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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
FUCK SPEZ
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
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.
/r/trees will only accept tree related posts
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.
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 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.
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."
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.
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.
OBEY
There's still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
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.
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.
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.
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
The lack of commercialization being shoved down and up your orifices is really nice.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
True but how do you get the message out when they control the media?
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 believe you missed the point. There's people there because they know that their content won't be found elsewhere.
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.
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.
Reddit mods are such cucks for power that they cave when it's threatened to be removed
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.