Reddit Says It Won't Force Subreddits Back Open (theverge.com) 166
Reddit is pledging it will respect the subreddit blackout where thousands of subreddits are currently staying dark -- but it's not clear the company actually will. From a report: "We are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities," reads a line from a "Reddit API Fact Sheet" that the company shared with The Verge alongside our full Reddit CEO interview. But that word "unilaterally" may be doing a awful lot of work -- because Reddit has apparently given itself a framework and justification to eject the moderators who support a blackout, replacing them with those who would re-open the sub. On Reddit, the ModCodeofConduct account has informed moderators that it will replace inactive moderators with active ones, even if they all agree to "stop moderating." That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4 of Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct and is nothing new -- even though Rule 4 says nothing of the sort.
I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:5, Insightful)
Corpos wonder why nobody under 60 bothers with their "news". This is why. If you're under 60 you're not so addled with age related cognitive decline that you can't tell when you're being lied to.
In my experience... (Score:2)
The over 60 don't need the news, because they've experienced some history. Also, a lot of news that turned out to BS.
Maybe the ones you know are a bit soft in the head. I once knew an old lady who, had lived through World War II and couldn't tell me a thing about it. Perhaps she hadn't been paying attention at the time?
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I think news dissemination at the time was less prominent than now. My grandmother didn't know much about the fighting, but could tell a great story about food rationing and having to put her own coloring in margarine during the war.
Also, during war, the government feeds propaganda to the citizens as baldly as it can. If you believe what we are hearing out of Ukraine right now, for instance... Most of what came out of Vietnam was BS as was a lot of the reporting about Iraq 2 and Afghanistan. The WWII ne
I blame Walter Cronkite. (Score:2)
Mr. Rogers also capitalized on that.
Dan Rather tried, but he just looked like a clown. Or maybe that's hindsight.
Coming of age is about realizing none of these people know any more about what's going on than you do. Oh, and they also lie a lot.
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I think Rather was promoted too fast. Also, he didn't get the memo that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Cronkite was way more effective.
Finding out that books like Shirer's (another journalist) were inaccurate in large part was eye opening to me. These people were giants in the world I was brought up in, but to your point when the scales fall off your eyes, they can't be put back on.
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Are they doing that though? I have heard of no subreddit that has been forced back open. I have heard of no subreddit that has had it's mods removed yet. Are they leaving these options open? Most definitely. But until they do, you can't write a headline saying that is exactly what they are going to do. The article summary does a good job of covering both sides, covering that Reddit says they won't do it and then covering how they may be setting up to do it via an end around. I understand that you are anti-r
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Well, there have supposedly been cases where some mods of a community supported the blackout, and others that didn't claimed that the pro-blackout mods weren't *really* active mods and thus can be removed. Admins promptly sided with the anti-blackout mods and evicted the pro-blackout mods.
Now one example narrative seems plausible: A stagnate mod who had been ignoring their mod status only decided to use their privileges after a year of inactivity when it came time to be activist. However, that's one side
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For subs that manage to stay unanimously on board with a blackout... We get to see whether Reddit actually caves, finds weaker excuses to displace the mods, or just shrugs and lets the relative importance of those subs die away as new subs take their place if they have a significant audience.
They should implement mod elections. Let the actual community decide. And then they can keep that feature around and put a check on future power-tripping mods.
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Ultimately, sounds like a miserable experience to be a reddit mod.
-You don't get paid
-You don't get IP rights to monetize if you do have something really good going
-You devote your time to running the sub
-Your users bitch that they want a better mod, whether or not there are actual alternative *volunteers* for the position or not.
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-Your users bitch that they want a better mod, whether or not there are actual alternative *volunteers* for the position or not.
Mod election solves this problem. If there's nobody else willing to do it, then you win the election by default. If they bitch about election fairness, then you can tell them to take it up with Reddit.
Ultimately, sounds like a miserable experience to be a reddit mod.
I agree, which is why I won't do it myself, but there's always someone with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do.
Re: I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:3)
Brigading is already a huge problem, and elections will take brigading from trolling to undermining the very fabric of Reddit. There are problematic mods, but giving brigades something visible to chase--removing mods the brigades don't like and then replacing them with mods they do, who will often be trolls--is going to wreck what little stability there is.
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Are they doing that though? I have heard of no subreddit that has been forced back open.
There was a case, I believe.. where a Sub had an Inactive top-moderator return for the purpose of forcing the sub closure. Since the way this works on Reddit is whoever is the "top mod" can remove or change all the other mods and can't be removed.
This is highly unusual, and it would make sense in this case that Reddit would remove the inactive mod from vandalizing the sub and restore the active team's mod privileg
Re:I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently the Apple subreddit was forced back open when the mods where given the choice to either open or be replaced.
https://appleinsider.com/artic... [appleinsider.com].
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Re: I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:2)
Read again; he said those over 60 are NOT morons.
Re: I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:2)
Aargh, sorry, I myself got the threading wrong. E comment you replied to did in fact insult over 60s.
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They don't have to force open the private subreddits, as people will eventually open new ones and people will migrate there. It's not like /r/mademesmile (for example) has some magical superpowers that someone couldn't recreate with something like /r/happypicturetime or something.
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Re: I hate modern pro-corporate "journalism" (Score:2)
You don't understand Journalism (Score:3)
Like it or not what pays the bills is gossip & sex tapes. If you want independent Journalism you wade through that crap to get to the good stuff. It's been like that for centuries, probably longer since my old Journalism courses focused on US history.
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Like it or not what pays the bills is gossip & sex tapes. If you want independent Journalism you wade through that crap to get to the good stuff.
And yet Teen Vogue [teenvogue.com] is able to do real journalism that without any of that "crap".
I want you to actually read (Score:2)
Never mind, I mean, it's not like teens ever gossip, do they? Perish the thought.
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Re:You don't understand Journalism (Score:4, Informative)
and
So, good on them.
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FTFY.
Fun fact, 70% of Americans have a favorable view of the word "woke". How's it feel to be a minority?
Reddit will be back (Score:3, Funny)
Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:2, Insightful)
I know this will be a VERY unpopular opinion, but at this point the blackouts are a terrible abuse of power by people that run these subreddits.
Why? Because the large majority of the people who used those subreddits day to day, have zero say over these blackouts - how long they will last, or even if they should be done at all.
I was fine with a day or two of protest to let Reddit know the mods were unhappy. But after a week it turns into mods killing off a resource that thousands, or hundreds of thousands
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:4, Insightful)
it's trivially easy for scabs to start their own subreddits (eg r/funny2)
I have neither the skills or temperament to be the mods of anything. I have thought about it.
Did delete my posts, comments and account. If I can't access the sub-reddit, why should I provide the mods content to lord over? I voted against it. A lot of good that did.
Re:Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:5, Insightful)
I voted against it. A lot of good that did.
Are you unaware of how democracy works? A single vote doesn't guarantee your wanted outcome.
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When it is decided on to block a useful resource, damn everyone who might need it.
Or especially when others keep electing the same type of people over and over.
Makes it feel like I don't have a voice in anything. That my vote doesn't matter. That I would be better having someone else fill it out for $50. At least I will get a few days of food for it.
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When it is decided on to block a useful resource, damn everyone who might need it.
That is exactly what Reddit is doing to Apollo.. You should be mad at Reddit, not the subs.
Targeting mobile apps by creating a Per-App limit on API usage. Many people will not be able to use Reddit on their mobile devices at all... The official app is a horendous experience, and moderators, and disabled users in particular are especially being harmed.
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If the people allowed to vote are the people that had joined the sub previous to the blackout, sure. Ballot box stuffing is anti-democratic; Reddit adding a bunch of puppets voting in their own interests isn't democratic either.
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Context matters.
In several subs, the USERS voted to black it out. Thus, it's blacked out. Democracy.
Reddit didn't count votes or have anything to do with it, where this path was taken, other than trying to fuck people over and those people deciding to not just bend over and take it. This was more like a vote for a Starbucks franchise to unionize, then Starbucks management voting to allow unionization.
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Considering we can't even get clear and open voting machines with open source, auditable machines, I don't think either fucking party truly wants fair elections. They just want to appear to have fair elections. They just want power.
If the Democrats were so worried about the purity of democracy they wouldn't be on the warpath to keep third party no label off the ballots in as many states as they can manage. They don't care about democracy they just care about winning. Just like the Republicans.
Nothing gets t
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I have neither the skills or temperament to be the mods of anything. I have thought about it.
What you're saying is that the existing Sub under the leadership of its current mods has value that you are unable to or unwilling to replicate.
Anything worthwhile requires work though. Can you really say your laziness should mean you get to commandeer an existing sub created and stewarded by a current team and make them do what you want, instead of the protest that community is overwhelmingly in support of?
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If a particular sub was really that important, or held critical information, they could just find it on archive.org and copy it to their computer. They could also start another sub and then let other people do the moderating and leave themselves as a casual mod or some such.
That might be true of some, not all. (Score:2)
In the vast majority of subreddits that went dark, the plans were discussed in the days before the blackout and mods went with the consensus. What you wrote is completely untrue.
I was not aware of that, but I have to say I saw zero sign of that in any of the 17 or so subreddits I used to follow that are now gone, and I read Reddit daily. Maybe it was true of some you follow.
I did see announcements they were all going to close. But all announcements were proclamations of what was going to happen... no deba
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Subreddits aren't happening because it has only been a few days, withdrawal from loss of participation takes longer than that - if this goes two weeks the vocal commoners will start to organize...
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It's definitely fun to "watch" the chaos and standoff though. I imagine people will start launching new subs soon enough and people that aren't that passionate will migrate to the new ones.
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In the vast majority of subreddits that went dark, the plans were discussed in the days before the blackout and mods went with the consensus. What you wrote is completely untrue.
I didn't notice any polls over whether to remain dark on any of the subs I follow. I'm sure plenty of folks got left out of the democratic process because they don't live on Reddit 24/7.
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Erm, most when dark without user input from my perception, when I looked at the list, and the subs, there were both no surveys and no time to gather input from users, subs were already committed before most knew of the plans.
In the couple subs I'm involved with, one of which animal health is involved, I considered bringing up having a poll to follow what users would want. But then also realized users could simply not post to participate.
Instead what happened is the loaded "are you going to join the blackou
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A large percentage of reddit 'users' are casual users who find threads via a search engine. That info is simply not available to them because of these narcissistic mods trying to blackmail reddit.
What happened to, "if you don't like it, start your own site"? Reddit belongs to.... reddit. Not the mods.
If you want decentralized control of social media, there are tools for that now based on the Fediverse. Arguably, that's where things would preferably go anyway...
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If the mods didn't give all their spare time away for free, these subs would be garbage anyway. I figure eventually Reddit will force open the big threads and all this will be a nothing burger in less then a month. Some percentage will swear off the site and actually never come back but not the casual reader.
Re:Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:5, Insightful)
The value of reddit is directly proportional to the labor invested (hmmmm this concept seems familiar) and part of that includes the work of moderators.
Reddit tried to shoot themselves in the foot and shot an innocent person and you're blaming the mods for this decision. Please get better at thinking.
Re:Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:5, Interesting)
The value of reddit is directly proportional to the labor invested (hmmmm this concept seems familiar) and part of that includes the work of moderators.
Exactly this. People get fixated on specific instances of mods who let a little power go to their heads, but they're missing the big picture. No system is perfect, including Reddit's, but Reddit's moderation system has demonstrated through its success that it is better than most at this scale, and it's built on volunteers who need tools that Reddit doesn't provide. Specifically with regards to spammers, most of these mods are using automated tools from third-parties to filter and block content so that moderating doesn't become even more of a full time job than it already is.
I don't have a Reddit account and rarely even peruse it as a lurker, so I'm not coming into this with any skin in the game, but it seems abundantly clear to me that the Reddit CEO has been lying from the start in both public and private, about both the facts and his intentions, and that his goal in this moment is to split the support base for this protest by reframing it as "the mods are doing this to you" so that it can stop hanging around his neck like an albatross. Never mind that the mods—even ones who never joined the protest because they fully support him—can't do their jobs without the tools he's destroying. Reddit will go dark either way—if not because of a protest, because the site implodes as a result of these changes—so the only rational choice is to wake up the captain who's steering the ship intoan iceberg.
Charging for the API is their right, and everyone is agreeable to the idea in principle. It's their platform and even the app developers who announced they're shutting down have agreed that it makes sense for Reddit to charge for access. But they need to be cognizant that their platform is only a success because the unpaid, volunteer mods have been able to leverage tools that are superior to those that Reddit itself provides. Without those tools, Reddit's value tanks as spammers and bots take over the site, high quality users depart in droves, and Reddit realizes that their right to make a choice is not synonymous with a right to remain a success. If those tools can't survive because of the pricing change, then Reddit either needs to supply better tools or fix their pricing.
Even if each community replaces their mods with ones who support Reddit's leadership, none of those problems go away. It may look better for the IPO that the CEO is trying to land, but if the tools aren't there Reddit still goes dark.
Re: Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, the moderator tools come in the form of bots, not apps. Reddit said the API for them will remain free.
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Have any of those tools shut down?
I ask because I've only heard of Apollo shutting down, not other third party API users.
None at all have shut down yet since they’re waiting for the new pricing to go into effect. And again, I’m not a Redditor so I haven’t been keeping up with all the details, but I think at least four apps have announced they’re shutting down, though the only three names I remember so far are Apollo, RIF, and Sync.
Relatedly, the disabled community is up in arms because these changes effectively force accessible apps to either operate as a non-profit (so as to qualify for an exemption t
Re: Aren't those tools still working? (Score:2)
Reddit claims that they're discounting those fees or making them free if they're a charity as those apps add value (according to them) where they claim apps like Apollo don't.
Some people contribute negative value. (Score:2)
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the mods are the ones making the sub-reddits "dark"
Oh, so that's a horrible abuse of power, but Spez screwing all the third-party apps (the point of the protest) is just ducky?
Fuck that. None of this would be happening if Spez wasn't a lying cockbag.
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As with most things in the tech world, you don't notice the good mods because they keep themselves effectively invisible. They hand out bans no one argues with, scrub the page of spam posts no one wants to read, and keep things generally above water. It's like a good sysadmin; you think you don't need to keep paying him because the servers never have any problems that you notice.
And then there are the bad mods. The ones we all hear about. The ones that ban you for mentioning where you grew up. The ones that
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The health of the soil microbes really is the most important thing, lol.
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Re:Blackouts have become abuse of power (Score:5, Interesting)
I think your stance is exactly why nothing gets done in the real world. It's like the devil's advocate of "let's just do a silent protest by leaving a pinned thread"
The reddit api changes are abysmal and greatly impact regular users, not just big data companies wanting more data to train AI/ML models.
If users don't like the way a moderation team does things on a sub they are free to create new subs. This is done ALL the time for all kinds of reasons! That's why we have spinoff subs like truegaming. If they shut down a sub the users who wish to run things differently can just make a new sub and popularize it.
I have actively stopped using reddit because I think Spez is doing this with an iron fist simply to get more money. I think a nonprofit company akin to wikipedia should be the custodian to a resource like reddit, not a for-profit company aiming for IPO who will run it into the ground with more ads in the quest for even more money.
If I were you I would simply create competing subs for the ones you are missing and mention them in similar still open subs to draw attention. No one is stopping you. It doesn't cost any money. You then can have the community you want, unlike the communities the existing mods have grown and maintain free of charge often for years.
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He absolutely is. He said in an interview with NPR today that it costs money to run Reddit and they need to earn more of it.
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> I was fine with a day or two of protest to let Reddit know the mods were unhappy. But after a week it turns into mods killing off a resource that thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people found useful.
> At this point I feel like it may be time to find replacements on Reddit for subreddits I use, because I am starting to think the moderators may just permanently kill them out of spite for Reddit, ignoring the terrible loss it is to real people to have that conversation history just vanish forever
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Completely agree. Basically the mods are locking up a ton of content they don't own because they want to throw a hissy fit.
Its reddit's platform they make the rules, if you don't like it build your own massive online town square! After all that is what any social conservative who is says perhaps their ought to be some rules governing these platforms is told!
Nobody asked these moderators to step up facilitate there sections of the site. They chose to and if reddit effectively takes away the tools they like
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Except its not their ball its reddit's ball. Its more like the mods bitching they can't use Tommy's pool any more because they don't like his no diving rule!
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I'd much rather people like this to be involved in reddit moderation than local government. Hopefully that trend doesn't change.
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Why? Because the large majority of the people who used those subreddits day to day, have zero say over these blackouts - how long they will last, or even if they should be done at all.
This isn't true that they had zero say... In the subs i've been involved in it's been totally the community, and the mods went with what the members voted.
Many, quite possibly most Subs polled their contributors or opened the matter for comment. Obviously there will be dissent, And passive readers who don't participate
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You can start your own subreddit right?
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It wasn't the mods effectively killing API access.
It wasn't the mods trying to sell OUR data back to us at exorbitant prices.
but it is the mods blacking out content and holding it hostage from the regular users - reasons are irrelevant in this case.
Your inconvenience is caused by reddit management, not the mods or users.
wrong. it is quite literally being caused by the mods.
Re: No point complaining about it. (Score:3)
BS. Modding requires a time investment and is volunteer work, not power tripping, for the good of a sub. People do power trip who are also mods, but that's like saying all sysops are power trippers.
It's not work if you get off on it. (Score:2)
Nobody does anything for nothing. (Score:2)
Not just modding. Everything. Even soup kitchens.
Comments (Score:5, Funny)
Reddit to mods: “You’re fired!”
Reddit mods: “We don’t even work here”
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Life imitates Seinfeld, again.
Haven't they already? (Score:2)
I thought the site admins banned some mods and forced open popular subs?
This was an obvious outcome (Score:3)
Is there anybody who didn't see this coming? Even the paper-thin bullshit excuse plastered over it?
The only question is whether the mods egos will let them stand their ground and be replaced or if they'll take the slap across the face so they can remain in control of their fiefdoms (within the limits permitted by the admins).
Excellent article on this fiasco (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Reddit is right in that they probably are at a point where they need to raise some revenue but it's seeming like their leadership (especially Huffman) are going about it in just the typical soulless MBA fashion.
Tech's Reckoning [wheresyoured.at]
Raising capital — especially at the scale that Reddit has — always leads to the bill coming due. Every time that Reddit has had to raise money, it has had to express how it will grow its userbase, its headcount, and its revenue. Every time that Reddit has taken on hundreds of millions of dollars of equity funding, it has promised these investors that Reddit will, as a result of the cash injection, become bigger and more fiscally valuable, and each raise has been paired with more promises about how much more Reddit can be worth. And now Reddit has put itself in a corner, promising shadowy organizations like Tencent that their money was well-spent.
The problem is that Reddit has, for all intents and purposes, become all that it will ever be, and that’s not a bad thing at all. It is arguably one of the most useful parts of the modern internet, with niche communities that have become functional parts of micro-societies around the world.
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Further, from what I've seen a number of compromise solutions have been suggested, recognizing their goal for bolstering revenue and leaving those opportunities open, but also preserving the general third-party client and bot experience that is valued by the userbase. Bill the market research people as you see fit, but give boring reader software and typical bots more reasonable rates. Require and facilitate third party readers to participate in advertising.
Currently, the attitude is .. nah we can just dr
As expected (Score:2, Troll)
You can't allow random volunteers to take your company offline.
If they don't like Reddit policy they can start their own message board. That's what we always hear when a company bans someone with an unpopular opinion. It should apply equally here, too.
Re:As expected (Score:5, Insightful)
They built their company on the volunteer efforts, and now they're pissing off those same volunteers who have told them to piss up a rope because the decision they've made is one that the volunteers won't abide by.
So they can make a choice - either try to replace the hundreds of people they are pissing off (and the thousands who aren't saying anything but also don't use Reddit's garbage browser site or their even more garbage "official" app) plus the thousands of users that are turned off by this hamfisted shitty behavior; or figure out how to not fuck over their most engaged users while trying to fuck over the developers that managed to make a better Reddit app than Reddit is apparently capable of.
Really this could be fixed in a very easy way:
1. rework the API so that there's two classes of service - one that has inline ads with the content which is available for free to any account holder, and one that has a minor subscription fee for an API key that removes the ads.
2. work with the 3rd party app developers so they can easily read if an account has an issued subscription key and switch the API endpoint to using the ad-free stream instead of the ad-ful free stream.
They keep 3rd party developers happy, they get a little more revenue from both ad impressions and direct subscription from die-hard users that just don't want to see ads, but still want to have the better functionality of 3rd party apps.
TL;DR: their CEO is a fucking moron.
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I agree with your 2 tier technical solution.
I disagree that this particular set of mods are important.
Reddit is one of the most active sites on the net. They could replace those mods over night with other volunteers if they wanted and life would go on. Maybe a few thousand would drop the site. Maybe 100k would leave and never return. But on these scales those numbers just aren't that big a deal if the company gets something else out of it like not being extorted by their mods over corporate policy.
We ha
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These things are generally *vastly* underestimated. I don't have nor how to get data for reddit, but pick some big open source project on github. 9 times out of 10, this vastly popular, massively important project often with over a million users will have like 1 to 4 key people if you look at the 'insights/contributors' data.
It often really unreasonably rare to find someone so passionate and with the available resources to support what would seem to be very very big endeavors. You may lose 50k users out
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So they have to close the APIs (Score:2)
It's part of the "enshitification" of the internet (not my term). It refers to the cycle and system where popular Internet platforms inevitably go to shit when they start optimizing the "value" they extract from their users.
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Would add:
3. API key tier for market research purposes
4. API tier for bots, for which advertising doesn't make sense, but they are a tool to get things done.
I have seen it suggested that the API costs are less about ad revenue and more about extracting money from marketing research companies. When the API is free or cheap and can get you all the marketing data you could want, why would you pay reddit for the data? The API pricing is consistent with the value to a marketing company
I also read that not only
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He's picked a relatively esoteric pain point to see if he can strongarm his way over the will of many in the community. Most of the media struggle to explain what's even really going on here and i'm not sure how much will there is for major subs to stay closed for the long run.
However if he succeeds in steamrolling the community on this point then he's got a reasonable path to driving the site to profitability. If he can prove that the protest doesn't work then there's
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You can't allow random volunteers to take your company offline.
Well, then they shouldn't be using random volunteer labor as a crucial part of their business plan. This is a two way street, reddit has relatively few people compared to the content they have a business need to moderate.
In theory, the blackouts are a preview of how the platform could degenerate if those moderators walk. In practice, I anticipate most of those subreddits have at least some mods are so obsessed with their community that they will not be able to bring themselves to let it crumble, no matter
Misleading summary (Score:3)
That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4 of Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct and is nothing new -- even though Rule 4 says nothing of the sort.
The referred to "rule 4" is literally titled "be active and engaged." Closing "your" sub in protest renders it (and hence, your moderating activities) inactive. The rule states in full:
Rule 4: Be Active and Engaged
Whether your community is big or small, it is important for communities to be actively and consistently moderated. This will ensure that issues are being addressed, and that redditors feel safe as a result. Being active and engaged means that:
You have enough Mods to effectively and consistently manage your community. This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting.
Camping or sitting on a community is not encouraged. If a community has been empty or unmoderated for a significant amount of time, we will consider banning or restricting the community. If a user requests a takeover of a community that falls under either category, we will consider granting that request but will, in nearly all cases, attempt to reach out to the moderator team first to discuss their intentions for the community.
A mod's intentions being something along the lines of "I'm keeping the community closed in perpetuity" would seem to leave it open to being took over by someone who actually wants to, you know, run the community.
Don't like reddit? Don't like them charging for their API? Don't use it. Problem solved.
Bad Judgement (Score:4)
They would never lie, would they? (Score:2)
I mean, it's reddit's admins. Clearly, they would never lie to their community. That's just completely impossible to ever happen.
Sounds like Russia (Score:3)
"The sanctions are not hurting us." Then why do you keep talking about them?
"We won't force subreddits open." Then why are you going to replace moderators when they're inactive?
What this is really about is money. Reddit needs to get its shit together before its IPO, and with thousands of subreddits gone dark, traffic has plunged and with it, revenue.
It's the same reason Reddit changed its API rules and is going to charge people. Sure, they can legitimately claim they can't give something away, but to make it so exorbitantly expensive that only a select few could possibly continue to use third party software, was clearly designed to get people to use its software which in turn means more data hoovering which can then be sold.
Seriously. It's not difficult to connect the dots.
Re: (Score:2)
What would be really nice is a law that says any time a PR flak or CEO says something deceptive, a random person who could be considered a potential target of the deception is allowed to punch them in the face as hard as they like.
If Reddit's official statement was more like, "We need to make the site more profitable to make it a sustainable business, and it currently is not. For that reason, we're only going to allow API access to our own app because that's where we can make some money. We will consider
Switched to Lemmy, and it's "nice"! (Score:3)
I've switch to Lemmy since the black out started and it's "nice." Reminds me a lot of very early reddit with a community that's focused on what excites them! But it's also 'early reddit' in that it's very small so there's not a lot of people jumping into a discussion if you have a question/problem about a thing/topic.
So if you're looking to move away from centrally controlled social media I encourage you to give Lemmy a try! (Much like Mastodon is to Twitter, Lemmy is to reddit.)
BTW I'm on https://lemmy.world/ [lemmy.world] but there are a bunch of instances you can join in the Lemmyverse of federated servers: https://join-lemmy.org/instanc... [join-lemmy.org]
The Reddit model is basically feudalism. (Score:2)
We won't stop moderating then... (Score:2)
has informed moderators that it will replace inactive moderators with active ones, even if they all agree to "stop moderating." That Reddit admin suggests that it breaks Rule 4
We'll just keep moderating as a Private Sub - and not stop moderating. It's a simple concept... a sub's mod team has the prerogative to say whether it's a private or public community. The blackout is implemented as subs deciding that the policy is Nobody can post or view the sub, except the mods -- this moderation policy is ex