- regular people get a break from their echo chambers
- VOLUNTEER mods get a break
- journalists get their news article
The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users data via comments and posts. I said this in another post but the existing CEO needs to get replaced. Maybe throw in a few other C—level executives to serve as additional blood sacrifices.
Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.
It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively, almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing "reddit.com".
Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!
That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle jerks. Why was I part of any of that??
I agree this is likely, which will extend the negative reactions further and alienate even more users. Unless Reddit execs do a 180 in the very near future I think the platform will be forever crippled.
Large networks rarely die overnight and whatever happens they will still have a number of users for the foreseeable future, but the steady fade to irrelevance will begin in earnest.
Power users drive a huge amount of content and moderation, and they are especially livid right now for good reason.
I currently moderate 2 subs (down from 5). I'm looking to offload those 2 without having them get banned for being unmoderated (again).
It'll be hell.
Huffman / Reddit Inc. have misread this repeatedly. Just saw he's reportedly assured staff it will "blow over" and "hasn't hurt revenue".
Wrong move.
Completely avoidable PR disaster, and until the ego(s) driving all of this step back, they'll just keep making the situation worse.
I will be extending my blackout on the site indefinitely.
Just one of the dumbest PR / corporate comms debacles I've seen. Almost as though the Reddit execs saw what Twitter is doing and said "hold my beer".
My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.
Barron's reports that Reddit's potential IPO is now in trouble.[1]
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/reddit-stock-ipo-revolt-6e8...
As a mod I am getting messages from regular users who are desperate to see posts that have likely troubleshooting answers to problems they are having at work.
Reddit is kind of a critical technical resource for some people and this is really hurting them at least right now.
I'm not convinced they lose out either. The front page doesn't really feel different than it did before. There are a handful of "Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments" posts, but I'm kinda blind to them the same way I'm blind to ads as I scroll past. Otherwise it just feels like any other day on reddit.
Most regular users on Reddit view it through feeds not individual subs. It’s very plausible the bulk won’t even notice, except when other people tell them it’s happening or it makes the news. Eventually others might wonder why they haven’t seen some sub posts recently but it will probably take a month or so.
These are the people clicking ads and using their mobile app.
I was looking at tents earlier and wanted to see reddit reviews but literally every single link was private. Reddit has to be noticing this.
Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.
When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.
I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.
Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.
and a love of r/jailbait
I think reddit did change for the worse though. Restrictions to speech and opinions, aggression if you deviate from the allegedly correct perspective. The company did revoke their principles of free expression for sleazy advertisers and market "research". Typical corporation.
Of course they need a way to finance their costs, but I think in the long run they shoot themselves in the foot. I believe we will also see age restrictions in the near future and do away with anonymity. Might kill the platform completely though.
well, except for Buzzfeed, who seems to exist solely to repost Reddit threads with GIFs.
That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.
>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.
They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.
A prime example of cutting your nose to spite your face.
Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.
A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users who don’t post top-level content or serve as moderators are on the 1% who do.
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.[^1]
It's encouraging to see that some subreddits are responding to the fact that the company is just planning to ignore users.
[^1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
I was there for a very long time (before it was even “launched” officially).
So I do it with a heavy heart, but I don't think there’s any way of going back for them now. Its been a downward trend for literally years at this point.
reddit always had extremely cringy but popular sides to it (Unidan, Boston Marathon witch hunt) and since the very beginning the decisions of the leadership have felt immature, off and wrong.
Reddit's leadership has always prevented reddit from being a thriving, productive community and their ineptitude has simply reached a boiling point now. For most of the time it felt like sifting through liquid poop to find a gold nugget once a week.
Its extremely unlikely I go back because ultimately I will feel like I have less than I did before.
even if its just fake internet points.
I hope the communities I used to engage in partake in this prolonged blackout.
People keep saying this. It's true of the vast majority of protests. And yet, they keep happening, and I don't think it's because they're completely ineffective.
I'll grant I don't entirely get it either, but here's my theory of how they work: by being a show of unity, protests are an honest signal of power. In any case where the party being protested against is not willing to cause mass civilian casualties, unified rebellion is a genuine threat. It's an even bigger threat in a democracy, or a commercial setting. It's also a signal of willingness to accept costs (not guaranteed honest, but it's still pretty hard to coordinate a bluff in public).
Negotiations are typically held during a ceasefire, not while the parties are actively trying to hurt each other.
We can hope that even if the Reddit protests ultimately go nowhere, they will at least have shifted public opinion, if only slightly.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...
I think a replacement of spaz would be the only thing that could move the needle at this point.
Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.
I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).
That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.
> Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.
Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is?
>Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.
And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?
i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be their last resort though
However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)
Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry, particularly on a sub like Music or Videos. Finding a replacement mod team without specific agendas is going to be hard. Only the most power tripping or ideologically driven will want the position as paying mods seems out of the question given Reddit’s stance.
Inexperienced mods will also be unable to handle the torrent of spam and low effort posts and comments the big sub attract.
It’s not impossible to punish the dissident mods but having a functional replacement on short notice is impossible.
Everything made sense except this part.
Power goes to everyone's head.
And when you have to insert paid moderators, the cost to moderate all of the huge communities will blow up Reddit’s internal budget.
It’s easier said than done. Just ask FB or Google (with YouTube), they have difficulty moderating their own platforms and they have billions of dollars at their disposal.
And you can expect people engaged with the protest to take full advantage of this if it happens, making the problem that much worse
If you simply reopen without any of the current mods, the site will be overrun
Trying to milk 3rd-party developers with excessively high API fees while expecting the community to provide all the value for their site free of charge was a very short-sighted move.
Is this not the answer to your question? Reddit can't afford to pay people to do this job. They rely on impassioned people to volunteer.
/r/videos, sure, that's got its own culture, history, known reposts, moderation style needs, etc. It will take some work to for a group of communications majors to figure out how to moderate it.
But /r/PLC, where I hung out frequently? You need reasonably intelligent electrical engineers to discern spammy press releases from interesting news! We don't work cheap, except when we work for free. Elite athletics, weird hobby niches, professional forums, on and on...Reddit's long tail, where much of the value was, relies on domain experts who were also good communicators. Those are hard people to find.
Stackexchange, love it or hate it, has the same thing going. Are you going to hire a pilot to mod the aviation stack, or a post-doc to moderate mathematics?
Domain-squatting on a couple dozen important keywords and brand names in 2005 is the powermod secret to success, not that they’re just that great at their job that they rose to the top on merit.
There are quite a few subs that prove this - really, really badly moderated but sitting on super, super valuable real estate. And Reddit doesn’t really have a mechanism for handling this unless the mod is outright posting gore or something - they got their first in 2005, that’s the end of it.
When people actually start migrating away from reddit and post/comment volume is significantly down, you'll see reddit suddenly be a lot more willing to engage with the community.
In my case, I've replaced my Reddit time ~50% with HN and ~50% with... something else, like doing work.
Personally, I’ve quite enjoyed using tildes.net lately. I know everyone is jumping on Lemmy and federation, which is great in practice but Tildes feels more accessible to me and for that reason may have more potential to actually capture a user base.
If you have one available, please consider throwing me a tildes.net invite.
Thanks m8.
The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy.
Theses changes, what's happening at twitter, the tech layoffs, govt regulations and fines, are all signs using Freebies for Attention Capture are not going to endlessly scale.
They are also screwing their moderators who use API-based tools, and people who need accessibility accommodations that reddit does not provide.
Not to mention the scummy behavior towards the Apollo developer.
AFAIK historically the % of GDP spent on advertising was more or less constant so it s not like advertisers bailed
Worse for Reddit, dumping long-time community moderators en masse would be crossing a Rubicon that could tip Reddit into a death spiral of low-effort moderation reducing content quality and engagement which will feed back on itself. The mods going dark for longer may in fact be hoping to goad Reddit into responding with such self-destructive stupidity.
Instead, I’m in far smaller niche and location-relevant subs. I didn’t realize what cutting off my city subreddit would do for my sense of connection to my city. I didn’t realize how shit general search results are for questions about hobbies.
It’s really made me question if can allow one entity to serve as such an important conduit to my interests again.
The F1 subreddit (over a million subs)is one of the absolute worst places on the internet for any kind of discussion. It's totally dominated by The Hive Mind, dissenting opinions are absolutely unwelcome and the top posts on every single post are low-effort jokes, usually jokes that have been told a thousand times before. It's awful.
MotoGP (250k+ subs) is better, but still suffers from similar problems.
V8Supercars is quiet, but the discussion is of a far higher quality.
"Better than twitter" is a low bar to clear.
All the big subs are garbage these days
Blackout isn't enough, don't let them scab the VOLUNTEER mods - don't cross the picket line - better yet, delete your account after using a tool to scrub your account's history. Delete isn't enough, you need to replace it with junk.
If you're going to lurk, make sure you're blocking first party ads.
At some point he'll either be forced to back down or replace the mods of the big subs with people willing to cross the picket line, I don't see why he doesn't just pull the plaster off now either way rather than drag this out bleeding credibility all the while?
I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers.
What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers?
- Reddit would get many more premium subscribers
- App developers would be able to avoid managing subscription fee’s themselves and continue as before
- Users of the official Reddit app would not be affected
- Users of third party apps would have to pay for Reddit Premium - but maybe at a discount
Talking with regular non-techy people who use reddit regularly - nobody outside our bubble even knows about or cares about the whole API fiasco. Most people I've talked with shrug and say they'll just use the official app if that's what it all means. The others asked if they can just pay and use the same 3rd party app in the future.
Reddit has been, and is filled with drama. These public news pieces make the community appear extremely naïve, to a fault. When people hear some of these apps had tens, or hundreds of thousands of users that circumvented ad revenue for reddit - they mostly do not have sympathy for the 3rd party app developers.
Just being realistic. I like reddit as much as the next guy, and agree the leadership is terrible (reddit has a long history of terrible leadership).
I think being honest about their goal would've reduced a lot of the backlash. The issue is that they're claiming to be working with the community when it's blatantly obvious that they aren't.
Ideally they'd just go to more reasonable/free API pricing though.
The way he's described things, it seems like he could've done this or that hail mary thing, a quick gofundme round maybe, to see if the Apollo users wanted to get behind the app in order to keep it by providing the six-month cushion that Reddit will not, and see if they can work out a new, still-equitable pricing scheme. My guess is that as an app with a huge userbase and reputation, he probably could have pivoted this into better income, even. But it also looks to me like he's just taken a sober look at things and realized that the nature of the game has changed and he doesn't want to play.
People on here keep saying the mods are deluded, but I think the mods are something much more powerful: disillusioned.
An organization needs to make enough money to live, but it doesn't need quarterly RoI and growth. That is a demand of a public market. Reddit got greedy and sold out.
It's time to start building new communities outside reddit. It won't happen overnight, but it needs to happen.
- Extend the 30 day to apply the pricing to 6 months (at least) to let people figure it out their stuff ; - Give some leverage for the _existing_ 3 party apps that contributed to reddit till this point on the form of a smaller price;
GME / BBBY is able to raise money from a mountain of APEs by basically giving the crowd what they want.
Reddit needs more funding to turn into a profitable company. They also need these 3rd party apps and other such features (that they're cutting because they don't make enough profits yet).
Just be honest with the world. Reddit needs money, please support the IPO, lets see how much money is raised and where it can go. Promise to use the money to buy out Apollo or something.
Gotta make that profile shine for VCs!?
It was a nice discovery tool and formula1 subreddit was great (memes and all) but I think spez really screwed it up.
Bummer, I'm sure it was floated, and probably shot down for some stupid non-sensical reason, but I would have insta-paid something in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a year for a personal access token that I could plug into an app like Apollo and continue using Reddit via API.
Is it incompetence? Not a priority because the focus was always on growth? Or just difficult/impossible as nobody wants to pay for anything and block ads?
I don't know the answer, but the answer matters. Both in this strike and the Stackoverflow strike many people are dropping claims that the company only cares about money. Those claims make little sense to me when the companies is making a loss.
You could have very valid reasons to strike, but you're striking against a company in financial trouble, facing an existential AI threat, and an advertiser pullback.
Im curious about spending..
Mods take a break, and just let the bots shit allover the content.
It takes like 20mn of un-moderated internet before it's all ads and spam... Reddit is basically reddit because of the carefully curated posts.
I ended up jumping to another department where I watched him bring in an expensive vendor to implement a replacement for a system I had been using, and then watched corrupt files start appearing in the production files. I was there just long enough to hear about his quiet exit from the company.
Someone else needs to quietly exit from the company if they hope to get this out of the grease fire. At this point, we'll all see what happens pretty quickly I think, but this looks to me like a ship with a thousand leaks and a drunk captain who won't come out of his cabin because people yell at him about problems that are not his when he does.
For the second part—they should free up the names of mods protesting. Fun chaos, unpredictable outcome. I support.
HN would hardly be better if random people mostly interested in cooking or martial arts were putting in their two cents here.
I really can't think of any subject that is better on Reddit than it was on an old message forum that was killed off by these giant platforms.
Compare any subreddit about psytrance or trance music to the corpse of forum.isratrance.com.
It isn't even close. The forum owner is also self interested to not be labeled oppressive. I can't think of any old forum I was ever on that had problems of oppressive moderation.
That isratrance forum of course though doesn't scale to a few hundred million people and early investors getting rich.
I 100% agree. Not just Reddit, but Facebook too. The days of phpBB and vBulletin are sadly over though.
And while I know it’s still around, it’s not the same—I miss slashdot.
Win-Win. New community gets the boost they deserve and old one gets to stay dark.
But first they have to make it easy for users to find alternative subreddits. Currently it s not even possible, their search sucks
Then the content can be exported from reddit into each of those platforms.
The instances could be federated. Reddit users could redeem their account across the federated network by proving they control the same account on reddit (either send a message to a bot on reddit, or by generating a one-time password then posting its hash to reddit)
Moderators(who are doing tons of free work to make reddit a tolerable place) use API based tools to help them moderate. If reddit is going to make their (volunteer!) job harder, why shouldn't they just pack up and leave?
The official reddit app reportedly does not make adequate accommodations for some disabled users, but dedicated third party developers did. They later said that they would give exemptions for accessibility use cases, but stipulated that they could not charge for their service. Some people the perceived this as: "we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it."
Then there is the disingenuous interactions with the Apollo developer.
All-in-all, people think that reddit is acting in bad faith.
Surface-level: the API price hikes are at a glance meant to force out third-party Reddit interfaces. To speculate, this is aimed to funnel users to Reddit's official application. I can say that because the mobile website is getting crippled over time to "encourage" users to use the app.
Deeper-level: it is reflective of Reddit corporate's attitudes towards its users. They are gearing for an IPO, so they want to tell investors that they will be profitable (read: milk its users, monetize everything, remove convenient features if it will mean profits, etc.)
And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk home.
People are mad because instead of being open and honest about their play, reddit tried sneak it it in. They are trying to give Reddit shareholders their win while everyone else loses.
This is an opportunity for new moderators to start new subreddits. Conversely Reddit management may back down.
By "useful" I mean in an easily searchable / navigable / quickly rendering form (not via the Wayback Machine).
Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO. They're fully within their rights to change how people access their website, how people interact with it, and limit who has access to the data on the website.
When I clicked on a reddit result on Google to find some information, only to find it has been closed down in protest after trying to find something on Google, I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company (granted, I guess they do have some power as Reddit is relying on these unpaid moderators to do Reddits job.)
I highly, highly doubt that Reddit will change their tune - they might lower the API costs, they might capitulate in some capacity in some regards to accessibility, but they'll still work towards an IPO and will harm their website as a result.
Their CEO is a scumbag and both their paid and unpaid moderators/admins have strong biases in any subreddits that aren't niche hobbies and meant for wider audiences. Great for those who wish to follow the echo chambers, but not so great for others who don't _really_ have alternatives.
I'll be happy if Reddit disappears off the planet, but I fear what will replace it will be even more restrictive - the internet needs decentralization of social media and communication.
Sure. Technically they are within their rights to do that.
Would it be good for them to do so? Probably not. It'll piss off their user base. As others have mentioned, it'll open themselves to lawsuits due to content moderation. It'll cost them a lot to pay people to moderate these communities, which they currently get for free.
> I would expect them to [seize the subreddits] if they're gearing up for an IPO
See above. This would make them less profitable and most likely negatively affect said IPO.
> ... I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company.
It's not self-ordained. They're doing what they are allowed to do with these subreddits, at least until Reddit takes away their moderator access.
There are two solutions to this: google's cached pages and archive.org.
> Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they're gearing up for an IPO.
Reddit's sob story is that they are still unprofitable. They can't afford to hire moderators for the seized subreddits.
If you’re just going dark Reddit will know you’ll eventually cave in.
Blackouts feel like you’re saying “we love you so please change”.
I’d be happy to see people use other services. I’d appreciate the decentralisation.
I wonder if the average Reddit user would be upset enough over the action to stop using the site?
I mean it's 2023, it's not like it takes years to make a web service.
Quitting twitter was easy. Reddit not so much.
If I was running Reddit, this is what I would be planning right now.
If this is extended indefinitely I would expect competing sub-reddits to form.
The next step after that would be an AI to generate the replies, worn out jokes, and repost complaints.
I called this in another comment. Spez won't let this continue - and he gets the nice second-order result of not having to deal with people like Merari
This isn't a drastic change and there aren't any competitors that are offering anything better (ignoring the benefits of something decentralized).
Stuff like r/aww and r/videos would probably survive if it was just the Reddit employees removing offensive stuff that gets upvoted high, but it will kill the long tail where the moderators are less garbage removers and more community organisers. Maybe just the generic mindless feed is enough for Reddit to be a successful business, but it's not what most people think of Reddit as, and it's not clear why such a rump reddit would be able to take users off of Tiktok etc.
Also, is it capitalism you love, or is it free markets and independent business? Cause capitalism is just when someone sits on their ass and collects dividends while other people work.
