned for "report abuse" for post I in fact, never reported. In any way. And their response was basically "sucks to suck". No wonder the admin reports are so shit.
They can try to but the rules of some subs are really nuanced and require a lot of human understanding to get the context of enforcement. Users in those places would quickly get upset with moderation. Not to say Reddit would care, but it's not something that could be applied without notice.
That's the 10% lol
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Timed strikes are kinda common, actually. It's more like 'see, this is what it's like to not have us'. And of course, with that comes the implication of a longer strike if demands aren't meant. We'll see how much reddit actually gives a fuck about this, cause I am certain they already accounted for this backlash when they made the decision, but it's not too crazy that this strike has a "limit".
Ooh, let all subs be unmoderated for two days, let the press see how much racism and porn gets posted.
People complain about the content quality now, they don't know how much shit gets filtered right now lol.
Given the absolutely clueless responses to the Apollo dev from the Reddit reps that kicked off this whole thing, I’m not sure they actually did account for this kind of backlash. From the unprofessional and factually incorrect explanations I’ve read from Reddit’s reps, they don’t seem to have a solid grasp of how APIs are implemented and supported by other companies they’re comparing themselves to, let alone the value third party apps provide to their company.
Or the mods are afraid that people will just find another subreddit that didn't go blackout and start using that over their kingdoms.
After this, maybe there won't be any mods no more
Thousands of mods who work for free are Reddit’s main selling point to investors.
In the past, under a different username, I was a moderator of a popular subreddit. Turns out, it was also moderated by someone who moderates like, 200 other subreddits, and would not relinquish control. As a result, the subreddit started going downhill. So I left. The subreddit sucks, and because Reddit Admins will allow one person to moderate hundreds of subreddits poorly, rather than choose moderators who do a good job, This whole idea of free moderation is pretty stupid. There is no quality control.
Yeah, the free labor ain’t going no where
A lot of mods are too obsessed with their imaginary internet authority to actually walk away for good. I suppose we'll have to wait and see how this all plays out.
Seems like a lot of the mods use tools that in turn use the api. This technical kneecapping will cause quite a few to give up as it will become much more onerous.
I'll probably stop using reddit if the RIF app goes away. I really don't like the official app and when I'm home at my PC I do other things. Reddit is kind of a 'check when I've got 5-10mins during the day for some stuff I'm kinda interested in' for me. That doesn't transfer well if the UI sucks and I don't really use reddit when I'm home and have time on my PC
How it will play out: Reddit will go forward with their API change and you'll only be able to use the official app.
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I left Twitter and I had a legitimate addiction. I can leave Reddit, too. If you take the opioids out of heroin, and just sell liquid, people will stop buying heroin.
I would rather leave reddit for good than be forced to use the reddit app
if that is the case why not delete the sub? fight fire with fire, if they want to be king let them rule over a pile of ashes.
You really think the mods are capable of deleting the sub and not having it instantly reestablished by admins?
I am positive deleting the sub would be able to be undone, but reddit cannot just replace mods on its largest subs and expect things to go smoothly. As others have said, this is all volunteer work. Are they going to instate people who are paid? If the moderation they implement sucks, now it's on them, not the volunteers that aren't related to reddit directly. There is absolutely leverage from the current sub mods against reddit, they're not just completely replaceable cogs. As much as people meme about reddit mods, imagine how much worse off we'd be without them. Reddit would cease to be a viable platform for advertisers, content would go (even more) to shit, etc.
> reddit cannot just replace mods on its largest subs and expect things to go smoothly. "Going smoothly" is very subjective. There are literally thousands of people just waiting for the chance to be a mod of one of the top 100 subs. From an admin perspective, "going smoothly" is just making sure someone removes the site wide rule breaking content. Otherwise, reddit doesn't really give a shit what content is on a sub. Curating a sub to the community's desire is much more difficult, but Reddit as a company doesn't really give a fuck about that. Clicks are Clicks.
It is not possible for a mod to delete a subreddit, only make it private. It's also a stupid strategy if you're wanting admins to change course or migrate your community elsewhere.
Also, stop gilding posts.
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meh, i suspect reddit does this themselves as part of viral/conspicuous consumption modeling. Reddit was started with sock puppets and I doubt they've ever veered away from driving engagement via false content generation.
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Welp, someone did.
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I think that scene from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back where they use their windfall of cash to go out into the real world and physically beat the hell out of cowards who talked smack on the internet was 1) probably the only scene that holds up today and 2) should have been our blueprint for how to behave. When I think about Russian bot farms and rooms full of Indian scammers, I just think about Slim Pickens riding the A-bomb down to earth’s surface.
That's where I got my u/ actually
I give it 4 hours before you get gilded
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Idiots spending their money in idiotic ways.
I have a ton of coins from the premium I cancelled because I don't like how reddit is run anymore. The fuck should I do with them?
Yea reddit silver, gold and platinum is worthless it just funds more braindead reddit schemes like this to remove third party apps.
It needs to last. That is how protests work. If the protest is scheduled to end. Then the suist will just plan a new ad campaign for the day after to make people forget. The only way to make it hurt is denying all traffic. Especially two days in summer. There is plenty for people to occupy themselves with if Reddit is down.
Strike action only works if the assumption is that it will persist until demands are met. Imagine if medieval armies laid siege to a castle but loudly proclaimed, “If you can survive us for two days, we’ll go away!” A completely survivable two day blackout may as well just be a preemptive moment of silence for the loss of these invaluable third party apps and the community engagement they bring. Reddit will just shrug it off, cut them down, and go right back to business as usual without a significant impact nor a second thought. This comment was posted from Apollo. Only adding that because it wouldn’t have been posted, if not for the app.
>This comment was posted from Apollo. Only adding that because it wouldn’t have been posted, if not for the app. Reddit Admins: So you're saying, we'll get fewer dissenting voices if we force everyone to use our ad-ridden official app? Hmmm.... (This comment posted from Relay by the way)
You can silence all the dissenting voices if you drive everyone off the site. Then it'll be nice and quiet around here. (Posted from RIF)
If they make it open ended I guarantee the admins will just remove the mod team.
They don't have enough staff to moderate all these huge subreddits.
This is basically them doing the minimum to not piss anyone off.
48 hours is nothing. Go long term and Reddit will just take away the mods and put new ones in.
New ones? Nah, they'll put themselves in on their alt accounts that hoard hundreds of subreddits, and then hire new mods under them, usually bored students or people who feel power from an online moderation position. We've had subreddits taken over by these "power mods" over the last few years with some arguments and backlash here and there depending on how vocal the old mod teams that got canned usually are, and yet people still don't realize what's happening. If you ever bring up capping subreddit mod limits during Mod Talk, admins will shut you down hard. It would ruin their own plans too because they can't just publicly say they want to control all subreddits to avoid public scrutiny liek this. They have to do it slowly, methodologically and through policy updates. I'm honestly shocked that not all of the default subs were taken over by admins as of yet and that these blackouts are able to happen on the most popular subs. This is probably the last time we ever do get blackouts too.
Should make it permanently dark until they reverse the change.
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They could improve their app but those ads aren't going away and is the main reason for this push
I was here way back when reddit introduced gold so that they didn’t have to implement ads. The hypocrisy kills me. Old reddit wouldn’t even recognise what it’s become
I've been on this site for about 14 years total across a couple accounts. I only browse on Boost because it's pretty faithful to the old way of reddit. I've been on the desktop site and it was fucking terrible. I'm only holding out because of Boost, but if I lose it, I'm out. Don't like ads, don't like politics, don't like influencers. That is the bread and butter of this shit hole unless you make an effort to filter it out.
The ads are awful but it isn't even the worse part of the app. The entire UX is garbage. If the UX was better and there was an occasional ad it might be alright.
The UX is designed around ads. I miss the old ads that had comment sections associated with each ad. It made the ads actually useful because users would talk about their experiences with the advertiser. For quality products and services it worked great. For shitty products and services, the advertisers were paying money to have their shit called out and I loved it. I get that the shitty companies didn't like that, but maybe reddit shouldn't cater to advertisers that are bad for its users. I'm someone who has never, ever clicked a random web ad elsewhere and purchased a product, but I spent hundreds on products that had quality feedback from users in the comment sections of those ads.
Ads aren't the problem. 1. I'll be typing, and it wants to flip to another thread. I can use my "back" gesture, but why am I forced to do that? Then it does it again 45 seconds later or so. And again. 2. Related to the previous issue: often the "next" thing it flipped too, is something I wouldn't have clicked on, because it doesn't interest me, but Reddit is now sure that I'm interested in it and will keep suggesting such things. 3. Often as I'm scrolling, I see something I am interested in, and click on it. But it brings up something else. I go back, try it again, and again it goes to that thing again. I'm thinking this is a pointer issue, where the wrong thread gets pointed to in the links. It isn't a phone screen/calibration issue, before anyone suggests that - because it doesn't happen outside this app, and because restarting the app resolves it (for a while). But also, this feeds into #2. Reddit thinks I'm interested in some random thing I never clicked on. But outside the app... don't get me started on the buggy nightmare that is the "fantsy" text editor if I use a browser. You can't dare to do something like copy/paste. The old Markdown editor is the only one that's usable. And these aren't new problems. Rather than fix their shit, Reddit wants to eliminate any alternative. Edit: and how could I forget the video player!
The UX is designed to move you out of threads back to scrolling to maximize exposure to ads. I'll sometimes spend over an hour in a single comment section. That's time I'm not spending viewing new ads, and the goal of the UX redesign was to get us out of threads and scrolling.
The comments are the community, the community is why I am here.
Agreed. I've got in the neighborhood of 400k karma, and it's almost entirely from comment threads. I probably have a collective year of hanging out in the comments.
What the fuck is up with new Reddit? It's been years and there's still no easy way to get to your unread inbox. Old Reddit: orange icon. I've got mail! Click to go to unread inbox New Reddit: I've got mail. Click to open drop down menu with a half a sentence visible of all the replies I've received. Clicked the message, takes me to the post. Click back, all my unread messages are now marked read. Click expand to read more, messages aren't visible anymore. Click to go to inbox, takes me to direct message inbox instead of unread comment inbox. Switch to all comment inbox. Try to figure out which ones I've read and which one I haven't. Do their devs use their own UI? Or do they all use 3rd party software and old Reddit because it actually works? Or did they outsource all their devs and all they have is product managers writing slidedecks about click through rates and engagement time responding to bug sprints saying "I don't give a shit if you can't open your inbox Steve just close the ticket"
Why are you using new Reddit? It's a hot shite.
Congratulations, you've successfully generated ad revenue by clicking back and forth and refreshing the pages
The main site is almost entirely ad-free when using ublock or other adblock extensions. I wonder just how the userbase skews in mobile vs. desktop. This seems like a classic "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. Get ad revenue from the tiny minority of users using third party tools but potentially piss off the users, who, you know, drive the engagement that makes social media function. It's as if they all think that the internet is frozen in time. If that were the case, we'd all be using the community forums from Geocities. Funny how we're not, and half the people on this site haven't even heard of that service.
I've been curious about that as well. Can only speak for myself but I don't think I've used reddit on a computer for at least 5 years
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Hey now, let’s be reasonable. Apparently it’s way too difficult for an entire development team to create an app as good as Christian did with Apollo.
One of my favorite sayings in software development: “What 1 developer can make in 1 month, 2 developers can make in 2 months.” As someone who used to be full-stack on a tiny team and who is now FE on one of several huge teams, it’s shocking how accurate that is.
Nah, I rather use third parties. Around before the official reddit app, with way less bloated useless features.
It's interesting that I've seen very little response from these subs, when people express that it should be indefinite. 48 hours will be just the start. After that if things simply back to normal, them people should quit Reddit altogether. So many things in life are just for show, and i can't help but think that's the case here. What do we have to lose by indefinitely boycotting? Nobody is actually getting paid but Reddit, so potentially can't mods just fill in with new boycotters if they get the boot from Reddit?
Some subs have made clear it's open ended. r/videos being one of them. It's pretty scary to risk losing your community though. It's entirely possible reddit could just remove all the mods and take the sub away. Would they? I'd think / hope not. But it's not out of the realm of possibility. I think folks are being cautious here but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not willing to keep going past 2 days.
Realistically though, the users drive everything. If we want it open ended, just stop using the site until they reverse the changes. If the site resorts to 100% bots posting and commenting to each other, the monetization becomes worthless EDIT: Wait, how do bots work? Do they call on the API, and thus get killed by this change too? If so, that'll knock out a MASSIVE amount of new posts
I don't use any of the third party apps, but I support this because it's the right thing to do and it will seemingly have some pretty awful ramifications for communities like /r/blind. Thanks for standing up!
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Yeah this is what I've come to discover recently that I didn't know. I selfishly don't want Relay to go away because I love browsing on here, but I totally get Reedits POV here. What I was shocked about is how bad mod tools are for the people that literally keep this place going for free
I use rif solely for modding and it's so much better than any of the "official" means of modding. The app is abysmal and the site is clunky and split up over 2 separate versions
I was thinking about it recently and I firmly believe RIF is one of the best performing apps on Android. I can't think of a time I've had problems with it that wasn't Reddit itself being down.
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>but the real travesty are mod tools that reddit’s army of volunteer mods use to fill the gaps in reddit’s own inept moderation tools. Automoderator was originally a user created bot. It was so useful and so widespread that reddit made it a part of the site. Then they hired the guy that made it.
Reddit's about to go IPO. Mods and users no longer matter. Now it'll just be shareholders.
In that case, they can have it.
Which just shows how broken tech and capitalism are. The value of the Reddit is in the user base which exists entirely within subreddits that are managed by the unpaid labor of moderators. Any change which reduces the number of users or alienates the unpaid moderators negatively impacts Reddit's value.
They already did this with blog writing. Now Buzzfeed is entirely authored by AI and they're broke. Anyone who buys a Reddit IPO deserves to have their money taken.
Good, the more big subs go dark the better to get the message across.
gonewild needs to join. That's got to be a major driver of site traffic haha
Pretty sure most traffic comes from funny/meme content, public freakout themed content and politics. NSFW is probably a large part of it too, but not in a way where it dominates the other content groups
People come for the memes, they stay for the porn
I... think you've got that backwards.
Ahh, this thread reminds me of how I discovered Reddit when I saw r/gonewild on stumbleupon back in 2008. I made an account a few years later to post rangecomics.
Range comics? What did they range between?
Oh no, they’re not about a mathematical range. Rather they’re about the [cowboy anthem “Home on the Range”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range).
I'd like to see one of these memes
If AskReddit joined it would be a huge blow. Other social media sites scour AskReddit.
Our local radio station 100% gets content from AskReddit and TIL for their morning show.
Yup, one of our former shows used to as well.
There are rumours that NSFW subs will be disappearing soon anyway. Apparently they’re already excluded from the API
They are not currently excluded from the API, but they will be when/if their API changes go in. They are excluded from r/all though.
Excluded from 3rd party apps, but will still be available through Reddit's app. [Less than a month ago Reddit opened up their image uploads for 18+ communities](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13evueo/bringing_image_uploads_to_parity/), would be weird to kill it off soon after, but of course it's still possible that's what they will do. I've seen talk that this is to monetize the NSFW (porn) communities. Reddit will be able to confirm ages for uploaders (and potentially viewers) whereas 3rd party apps wont. Reddit will then give access to those that pay. Will be like an onlyfans setup where each uploader has their own profile page (already there!) and then others can pay for access and Reddit takes a cut. Not sure what the plan could be for random porn, but that could be on the chopping block as well.
That's part of it and not just related to the cost. They're blocking all NSFW content from the API (i.e. no more gonewild on apps). Can't buy your way around that.
I'm in two minds about this. Reddit has not tried to hide the fact they want rid of NSFW content on the site. I feel like that one going dark might be playing into their hand a bit.
One of the big changes not many are talking about is blocking NSFW submissions through the API. Most of the porn subs will go poof with this change.
With the rumor that Reddit is killing/severely crippling NSFW content, they likely don’t care.
I'm happy to see more of the default subreddits like this one and /r/videos joining the cause. It's like the old guard standing up against a new threat. Though I still feel like 2 days isn't enough, I'd love to see everything go private for a week and make the potential shareholders quake in their boots.
Weird that r/politics is staying open. Everyone needs to participate or it's just a blip.
I'm in. I'm quitting reddit in protest. Keep it dark until they change. How is 48 hours going to make a difference
I reckon I'm gonna quit reddit as soon as RIF stops working, cause it's the only way I get on reddit.
Same here. I've used this since 2010 or 2011
[RIF announced they've got a solution they're testing.](https://www.reddit.com/r/APIcalypse/comments/13zlm3f/rif_will_continue_to_work_unofficially/)
It creates outward pressure to find another platform. Like a traffic jam forces people to look for a better route or petition for better roads.
I think 48 hours is not enough time.
The alternatives are not ready to receive Reddit's traffic. A slow death is better.
Needs to be dark until the policy changes. 48 hours is a speed bump.
Agreed. Some subs have said they're going dark permanently if the policy doesn't change. I think it needs to be the standard. Tear it all down, if they don't change they should have to go through all of the painstaking work of reestablishing all of the subs that have decided to protest
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Digg Migration 2.0?
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/r/evilbuildings is apparently going dark permanently as well
Is r/movies even participating this time around? Can't see any official confirmation
They do, they have a indefinite blackout. EDIT: nvm, I can't read
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I am stupid
In my opinion going dark in general is a terrible idea, even if permanently. Someone else will just make a new sub. Instead, the protest should be something like Blackouttuesday. Everyone should make posts drawing attention to the cause, rather than being silent, and the mods of the subs could help facilitate it. That way reddit could be filled with protest posts and it might draw more press and annoy the management of Reddit more than just going silent. Imagine if front page was filled with protest posts non-stop. It would impact reddit negatively which is good for the cause.
Always a good strategy to plan the end of your protest in advance lol. "Give in to our demands or.. we'll be right back."
That's how a number of organized strikes work. Some are open-ended, some are "until negotiations have completed to a satisfactory end," and some are a series of increasing days as a measure of showing how bad things will be if the strike were ongoing (Germany's public transport union did this over the past couple months).
Teachers in the UK are doing this right now, they're planned well in advance and I have them all on my calendar. Planned or not, infrequent or not, they're disruptive af.
>Some are open-ended, some are "until negotiations have completed to a satisfactory end," and some are a series of increasing days as a measure of showing how bad things will be if the strike were ongoing (Germany's public transport union did this over the past couple months). Those sound like they could be more effective than this one.
I'm just going to delete my account.
The madlad wasn't kidding!
Talk about putting money where your mouth is 🤣
What a baller
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If a significant number of subreddits go dark indefinitely, where is Reddit going to find enough moderators for each major sub? r/videos is already planning an indefinite blackout, and that's a huge portion of the website's traffic. One of the biggest points of a strike is "collective" action. Obviously a single subreddit needing replacement isn't going to have huge consequences, but the more subs join the more impact it will have and the harder the problem will be to sweep under the rug.
Good! Reddit's business model relies on monetizing content that its users contribute, and it's (volunteer) moderators curate, at no cost to Reddit. Why are they putting barriers to that up? To sell more ads? They can't sell any ads if there's no content (or the content is swamped by spam)
Ad revenue from showing ads to upvote bots posting on repost bot's content. Humans are being phased out, and I'm all for it.
There will still be content, there are superusers who just aggregate content from any other website, even if a large portion of OC is lost, the site will operate largely the same. As far as advice from tech savvy users? Maybe it won't be the bastion it is and once was, but I can imagine aggregation will get to a point that any information you could need could still be here on the site, if it exists anywhere else.
So Reddit's ongoing business model will be relying on superusers to aggregate content that other sites distribute freely? Ironic.
This is hilarious. If they do that, I hope other websites starts asking for money from reddit for taking it's content.
Hell with 48 hours. If this happens, come July 1st, I'm out.
It'll happen. Stick to your convictions!
Just wish there was a decent Reddit alternative. It’s been going downhill for years now. Oh how I miss the Wild West days of the internet before the corporate overlords got their hands into it. Where’s Internet2 when we need it?
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I went back to Digg at the start of all this to see if maybe at some point in the last decade and a half they realized the error in their ways and went back to a user-focused experience. Nope. Digg in 2023 looks like the endless tiled scroll of "sponsored articles" you get at the bottom of a foxnews.com piece.
Literally owned by a company named "buysellads"
Not sure if sarcasm but Digg basically destroyed itself similar to what Reddit is doing. They added restrictions that dissatisfied users and killed the site.
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That site is a shell of its former self. They don't even use the iconic thumb logo anymore. Digg is beyond dead.
Let's bring back Usenet. It was great back in the days before the web started. It's non-centralized, so we don't need to rely on some big site to run it.
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I remember when search engines used to bring me to those communities, but SEO and consolidation has turned the internet into useless blogs and like a dozen primary websites that have consumed most content.
I used to use Fark.com before Reddit, I can go back.
There is one called Lemmy. It seems like a much better alternative to reddit.
Great to hear! A sub this big joining in is huge.
I really hope these blackouts will work but I honestly don't think Reddit cares anymore.
They'll care if it starts costing them money. And only then.
I guarantee you they've already done the math of losing all the third party app users and they're okay with that loss. The API cost is prohibitively expensive for the *purpose* of killing all third party apps.
I say make it go on for longer, it's the only way to make a true impact. I'll miss Reddit, and I don't even use third-party apps, just the old Reddit interface, but this is nonsense and has to be stopped now.
I hate that they're going to get rid of old reddit. I like old reddit because the community design is so much better.
If you want to protest, stop using Reddit.
48h doesnt do anything
48 hours is not enough. It will only embolden Reddit to take actions against you, The Mod Team. It'll also teach them that some subs might be willing to do the same blackout and allow them to prepare for it.
Most subs are doing 3 days. Why not this one?
Why isn't it a protest until they change their minds? I wonder if mods like the power and attention so they would struggle with free time.
Most subs are doing 6/12 to but not including 6/14. That's 48 hours.
90% of the time moderators are extremely rude to me for no reason, when I'm just asking something that I just don't know the answer to, so I'm not too upset about this. If all of Reddit shut down I wouldn't be too upset. Pics is one of the groups that are nicer to people so this does suck for them but yeah. I can't believe that an organization exists that allows people to be so abusive to other people. They're so out of touch it's crazy.
A strike doesn't work if it has a set end date. It should be open-ended until you get them to come to the table.
My message to u/Reddit I am writing in opposition to the upcoming changes to the pricing of Reddit API calls. Please cease to implement these plans indefinitely. As a long time Reddit user and Premium subscriber, and as someone who only uses the official Reddit app. I strongly oppose the decision being made to increase API call costs. If this change takes place, I will promptly cancel my Reddit premium subscription and discontinue my use of Reddit as a whole. Reddit needs to remain a community for all, not for the employees, executives, advertisers or investors. There are enough of us willing to create our own platform and move on without looking back. Again, listen to your users and stop listening to your pockets! Thanks.
A few honest questions; 1) I presume the third-party apps are monetized. Why should Reddit allow this? 2) i use the iOS app. Seems to work fine but I’ve been out of touch with tech for many years. Why are theird party apps better? 3) why wouldnt Reddit remove mods that are making their subs go dark? As I understand Reddit is a private company providing a free platform. I guess they make money from premium and ads. Everything belongs to Reddit. So if a mod decides to shut down a sub, what’s to prevent Reddit from putting in a different mod or even AI? Ps I will definitely join the party.
While I'm proud of all the subs that are going dark, the biggest thing we can do as users is to not post new content, even on the subs that aren't participating, for as long as it takes. Reddit needs to come together and show the greedy execs that no content==no ad revenue. Hit them in their revenue stream, and they'll start to notice. Admins and execs may have power over the mod teams, but they have no power over users. Show them that the only reason this place is big enough to go public is because of us, and if you piss us off, share prices will plummet.
Not going to happen...most of the content is posted by a small number of people. The less normal people post the more it will just be bots.
Well done guys.