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Major Reddit Communities Will Go Dark To Protest Threat To Third-Party Apps (theverge.com) 107

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Some of Reddit's biggest communities including r/videos, r/reactiongifs, r/earthporn, and r/lifeprotips are planning to set themselves to private on June 12th over new pricing for third-party app developers to access the site's APIs. From a report: Setting a subreddit to private, aka "going dark," will mean that the communities taking part will be inaccessible by the wider public while the planned 48-hour protest is taking place.

As a Reddit post about the protest, that's since been cross-posted to several participating subreddits, explains: "On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love. A complete list of the hundreds of communities taking part (known in Reddit parlance as "subreddits") includes dozens with over a million subscribers each.
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Major Reddit Communities Will Go Dark To Protest Threat To Third-Party Apps More

Major Reddit Communities Will Go Dark To Protest Threat To Third-Party Apps

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  • That'll show them... Sounds like a Facebook message asserting your privacy rights on Facebook.

    • If they went dark until demands were met (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @09:08AM (#63577011)
      it would work. Reddit can't survive without the big forums after all. They drive 99% of the traffic and ad revenue. Reddit could take the mod's power away, but then they lose the mods, and they probably can't survive without all that free labor.
      • They could. The bigger ones seem to be the ones less modded anyways.
        • Are you using a different reddit than me? The big forums I hit seem to be extremely well moderated. Small ones don't really need mods, the trolls don't bother with them since trolls are after eyeballs. The mid sized ones sometimes have a bit of trouble though. They're just big enough to attract trolls but not enough to attract lots of unpaid mods.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          If they were actually that loosely modded, they would be packed with spam.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HBI ( 10338492 )
        Seems to me all they'd have to do is take away that power to make it go dark and the whole issue goes away - which they would do, ultimately, if the effects are as dire as you state.

        • Then so would the mods (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:39AM (#63577227)
          reddit has thousands of unpaid mods. It's the only reason they're profitable. All they do is host the site and make sure it doesn't get hacked. The day to day work of making a forum usable is done by unpaid volunteers that Reddit can't survive without.

          Reddit isn't a social media site, it's a free message board host.

          • Reddit isn't a social media site, it's a free message board host.

            Interesting distinction. Does reddit own the namespace? Let's say the current mod of r/videos decides to nuke it. Can reddit kick them out and re-open it for some other mod willing to do it? Or hire somebody to do it? Or does whoever originally claimed the name r/videos own it?

            This came up on Twitter with NPR decided to leave and Twitter said, OK, but we're going to make the handle available.

            • There are no restrictions on what reddit can do to r/videos. I don't see what that has to do with the distinction that the parent made between a social media site and a message board.
              • is that reddit is much, much more dependent on mods than Facebook.

                A social media site makes it's money from social connections. You're not on Facebook to discuss hobbies with strangers or get questions answered, you're there to connect with friends and family. FB might have some of the other stuff, but it's not their bread & butter.

                A message board is a very different thing than social media. There's not a lot of point to being anonymous on Facebook, but over on reddit (or here on /.) it lets you
            • Yes they own the site, so yes they could take over r/video. But then they'd lose their users in a revolt. Margins are thin in the ad business (and make no mistake, Reddit is in the ad business). If even 1/4th, hell 1/8th their users jumped ship it would probably sink them.

              I can make a website tomorrow with user id NPR if I want. Doesn't mean I matter in the slightest. The currency online is eyeballs paid for with advertiser dollars. When you sell users you can only get away with so much.

        • Reddit communities aren't owned by reddit. They are created and destroyed by people. Taking away the ability to control your subreddit takes away the entire point of Reddit itself. It would be like Wordpress taking away your ability to create a website.

          • There’s the real point and the PR point. If people knew the real point of reddit a lot of them wouldn’t go there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        It wouldn't work so long as they are all announcing that they will stop after 48 hours.

        If it matters so much for reddit, they'll just shrug and say "see you on Wednesday then".

        They are pretending that 48 hours of being private is a huge sacrifice and they can't stand to inflict that on their communities for more than that. It won't make a dent in Reddit opinion.

        In this case, the more likely scenario would be a drop in visitor count inducing them to back off a bit. On the flip side, they may declare the visi

        • not directly. It's about awareness. It'll make millions of users aware of the issue. It's a different tactic.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Junta ( 36770 )

            Meh, awareness won't matter here. Either they are directly affected (their preferred apps no longer work) and they will inherently care (app developers have been mentioning it loudly so they already know). Or they aren't impacted and will say "oh well, two days without this reddit over an issue I don't care about". If all their favorite reddits were down for a couple of weeks they might get a bit irritated, but two days is nothing.

            • you be it'll matter. Wizards of The Coast tried basically the same thing (closing an open ecosystem) and it blew up in their face when the community noticed.

              Consolidation and a lack of anti-trust law enforcement have taken away a *lot* of consumer power, virtually all of it for necessities, but for luxuries there's still leverage. Especially for something with a low barrier to entry like tabletop like games and web forums.

        • Re:If they went dark until demands were met (Score:5, Insightful)

          by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:55AM (#63577291) Journal

          48 hours of severe decline of ad impressions is something they will notice. And there's nothing to say that they can't extend it beyond 48 hours if Reddit is going to be dicks about it.

          We're talking about volunteer efforts here, for the most part. Thousands of hours, collectively, of volunteer content posting and moderating. Fuck around too much with volunteers, and they stop volunteering to do work for you in short order. See: the decline of this once-great site that relies upon volunteer content creation.

      • those aren't the "big forums" though

        Nice analytics sites out there that tell what the hugest subreddits are, by posts, comments, growth, upvotes.... but I'm not going to bury them with slashdot tourist.

        These video ones don't appear at all in top 10 of each of any category. I'd expect reddit to say "don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out" , they may be top bandwidth hogs but that's it

      • By "survive" do you mean its revenue exceeds its expenses, or do you mean continue to draw investment?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        Reddit can't survive without the big forums after all.

        They can just remove the mods and set the forums public again. Problem solved. Finding new mods probably won't be too big a deal, there are plenty of people who will cheerfully work for free so they can have that sweet, sweet power over others that already drives plenty of mod teams.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ragica ( 552891 )

        Or even better, get submitters to post content to Lemmy [lemmy.ml] (or other instance, as this one is reporting load problems from the influx of new users already), or some other free site while dark. It would be good to not have all ones eggs in one basket.

      • Some of them are. The mods of /r/Videos, e.g., have stated that they'll be extending the period if there's no movement. It's just one sub, but a biggie (26M subs)

      • Reddit power-mods and admins are very closely intertwined. The biggest subs would never go dark because they depend on Reddit as much as Reddit depends on them. Payola is a very real thing, as far as big-sub mods are concerned. A day without the sub operating is a day without big money.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • That'll show them...

      This form of protest has actually had a material and positive effect on Reddit in the past... which sounds exactly like the opposite of Facebook.

    • Let's send the redditards "thoughts and prayers" for their efforts.

  • Hoping we go back to NNTP (Score:3)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @09:47AM (#63577105) Homepage Journal

    The quality of reddit the last few years has been terrible. People know there are swarms of brigading bots, especially when it comes to political discussions. Go to the subreddit of any major city and you see the same talking points. My favorite, the top 10 most populous cities in the US have a housing crisis, which is the reason we have so many addicts in tent cities. There also seems to be a big influence from China on the site. Saw several posts on Tiananmen square yesterday, they didn't garner nearly the attention I thought they should have.

    That being said, it's probably best we go back to the internets decentralized platforms like nntp.

    • NNTP died for a reason, it became untenable when it grew large enough to attract commercial and political interest, and is much moreso now with generative AI. It's getting hard to see how anonymous communication can retain any value, when you could just push a button to generate any particular viewpoint.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teckla ( 630646 )
        NNTP / Usenet plus a filtering service could work, just like the web plus uBlock Origin works.

      • There are a lot of smaller forums still around that have pretty good quality. Better than reddit or even slashdot but I keep coming back here for the nice mix of intelligent discussion and romper room trolling.

    • I’ve been hitting up the BBS scene lately I know they won’t replace Reddit but they’ll attract the right kind of people at least for awhile. The people are nice and intelligent and it feels real good to be posting somewhere where you know things are on the way up and not on the way down.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Others and I still use the usenet newsgroups since its peak days. :)

  • The circle of life... (Score:3)

    by Nocturnal Deviant ( 974688 ) on Monday June 05, 2023 @10:19AM (#63577173) Homepage

    Back I come, Been a long time.

  • Ok (Score:2)

    by S_Stout ( 2725099 )
    Reddit can do what it wants. Until Reddit gets some competition everyone will have to put up with the changes.

  • Less than 1% of Reddit users use a 3rd party app. It's amazing this uproar has gotten so big based on something that directly impacts so few.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Chances are, while only a very very small number of the more than 800 million monthly active users utilize 3rd party apps, they likely browse much more than other. Stands to reason you have to be a fairly heavy user to bother paying for an app to use the site.

        It's still something they have to support. It's not free for them to offer and support the API, especially in terms of making new features available through it.

    • The impact is a minor inconvenience for the users, we will have to move to the official app (which side bar, steals about everything on your device that isn't nailed down in a similar way to Tic-Tok) and we can no longer use our third party apps that block ads, prevent data scraping or simply better designed with more accessibility features (The in-house app doesn't even try to accommodate Text-2-Speech, high contrast or colorblind modes).

      The other key issue is about moderator tools. This will effectively

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        Automods are literally killing the site. When I first started using it, it took me several hours to get enough karma to be not autobanned from every subreddit I was interested in posting in. Most don't even announce whether they require karma to post. It's quite an experience looking for a subreddit that's both underground enough to not use automods, but also has enough traffic to generate the necessary karma. Nothing says "welcome to Reddit" quite like a "your post has been removed" message, especially aft

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      my guess is because those few are moderators and think they matter and have enough leverage. time will tell if they do, but i wouldn't bet my lunch money. meanwhile media loves to run these stories.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by redback ( 15527 )

      they should just get rid of all apps entirely. will get rid of all the people too stupid to use a computer.

  • 48 hours isn't long enough to rid the internet of the smell.
  • Reddit is a cesspit run by degenerate moderators who forbid any criticism of child groomers. The subs are generally run by social retards with multiple subs under their belt. When questioned or contradicted, they first troll the offending user and then go bawling to the admins to get the account banned. It's also very Orwellian, as when your account gets banned, all your previous post go down the Memory Hole.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      Reddit is a cesspit run by degenerate moderators who forbid any criticism of child groomers.

      You're correct about /r/conservative as nearly every topic is for flaired users only.

      I'm being sarcastic here and this sub should really get you angry. https://old.reddit.com/r/NotAD... [reddit.com]

  • These 3rd party apps are a convenience tool for most people but this change will also apply to the apps that folks use to make and control large swarms of reddit accounts (bots or marketing accounts).

    If the change goes through and reddit still has a massive bot problem, won't it mean that the bots are being run by the platform itself?
  • I like Reddit, but this is a non-issue to me.

  • The King (Reddit) ultimately decides what can be used to allowed to access the treasures of the kingdom.

    There used to be a platform on the internet that no one entity had complete control over and that was Usenet. Usenet is still around but as a shadow of it's former self. Maybe we will see a revival.

  • The big, top 1% subreddits are a fucking joke as-is. They exist strictly for meme-worthy content and hard pushing for lowest common denominator likes. The niche subreddits are a mix of passionate labors of love and fascism perpetuated by the mods.

    I'm 100% sure that whatever 3rd-party apps the mods are most up in arms about is what lets them run a sub as their own personal fiefdom. If reddit would be unusable / unmoderateable without these apps then call their bluff. The moderators should resign en mas

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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