Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests.
There's still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
Like what the hell are they even protesting about now? What is left to protest about? And why? Just go.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
If you're still posting on Reddit or Twitter, and it's not for a niche community, please don't come here.
The hold outs for these sites are so fucking dumb. They act like social media is somehow an important part of their existence when just 10, 20 years ago it was an emerging technology. These early iterations of social media are toxic as fuck. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They don't deserve your patronage and are taking your goodwill and turning it into social decay.
10-20 years and you people can't give it up for something better. There is no argument. You don't owe them loyalty. They aren't innovating. They have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism.
Yeesh.
No, because then they'll all flood here. Then I'll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I'm bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I'm good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
Nope.
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it's going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
....I'm gonna go ahead and say it.
I like it better here.
Same. This place is great, even with the tankies from lemmy.ml and the fascists from hexbear, at least we somehow still get along.
Having those arround adds some flavour to my feed. I'm like "ooh so that's what they are up to" I wish that smaller communities thrive but well.
I honestly believe that Lemmy is cool, but it either needs more content or I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed "better". At least it's not that addicting, and the "small community, small town" vibes gives charm to it.
I've been here since August 2024 or so.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
It's a lot better than August 2023!
I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting
Lemmy's feed is intentionally (or I think it is intentional at least) worse in this aspect than Reddit's feed, in order to not be as addictive. Take that how you will.
This place feels like old reddit. When we could have actual discussions and not just be downvoted by bots. It’s so much better here
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don't and there's tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don't have a reason to go back
It's so much better. Personally I don't hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I'm super OK with that.
The lack of commercialization being shoved down and up your orifices is really nice.
We all do
You know what's not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
It's possible but reddit isn't the only one looking for engagement, so are individual users. If a site has more users, it has more engagement and content. It is also not impossible to drop the lemmy name when you do go back there to make people aware of the alternative.
Someone dropped the name lemmy over there, so now I'm here checking it out. Screw reddit, man.
My thought exactly. They can always do like me and nope the fuck out of there.
True but how do you get the message out when they control the media?
That's not a good method though on it's own, there needs to be effort to undermine them. And since they don't want to do peaceful protests, the only option left are the more violent and less legal ones. The ones that compromise their platform and its data.
And moving to a different, more decentralized shithole?
Lemmy has the same power tripping admins and mods, just more of them and each with a new and unique bias. You don't hate AI? Ban. You acknowledge certain genocide? Ban. You made fun of my typo? Ban.
Wrong instance I guess. Yeah, Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and hexbear are toxic as hell, but there are really nice instances out there. I chose dbzer0 and it's great here. We also have many interesting threads about locally hosted FOSS AI. db0 himself is quite involved in this topic, he's the initial author of things like AI Horde. Basically everyone on db0 I've seen acknowledges the active genocide that's being conducted by the Israeli fascist government. Other topics on the instance are anarchism and of course piracy.
It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
People still use AOL internet. I expect Reddit and twitter to die sometime in the 2050s.
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn't matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
I don't know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there's so many fewer assholes over here.
I believe you missed the point. There's people there because they know that their content won't be found elsewhere.
A lot of it is just propaganda bots at this point.
Those still on are a bunch of bootlickers IMO
It's amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit's investors can make more money.
There was this one post for a call for mods about "doing a social good for the community".
Like bro, this is a video game subreddit. And you're doing it for free, to help another dude get really rich.
Ideally, it would be because they care for the community they moderate, which I believe is the reason most mods do it.
Then you have creatures like awkwardtheturtle, who knows what motivates them.
If all mods quit that'd be perfect. Reddit has shown they'll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to). But if no regular users wanted to pick it up then they'd have to pay admins to moderate. I don't think we'll see it though. There's always going to be someone who wants it enough who has enough time for whatever reason.
Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to).
But, their business model doesn't work unless those mods are working for free. So, while they may replace mods, unless people keep signing up to work for free to help a for-profit company deliver value to its shareholders, eventually it's going to collapse.
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
Well it used to be (when Reddit was FLOSS and Reddit didn't take communities off the founders who created them, at most they'd close the community) that people saw it as choosing Reddit to host the community instead of creating it somewhere else. However, Reddit has since changed the rules drastically, and essentially taken the communities people created there.
Best response for mods is to move your community somewhere else, and put in an automod rule redirecting people to the new community on Lemmy or whatever. Reddit will probably eventually try to take over and keep competing with your community under the original URL.
I was reading this post recently: https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ - I guess it applies to communities equally as much as it applies to anything else.
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That's when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
"But we'll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday."
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
Moment that "protest" started I knew it would last like a month tops.
Most people don't even care about third party apps.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless "We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power" idiocy.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to "nsfw" because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn't really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
...so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course "accurately reflecting the subreddit" wasn't what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said "remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we'll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing".
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
lol no if anything they’ve become far left shitholes.
A lot of subreddits have done that. The problem is nobody notices...
That's what I did with all mine.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
A boycott that doesn’t hurt has no leverage.
It's because it was being done by terminally online Redditors, not using the site was more painful for them than the site itself.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you're a leader. but they're better than the alternative. that's the whole point.
They're better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don't mind the new alternative.
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I've seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there's a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn't there even for casual users. They can't really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
i'm not yet sold on this "old vs new" thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn't been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn't even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i'm open to changing my mind on it.
But that complacency isn't happening to everyone. A lot are just festering, slowly digesting more incredulous and radical propaganda/influencers. Every ones base reality of the events that are happening over the country is getting completely skewed by the new types of outlets like tiktok that they flock to because of the lack of accountability by our elected officials and journalists/news organizations.
During just this last hurricane Helene I've heard more anger and outrage about the government than anything to actually do about what's been hit or what the people and rescue workers are actually doing. This is how we get mass shooters and assassinations becoming more prolific, people aren't just complaining and going about their day. They're nodding and grinding their teeth while smiling.
I have made like, idk, maybe three reddit posts in the past year. Apart from incredibly specific niche topics which don't have enough folks here to get a good answer, I don't use Reddit.
Something Great and something French
The old alternative is better IMO, makes change happen one way or another. Specifically the unsanctioned, and non-peaceful protests. Boycotts don't work in the days of ad-revenue, since ad-revenue funded companies have immunity from user dissatisfaction in that regard (can replace a substantial amount of users with bots that look at ads and they still get ad-revenue).
What we need are old-fashioned style pitchforks and fire protests against them, but in the digital age, using cyberwarfare, like this.
(reposted because SJW deleted my others)
People haven't been using the alternative, and that's the problem. Reddit and tech giants have grown complicit. They do not believe people would do it to them, or they think they could survive thousands of people trying to do it to them, if one can then many can.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
The violent ones produce change one way or another. They're significantly less desirable for leaders, and that's kind of the point.
Or just agree with what your betters want you to think, obviously. </s>
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of "Social Media for Dummies," I don't think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally...
This isn't limited to the Reddit app. You can see it on the desktop and mobile website too.
So that's what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit...
At reddit, line must go up. So user experience must go down.
(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. Complacency won’t grow the userbase here.
What you guys did to the alternate Star Trek subs (ie: the ones that allowed criticism of NuTrek) is inexcusable and will never be forgiven.
started StarTrek.website.
I don't use that because you are (or someone is) modding it wrong. You don't allow people to talk about which parts of Star Trek they don't like and others might want to avoid. Fuck that. All parts of Star Trek are not equally good.
oh yea i got banned on r/startrek for expressing mild dislike of the discovery show, wasnt even rude or anything. Tried to appeal the ban by asking why i was banned got instantly mod muted and perma banned.
Fuck that Subreddit. I called someone an idiot there and they banned me. I don't know if this changed but at the time ALL the moderators were privated. I found out one moderators and called them them all cowards and losers. It was THAT exchange that got be banned from reddit entirely.
I came here and never looked back.
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit’s platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits.
You quit reddit because they didn't ban subreddits you don't like?
https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-biden-pressure-censorship/
I quit because contributing my labor made me complicit.
Stop using Reddit, problem solved
In favor of what is the problem. In Lemmy half the instances have defederated from half the others.
People use Reddit because there's only one Reddit. Coming to such a center is human nature, while Fediverse architecture is someone's strategy. Changing your strategy is simpler than changing human nature.
If we drop the tech religion part of the subject, NOSTR moderated communities are a very good thing as a global, not per-instance, Reddit alternative. You can clearly see that its core idea is chosen by people who are more confident with human psychology than with tech. And it's good for that very reason. It's an ugly real solution.
Except all clients suck balls and there's nothing to see there yet.
What? and lose THE MOST EFFECTIVE PROTEST PLATFORM EVER MADE? I couldn't imagine what else we would use to teach corporations and politicians a harsh lesson (insert giant eye rolling emoji)
I lieu of that, I'd say the mods should just go limp. Stop moderating content and let posters run wild. The company needs to realize just how much their business model depends on all that unpaid labor.
I think they realize it but know these mods are addicted to the fake power so they won't go anywhere no matter what
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
Man I just turned 20. I’m sick of everything I do online being dictated by commercial interests. I feel like an old man. I just want my applesauce and my bingo, and to not be bothered and lumped into the white middle class 20 year-old advertising demographic.
( please stop bombarding me with scare tactic election ads google )
I lied about my age online a WHILE ago and I'm going to let you know old farts get bombarded too.
Its gotten better since my old persona died I think (you know over 120 is just out of most marketers age ranges).
I hate ads with a passion, if a friend shows me a video and an ad pops up I show them how to use fence and ad blockers on their phone right away.
...we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm
Seems like that's about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
My account was banned because I kept reporting people and it was easier to get rid of the complainer than it was all the bigots she was complaining about... but... now I feel very "You can't fire me, I quit" about it
But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.
Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.
“Those who make community protest impossible will make hacks inevitable."
― John F. Kennedy, pretty much
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
My oldest Reddit account is 15 years old. That site is a shell of what it used to be. It's lost almost everything that made it special in the first place. The community is also too large in my opinion. We went from well-thought-out posts, comments and questions to memes and one-liners. It's toxic, hive minded and full of bots.
I feel like Lemmy also has a problem with corporate troll farms.
Reddit is far worse though with bots and establishment troll farm shill accounts.
The internet always moves on; the most popular bulletin boards and usenet groups and web forums eventually fell and people moved away. Even Digg had a powerful following and heavy user traffic and due to Reddit style changes everyone left too. Reddit just as likely.
Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.
When something grows to that size it becomes recognized as a useful tool with which to conduct social engineering. Reddit has been a weapon of information warfare for well over a decade.
Yes, what shocks me most is that there was a small window of time in which media organizations covered Israel's troll farms on there, but when Russiagate happened they essentially mentioned it only in passing from then on. To me, the subtext of that was Israel gets a pass as it's not belligerent social engineering.
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
fuck u/spez
“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit
"we won't let moderators harm their communities by not letting them eg. protect their communities from brigades and similar harassment"
Sure you thought that through, reddit admins?
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
Indeed, fuck reddit and their Russian shills. I was permanently banned for commenting about the Russians receiving a dose of their own medicine and I did not use a single swear word.
I protested, they said, nope
Protesting on a site that's fully automated their administration just means getting told "fuck you" twice.
There's no real bureaucracy under the hood. It's just "friend computer says you're guilty" followed by "friend computer says you're still guilty plus you had the gall to doubt friend computer's immaculate wisdom".
I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.
Bruh, at least you just got banned "for" something. I got shadowbanned, and for seemingly no reason at all! I made some very neutral comments in fandom subreddits, and only when I looked at the pages logged out, I realized the comments were not showing up. I can only guess it was either my location, my custom domain email, or a combination of both.
I had that happen too. Conversations with people would just dissapear. I'm done there. I can't say anything even slightly edgy without getting banned. I got banned from a sub for saying mods will kill reddit. I got a permanent hate speech ban for a fantastic joke.
"I can't show you the evidence of Haitians eating pets. They already ate all the evidence."
I like the reddit form of consuming information but that place you either get in line or get silenced. The equivalent of r/politics is far left on here too so that might be a bad sign for this site though lol.
What’s really fascinating is how many of the advice communities for certain sexual practices are run by bona fide rapists.
Reddit permabanned me. I pissed off too many mods, made too many new accounts, now I guess my ip is caught in their spam filter or something. Crazy thing, I never posted anything offensive. I could be posting about playing GTA and somebody I pissed off in another thread would report me for "advocating violence", which is an autoban basically.
Add to that the "your karma is too low" or "your post doesn't include xyz" shit and the site is becoming unusable.
It's the same here
If it's like that on lemmy.ca then why not go to a different Lemmy host or make your own. Both things that are not an option for Reddit
Somewhat, but the way federated instances are set up, it's not nearly as bad or easily abused. Not as if making a new Reddit account was that much of a roadblock, either. They accept 10minutemail addresses.
The “wrong” is different here.
Same. Will never go back. Even the military subs are toxic now.
Imagine that.
And this is where you went? This is literally Reddit’s bias taken to the level of hyperbole. The extremism groupthink here is the primary reason it hasn’t and likely will never go mainstream.
What? Where have you been that you have this kind of opinion? It's basically the same as reddit: You do have your bubbles, you do have open minded communities, you also have closed minded communities. Your experience is therefore dependend on where you go.
For example: Joining a vegan server to say "meat is great" will lead to a shitshow. But that's not supprising and it's not because Lemmy per se harbors militant people.
Uhm, the worldnews subreddit is literally the most astroturfed online community I have ever seen in my entire life. Lemmy isn’t great because it still has Redditors on it, but it’s still nowhere near as bad as Reddit.
FUCK SPEZ
May I be blunt? I don't think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.
That was clear from the article as well, where they said they took the opinion of 150
bootlickersmoderatorsThe guy who admin my lemmy instance is also the mod of r/Brasil and he and the Brazilian mod team worked a lot to avoid the subreddit to become an alt-right shithole like the rest of country subreddits (the losers from the alt-right national subreddit even had to pay for reddit ads to try to funnel user there).
Roll it up
I agree. Especially with how some moderators talk down to users, they sure licked those boots stomping on them to not lose their reddit powers.
Looking at you, r/de who's "protest" was to "allow memes" for a week.
There is no chance in hell any of these cowards would stand up for their community. The ones that did are already here.
So long as we're being blunt, this criticism can be levied at Lemmy too. There is less accountability here and your only option is to 'find a similar federated community' because nobody seems to want any kind of accountability or standards in the mods. Well, you have basically 2 major communities and both of them are equally stupid but in opposite directions. Viable option indeed.
We're talking about two different problems.
The one that I'm talking about is Reddit admins being clearly hostile towards the community, including mods, and the mods still being willing to lick the admins' boots, instead of migrating their comms to another site. Even at the expense of the userbases of the subreddits that they moderate.
Here in Lemmy this shit does not roll - both because it's easier to migrate comms across instances, and because the userbase is mostly composed of people with low tolerance towards admin abuse.
Now, regarding the problem that you've spotted: yes, it is a problem here that boils down to
- Lack of transparency: plenty mods and admins here have a nasty tendency to enforce hidden rules - because actually writing those rules down would piss off the userbase.
- Excessive polarisation and oversimplification of some topics, mostly dealing with recent events. (Such as the one that we both were talking about not too long ago.)
I am really not sure on how to compare the extent of both issues in Lemmy vs. Reddit, nor how to address them here, and thus to get rid of the problem that you're noticing.
The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.
Quite a few of the mods are severing alternative interests. The partisan subs are run by literal party staffers and think tanks. Lots of the big brand subs are run by marketing agencies. Reddit's financial model is to sell these spaces. You don't just have some random mega-fan running /r/Marvel. That's a Disney staffer.
None of these guys are going anywhere.
Nobody is going to quit, all mod roles can be replaced in minutes with people excited to do it. If they have to, they can pay them even and make them official employees and never have to worry about protests again.
Also, who cares, the site has a clock over it, in a few years most users will be bots and children and all content will be farmed slop akin to youtube.
Furthermore, if anyone thinks that "protests" on reddit accomplish ANYTHING that person is a literal child, or someone else who shouldn't be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
Whatever high ideals we had for reddit a decade ago are long-since dead and buried and that's fine, instead of whinging about what we lost we should be trying to figure out what to build next to maintain some semblance of an internet in an age of AI slop.
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
/r/trees will only accept tree related posts
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?
No that just isn't allowed. I'm not joking, the admins have removed entire mod teams and installed new ones because the mod teams decided to change the topic of the sub.
I soft quit Reddit last year and deleted all my profile’s comments and posts. I only kept it around because I had heard Reddit was restoring deleted posts and I wanted to make sure mine were gone for good. After several months I stopped checking.
This article made me finally pull the trigger and go in to delete my account. Surprise surprise, two pages of old comments had been restored.
It seems like the new account deleter scripts replace all comments with random text rather than actually delete them, which I'm sure makes it harder for reddit to undelete.
Reddit is already dead, the corporate AI shell is all that remains amongst some folk who dont realize everyone is a bot or an idiot.
/r/android used to be one of the hottest subs - it's literally just posts from the same 2 OPs linking to their professional news articles.
Before the API change I was looking into making an extension for RES that would automatically block any user account above a configurable ratio of posts to comments. It was BANANAS how much content was from bots on the front page even on smaller subs, and that was before the protests.
That would have been a lot like how I remember message boards being back in the day, (late 90's early 2000's) and honestly I don't think I like it. People like me (with both low number of comments and posts) wouldn't be able to reach that bar to entry. I get the bots wouldn't either, but that still eliminates human users as well and I don't know if that's a good thing.
Just like digg back then after they switched the format.
Reddit keeps forgetting they depend on the users, including the mods.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It's literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn't get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I'm sure they're still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o
She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.
Good. Can’t wait for these shit MBA clowns to destroy something else with their vast “knowledge”. Only this time will cheer them on.
I remember there was like a twilight where yelp was helpful, then it wasn't and I learned all their shady shit and went "yeah that explains it".
Reddit has a longer amount of content to burn through but if it becomes just husks of communities puppetted by corporate pr firms it's going to just slowly cannibalize.
This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won't be done because it's "illegal", that didn't stop these guys now did it?
It happens in the real world too.
In the positive cases the local police force and / or military manages to convince the government that it is a non-supportable act and nothing happens. In the bad cases it results in government officials getting lynched in the end.
Some people point blank refuse to learn from history, no matter how many times it is repeated.
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
Heresy? Is that Roblox Burlyman? It's heresy, right?
There's an irony seeing Redditors creating threads and complaining about it as if they did anything during the API-gate saga
I'll bet $50 this is because they plan on pulling the plug on old reddit soon, and don't want to allow the inevitable protests.
Few enough people use it i doubt they'll do that.
The og reddit api (is that the term?) that came before old.reddit still works too(can't remember what it is off the top)Few enough people use it i doubt they’ll do that.
I was going to suggest otherwise, but after checking the viewing stats on r/linuxhardware, out of 193k unique views in July, 7,300 were from old.reddit, which accounts for 2.8%, and that kinda blows my mind. Just a couple years ago the numbers were much higher.
The views on that sub have increased a lot over the last year, but engagement is the same or lower, so I heavily suspect a lot of the views there are just bots inflating the numbers.
They killed i.reddit.com after the APIcalypse, so I wouldn't be so sure.
They're about to make another wildly unpopular move. Get your popcorn ready.
And unlike last time there won't be an easy way for mods to point users towards Lemmy.
Glad I'm not the only one pessimating that.
Let's be honest with ourselves - no, it won't be wildly unpopular. This change affects very few people and the people still using Reddit at this point likely won't care much, and I have doubt any future change would cause much outrage either.
Because think about this - who is actively complaining and gnashing their teeth about the continued downward spiral and still scrolling, posting, moderating there at this point? I'd love to believe more people would jump ship - but if it ever happened it would take a far larger-scope fuckup than anything we've seen so far.
The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Wow. So many power-hungry people in one room.
Reddit mods are the blue sludge in the porta potty tank, not a "council".
They are traitors of the userbase's interests
Great username 😂
😊
Mods could just make a filter to remove everything new anyway. The concept of mods being unpaid volunteers means they get to fuck with reddit if they really want. They already had that issue with some subs just starting to allow porn during the first api protest. Sure reddit can just churn through to newer friendlier mods like the first time but they're not going to be able to crush all the dissent and drama from moves like that.
But actually I think reddit has a bigger problem than protests. They tweaked their algorithm recently and it is going the way of facebook now, I've been getting 0 upvote day-old posts shown to me. They're probably getting more engagement but I don't think redditors are going to put up with that level of enshittification as easily as other social media where people are locked in by friends and followers.
If you can't meaningfully curate your feed then Reddit has lost all value.
In the next protest mods should allow content like porn as another way of protest.
I believe mods tried this and reddit purged the mods when subreddits only allowed John Oliver images.
"This sub is now entirely dedicated to discussing u/Spez's involvement in moderating jailbait subreddits"
They address this. "The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too."
Lack of imagination.
Mods can still dump 10k trash messages in a sub making it unusable. (Or smart messages in the case of most subreddit who are trash anyway).
Set-up automoderator with rules reventing anyone below 5 billions karma to participate.
Ban everyone.
I'm sure there are a lot of other options.
If your subreddit is big enough and you do anything disruptive they’ll just take your mod powers away and give them to someone else who won’t disrupt it.
The best thing to do is either over or under moderate the subreddit in a way that seems legitimate but leads to the usefulness of the community dying off while also migrating the most useful content off the subreddit.
Mod-to-rule
Banning everyone takes a bot, which is rate limited. Same with a trash flood.
Automod though, you can easily set to do things like remove all new comments and submissions, remove stuff on one report (which lets you use the argument no one really believes that you're letting the users have more control.), allow new submissions but lock every comment section, or allow only select users to post, whether based on karma, username, flair, etc.
Possibilities are endless really.
They'd get banned for spam.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
Bots building post history in an abandoned looking sub. Usually done to get access to some other sub.
With the right looking post history you can scam your way onto a surprising large number of moderation teams.
Fuck Spez, & long live Lemmy.
They could just not moderate it tho. Reddit is a toxic workplace (for free) for mods.
Basically, "you can do whatever you want as long as it benefits us." I hate for-profit social networks.
At least here you don't see a single ad.
Yet
Instance owners could potentially insert ads to help cover server costs. Users would likely just migrate to a different instance, but I could definitely imagine one of the bigger instances doing that eventually.
I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.
Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.
Lmao now even the moderators get cancelled by Reddit.
The platform can't die quick enough, it turned into such a fucking cesspool of powertripping mods and circlejerks. And it's impossible to ever get in contact with admins because they replaced them all by bots. There are also so many bot posters that at some point it'll just be bots moderating bots, moderated by admin bots.
I think that's what most as execs want, sadly
if i post or comment on reddit, anything at all, my account will be suspended instantly. i think they have black listed my ISP or maybe my entire country. i can appeal the suspension every day but nobody will read it. i literally can't use reddit.
What country is that? I'm curious if they're also racists.
it's obviously not racism. don't be a clown.
it's laziness and incompetence. it's a huge problem for many smaller countries outside the western world. you are blocked from using various services across the internet constantly. they want to filter malicious traffic, and they don't have many users from your country, so they blacklist the entire ASN.
the infuriating thing about Reddit is that they have an appeals process, and they're just ignoring all of the appeals. it is known that appealing a suspension does nothing. it's been this way for years.
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
I recently wanted to ask something on reddit after 2 years away, because a certain mod dev is there. Got a message it got deleted because i don't have the karma to post in that sub. Thanks for the effort, never again. That's why i don't write on Stack Overflow, too.
Most self destructive design choice I've ever seen on a site
How the fuck are you supposed to get new users if nobody can even post!?
who cares what that shit show, bad example, internet stain is doing at any given moment. fuck spez.
said a lemmy commenting on reddit subreddit on the fediverse hehe
I just checked and theyve banned my private subreddit for lack of moderation
Heil piss baby Spez
My protest over a year ago was effortless. I just deleted my account and stopped going there.
More than a year after the protests, Reddit is essentially back to normal.
[citation needed]
For a casual observer, who was never engaged with that platform, it might actually look like Reddit is back to normal, based on a casual glance at the activity.
You only notice the cracks leaking water when you actually look closer, and you remember that the stone dam didn't have so many of them. The surge on bot activity, the lower level of discourse in the comments, the further concentration of activity into larger subs, the content feeling more and more repetitive...
So rather than allow subs to remain preserved while the replace the mods in place they will push subs to shit on themselves in this latest bout of enshittification.
I came here to banish reddit but this thing wont leave my feed. I guess I'm going to have to take the time to filter the word.
I fear Reddit might be going the way of Twitter and Facebook, too many users which makes them too big to fail or their failure is sooo slow that by the time they do fail they will have cemented their footholds in our politics they will puppet our politicians more than now.
I mean it's safe to say it was probably the last opportunity to do a protest on that scale even before these changes. Maybe they can still do "remove any post on wellthatsucks that isn’t a vacuum" type of change.
Probably old Reddit imploding will bring a few more this way, but safe to say that most people who left Reddit because it's changed for the worse since 5-15 years ago have already left. Still, I have seen a few new users join Lemmy after TechLinked mentioned the site and a continuous trickle would be welcome.
On another note, hearing the "council of Reddit moderators" makes me imagine a cringeworthy meetup in someone's basement.
Ugh reddit mod community makes me so angry.... Glad I left that shithole
I’m also glad too. I just sign up and I’m currently looking for the alternative reddit communities here on lemmy.
just ask for them on [email protected] they will find those subs for you
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit's POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.
I'm so glad I have a Reddit alternative now like Lemmy. Every news article I see about some corporate move Reddit makes, it seems further and further removed from the community-driven website I had hoped it would be.
Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Didn't they boot out everyone that wasn't a suck up?
160 mods representing all subreddits? Yeah that's entirely power mods who would tow the line
You'd think this would drive away what mods are left, i imagine they are mostly there for the illusion of power they get at this point and this will be a step towards removing that.
But then, the entire corporatization should be enough to drive people away on it's own but it doesn't seem to be.
Most mods are corporate stooges anyways
You also have some newer mods who are controlling the narrative for profit.
They can't have anyone but themselves breaking the site. 😂 People should figure out a good way to protest Reddit. Ddos attacks can't be fixed. 😁
30 terabyte of Rick Astley per second should do nicely.
I'm sure there will be ways around it. Mods can automod-delete every comment, change the rules of the sub to only allow posts of nonsense, or nit moderate at all.
The main problem is that protests don't succeed at reddit because people like moderating for free for some reason. Strangely Reddit has more leverage over mods than mods have over reddit.
like 10 seconds in automod to get right around that shit lmao.
Oh No, anyway.
Fuck spez
Bots and locked down curated content vs. hive-minded rhetoric that circumvents anything resembling nuance at all.
Gotta admit, there aren’t many good choices here.
dont worry r/worldnews allwasy ready for the mission.
Are you sure you wrote this correctly? /lh
OBEY
What is reddit? Never heard of it.
As a russian I knew it will happen.
Now I wonder what Ukraine spez will start war with? EU? FTC? Fediverse? Something to keep it in permanent state of emergency. Bots? Adblockers?