Reddit is Telling Protesting Mods Their Communities 'Will Not' Stay Private (theverge.com) 150
Reddit is pressuring moderators who have set their subreddits to private to reopen their communities this week, according to messages seen by The Verge. From the report: The company has given moderators deadlines to lay out their plans for reopening but said that they can't stay closed. The timeframes given generally indicate a deadline of sometime Thursday afternoon. Reddit was vague about the exact repercussions but seemed to suggest this was the final warning stage. "This community remaining closed to its [millions of] members cannot continue" beyond a the deadline, the admin (Reddit employee) account ModCodeofConduct wrote in a note to one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private.
Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way Reddit can enforce this change is to rollback human moderation to near zero. Same as what recently happened with Twitter except with algorithms.
It will become a disaster. They're better off maintaining the status quo than to wreck it with the open floodgates.
If people are the "product" in social media, then the slaves are revolting. It's not going to look good trying to fight against them and it won't do well for their future.
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, Slashdotters do their own form of protest to bad changes. But it is mostly just complaining and making fun of the people that run the platform. We just don't have the energy for anything else here.
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
When slashdot beta went down, everyone hated it. They hated it so much that two similar sites sprung up Pipedot and SoylentNews. Pipedot went under some time ago and SN is hanging on. You'll notice that slashdot beta is no more.
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I remember that happening!
Jesus I'm getting old...
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:5, Informative)
The competitors never really pulled much of the traffic; what really pressured them to drop the beta was that the comment section became a complete wasteland with huge amounts of anti-beta spam and moderators playing along by modding down on-topic posts and modding up the anti-beta posts. One of the editors took to moderating everything critical of the beta down, but found that they couldn't keep up against the prevailing opinion.
The other time something similar happened was when SourceForge (part of Dice, same parent company as Slashdot) started bundling malware with the GIMP, and the /. editors refused to post anything about it. Again there was a revolt in the comment section until they finally relented and allowed a post about it.
Definitely some parallels to the reddit situation, although I don't know that the reddit userbase can come close to working together like that.
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I guess that the other subreddits could go the route that /r/aww took, and just post troll memes from now on.
Of course, the way Spez has been going, Reddit might go into full dictator mode and throw out the entire moderation team of the top subreddits and replace them.
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The only way Reddit can enforce this change is to rollback human moderation to near zero.
No, they can force them to be public and then "fire" moderators for breach of duty if they do things such as block legitimate use of subs. The thing is, the world has a very short memory span. Moderators are lamenting what they are about to lose, there's plenty of people out there who would be happy to take their place not knowing what their predecessors ever had in the first place.
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Moderation isn't a static entity, though. Firing all your staff and replacing them with cheaper alternatives does not leave you with the same company. They're aiming for an IPO with what they have now. If they lose it, it could be gone for good.
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What they're losing is the tools that let them do their job. Without those tools, the choices are either really limit who can post, or give up.
I think Reddit is going to end up paying for lots of additional staff to replace the volunteers...and that additional will need to be larger because of the absence of the tools. Or perhaps they're planning on depending on an LLM. That might work. It's the kind of thing an LLM ought to be able to do fairly well, and the failure costs aren't that high.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
They're counting on replacement mods (Score:3, Interesting)
Reddit is still going to go the way of Twitter because *all* platforms do. Sooner or later they either want or need to make a lot more money, and the best way to do that is using the algorithm for outrage farming and doom scrolling.
There's a name for it, enshitification. It's what Facebook did, and they were so successful at it that ever
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That's so fucking stupid it borders on a lie. Fire the current mods, replace them with high-karma members of the sub who volunteer and the circle of life will very much carry on.
The 3rd party API protest has a very simple cause: existing mods are people who are smartphone addicts who figure out a way to be on them while at their day job. New mods will do less, but there can be more of them, a very elegant solution.
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Real name policy - strict enforcement. Discovered to be in violation - account and all posting history erased.
Ok, Mr. Dark Ox
Do that and you will have a perfectly functional orderly discussion, with mostly well behaved posters
Oh sweet summer child...
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I'll do it when everyone one else in the venue does. (real name policy)
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Right.
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Rule 0) you never unilaterally disarm. You get the other sucker to do it first or you make an agreement to put down the weapons together.
Re: Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:2)
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I needed a dose of Graham Chapman after that. [youtu.be]
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But then are libel and slander laws unenforceable since the carriers are not responsible for the content posted?
The true identity does not have to be publicly visible, but it surely it needs to be ascertainable to anyone who believes they are being slandered enough to file an action. It's not a perfect solution but it seems easier to do successfully than altering the laws to somehow work in this environment, or getting protected media to take responsibility for what they publish in the same way that the MS
Re: Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it so bad to be able to post an opinion to the world without everyone knowing exactly who you are?
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I always have done it. I've used my real name on every single service or forum I've ever made an account for. Sure, it means I need to have really good password protocols to prevent someone from trying to hack my accounts, but in the 20+ years I've been publically claiming my identity I've never had a problem with either identity theft or, issues with the contents of my posts because I have made myself be accountable for how I act in public.
I've learned that most people are not capable of doing this in meat
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Real name policy!? Screw that. Just take that idiot that's been obsessively trolling rsilvergun for a year now, do you really want people like that to be able to track you back to your real world location?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't disagree with you on any point here. Yes real name / identity policy will absolutely stifle some conversations.
One thing the internet has done is a caused a whole lot of things move a lot faster than they used to. A lot of that has to do with people being a little two free to speak their minds, not in the legal sense but in the anonymity means I have not accountability to social norms sense.
It hits a lot of areas - Qanon type conspiracies fly because a whole bunch of idiots repeat things they may or
Re: Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:2)
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That is how to create a discussion forum where people talk about nothing other than the weather, their health problems, and what they ate for breakfast. You know, safe topics that won't attract stalkers or get them investigated by the current regime.
"Orderly" is not a virtue. [archive.org]
Re:Reddit is about to go Twitter (Score:4, Informative)
That is how to create a discussion forum where people talk about nothing other than the weather, their health problems, and what they ate for breakfast.
NEVER post about your 'health problems and what you ate for breakfast' under your REAL name, unless you're independently wealthy and don't rely on health insurance companies. It's the equivalent of telling your home insurer that you experiment with fireworks in your basement.
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Pfft. Amateurs. Cooking meth is the only way to go. Or creating your own breeder reactor [wikipedia.org].
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Most users don't care because they don't know what a subreddit would look like without moderation.
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We're on slashdot. This is a forum without reddit style moderation, moderated only by upvotes and downvotes by users.
So this is a good example of a forum without upper level moderation. And it works fine.
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It only works because it hasn't attracted a wider audience. It is self-limiting.
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And don't forget that Slashdot has had its share of AC trolls who are effectively banned by upper level moderation. You don't see the moderation but it is definitely there.
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I'm specifically referring to both systems having a plan of suddenly rolling back moderation (whether automated types or human types). Twitter is "fine" now because they never relied on humans in the first place. And every user is a moderator of their own threads, effectively. But there was a long period of just wading through trash on the platform and I wouldn't call it over yet.
reddit is all bullshit anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:reddit is all bullshit anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't NNTP come back into fashion
The failure of news groups is that they only worked because they didn't have too many users and the users they did have were mostly not garbage people. They disappeared because they were flooded with spam on one side and illegal content on the other. The nature of NNTP makes dealing with DMCA notices really burdensome.
Re:reddit is all bullshit anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
At the time I might not have agreed that newsgroups were populated by mostly not garbage people but now that I have seen the depths to which online conversation can sink...USENET was the MIT or Harvard of online discussion. I miss being able to talk politics and have people actually talk about the issues rather than assign other people to a tribe and dismiss them.
The spam became ridiculous. Providers were always complaining about the amount of resources and disk space it required as well.
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I don't know about that. I was involved with a few moderated groups. No spam, no illegal content, no descents into polarized political fights.
I suspect that Usenet died because nobody could figure out how to monetize it. And thus, Facebook was born.
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NNTP isn't bad. It might need some modification like what SMTP has, with some GPG key signing, to ensure moderated groups can't have stuff forged, and to allow secure post cancels (cancels could be done by having a header with a bcrypt hash in it, and the NNTP client generate that hash. If the post is to be canceled, then send in the nonce that was hashed, and that would prove that the poster was the one canceling it, similar to how 4chan allows for cancel passwords.) This way, there is some authenticati
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Hate posting twice to the same thread, but maybe IRC can adapted as well. Since the days of having more than just EFNet are gone, having multiple IRC networks, some of which are free-for-alls, others require some type of GPG or other authentication to log on might be a good way to allow for decentralized messaging. Couple this with local IRC servers for orgs only, and this can replace a bunch of real time protocols.
That, and have IRC, both server to server and server to client have TLS baked in, perhaps s
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You're talking about federated secure messaging. There are a lot better starting points than IRC. XMPP has federation and TLS. But the federation is a very manual process. Mastodon has more the look of Facebook but I think that is more client related than server architecture. Matrix is the one that is designed more for chat and IM. I wouldn't go reinventing the wheel. Just using the things that are already out there would help shape what they become.
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The problem with NNTP is having so many servers all hosting the same redundant feed. NNTP is still around and these days it's mostly for pirated media.
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most of reddit is horsehit
Reddit is people. People are just horseshit, that's the fundamental issue. Try browsing Slashdot at -1 and you'll see that quite clearly.
But this really shows the perils of hosting all your information on someone else's private servers.
What perils? Reddit is by it's nature a place for transient conversation. No one is using it as a chronical of their work, or blogs. The fact that solutions sometimes show up in Google search (because god knows Reddit's search sucks) doesn't mean that it is used as a storage for the knowledge of the people.
It's 2023, any idiot can fire up a website on which they are largel
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Over a decade? It's more than 25 years since I first did that with Geocities.
Re:reddit is all bullshit anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't NNTP come back into fashion ?
A few reasons, some of which you kinda touched on.
is it really just to hard for 'normies' to use ?
It's certainly not pretty or readily intuitive. Also, about the only viable webUI for NNTP is Google Groups, which basically defeats the purpose of NNTP.
not enough flashing graphics and blinking lights?
To a certain extent, yes. Not literally, of course...but as much as we might loathe emojis and GIFs and formatted text, there is value to these things for many normies. On the other side, it's fairly common for Usenet folks to complain about actually using screen space. On more than one occasion, I've been replied to about using 120 character lines instead of 80; still less than 1/4 of what my monitor can display, but there's still an expectation that we're going to make posts that are compatible with 150-year-old technology despite the ubiquity of 1080p and 4K monitors in 2023?
There were / are some tremendous client softwares, all open, accessible, redundant .
...and still look like late-90s and early-00s software. Pan, Thunderbird, Forte Agent, and the oddly-erased-from-the-internet Newsman Pro all avoid modern software's constant furniture rearranging and icon-only displays by going to the *other* extreme of software development where the UI never gets *any* enhancements. The two I thought were the prettiest (Windows Live Mail and UsenetWire) both get complaints that they dare make posts that don't display properly for other users.
But really, I think NNTP has a few other things going against it. First is its vulnerability to spam. It's died down now because the user base is a few thousand, and they're tech savvy enough to avoid falling for spam (though some Crypto Bros gave it an effort). If even 1/10th of Reddit's userbase started using it again, expect the floodgates to be open again, and kill files to be a losing proposition against the 2023 landscape.
Reddit also has a voting system. It's prone to groupthink and system gaming, but it helps promote desirable content from undesirable content in a way that NNTP simply doesn't support. In addition, it provides incentive for people to post; that 'dopamine hit' from seeing 200/2,000/2,000,000 upvotes is a motivation for continued participation. I still get the warm-and-fuzzies when I get a +5 post on Slashdot; NNTP doesn't provide this.
Reddit (and Slashdot and VBulletin et al) also have reply notifications. Some NNTP clients can handle this in some fashion (Newsman Pro highlights your messages in red which makes the thread more readily visible), but it's definitely not a standard.
Add in the absence of image threads; i.e. no r/aww or r/dankmemes or NSFW sections, as well as the inability to ban users (a blessing and a curse depending on context) and the limits of NNTP for the masses become pretty obvious.
I'd love nothing more than to see an NNTP 2.0 that addresses these matters in some capacity. The problem is that the result would end up either with all of Reddit's problems, all of Usenet's problems, or most likely, the worst of both.
Come on people - Make the alternative! (Score:2)
Just needs: Fair modding ( no sides in the argument ), working mod appeal, mod powers limited to subgroups, and a NON SHITTY, MODERN UI that works properly with threading.
Is that really so hard?
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I much prefer competent modding.
"Fair and balanced" modding gets you shit like Fox "News", where transparent lies and wild conspiracy theories completely overwhelm rational discourse.
Truth is a valid bias to embrace.
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"Truth is a valid bias to embrace."
Agreed. If what Elon is *trying* to do on Twitter with "Notes" actually works, maybe that is a solution to misinformation - Post shit, but it will sit next to its debunking.
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When was fox news fair and balanced? I have seen it couple of time and it is anything but.
The problem is most things like what truth is just what you believe is true. Who's to say killing people is bad, I think most people would agree that it is, but I see no absolute evidence that it is true. I don't even know of any absolute definition of bad that I could start rationally inferring it from.
Sometimes I do see some non-biased reporting, the ones where they say x said this, y said that and not try to give th
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Just needs: Fair modding ( no sides in the argument )
That’s a bit like asking why autonomous vehicles aren’t 100% safe in all possible conditions. And the answer is the same for both: because that’s an unachievable, impossible goal. To be a “better Reddit”, you simply need to do better at putting the power and the consequences in the hands of the communities themselves.
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So everyone sits in their own circle jerk echo chamber?
As a centrist, I want to be in a forum where I can confront the racists and the hateful woke, not hide from them.
But without fair modding, that just descends into content-free insults.
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So everyone sits in their own circle jerk echo chamber?
I mean, that's what Reddit is today, so I'm not sure why your question seems to be implying that's any worse than what we (well, not me; I don't have an account, nor do I regularly visit Reddit) already have. My point was that fairness—or, more broadly, any rule of law—needs to be derived from the people it serves. Anything else is a recipe for the rules to fall out of alignment with the people the rules are supposed to serve, as is the current case with Reddit where it's becoming increasingly c
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Surely anyone who doesn't want to hide in an echo chamber wants to be involved in a fact-based discussion without mutual insults taking over?
"The ones you want to confront aren't interested in rational conversation"
There are many rational people who I disagree with.
Maybe many of them are so unused to fact-based discussion without insults that it will be hard to get them used to it.
But g
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Its not possible, but it should be the goal.
Its like saying "autonomous vehicles aren’t 100% safe in all possible conditions" so we should just give up trying to make them safe.
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Fair modding ( no sides in the argument )
Deciding what is a side is a form of bias. I'd like to see what this means in practice.
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It absolutely does. Moderation doesn't always mean removing posts, though that does sometimes happen too.
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If you stick to subs pertaining to the topics you're interested in reddit isn't bad. Yeah the large catch all subs tend to lean left but that comes from the age of the typical reddit user. It sounds like the interface you're looking for is https://old.reddit.com/ [reddit.com]
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I got banned from the *site* by a woke hitler mod in a sport's group. No working appeal.
So picking topics didn't help avoid shit moderation.
Oldreddit doesn't help with the bad display, sorting and navigation through the structure of subreddits, posts, comments and subcomments.
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How do you know the mod was "woke hitler"?
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How would fair modding work? (Score:2)
For some reason, it just hasn't caught on elsewhere.
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Just needs: Fair modding ( no sides in the argument )
Who do you imagine is going to pay for this unbiased moderation? And how explicit is your CoC? Because if it doesn't address every conceivable situation, there will be situations where a moderator is going to have to apply their best judgement, which will naturally be influenced by their unconscious bias.
You're not going to pay for that, so you're definitely not going to get it. You probably couldn't have it no matter what, but you absolutely can't have it for free.
Is that really so hard?
Tell us you have no idea what's involved i
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Make it clear to everyone that you have no useful contribution to a discussion.
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Let's see here, "Marxist", "Leftist", and so on.
Any "conservative", "free-market", "Christian"? Nope. Yep, this is open to all viewpoints.
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Sorry your derpy basic ideology wasn't popular enough to make the top recommendations, but you can at least get plenty of results for "Conservative" and "Christian" here:
https://browse.feddit.de/ [feddit.de]
As for pro-capitalist stuff, I dunno, try your local Chamber of Commerce or just subscribe to the Heritage Foundation blog, not a lot of ordinary people who work for a living are into that these days...
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Fair modding is probably an impossible request. Every system I've ever encountered was biased either for or against some kinds of messaging. And people don't agree on what the fair way to handle things is.
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"a NON SHITTY, MODERN UI"
Make up your mind, which do you want?
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Good point.
I want a modern UI but with the old-fashioned concept that you can tell WHAT IS A FUCKING BUTTON.
"My way or the highway" (Score:2, Insightful)
The beatings will continue until morale improves! (Score:5, Funny)
Reddit almost makes Musk's Twitter seem sane. Almost.
Reddit - you seem to be bleeding from both feet. Perhaps you should stop shooting.
I can't wait to short your stock.
E
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Reddit can always save money by refusing to pay building rental fees. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06... [techcrunch.com]
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Reddit - you seem to be bleeding from both feet. Perhaps you should stop shooting.
Are they? User count is back up, less than 1000 subs out of several million remain private. The storm in the teacup is nearly over and a few new moderation faces will show up.
I still remember that time Slashdot was going to go under when it changed management. And the time after that. You seem to be under the impression that users actually care about what a very tiny minority think.
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Who supplies the statistics, and why do you believe them?
Even were they correct (which is possible) it doesn't mean that much. Short term fluctuations happen all the time. The questions are "Will they be able to maintain sufficient quality to hold their readership?" and "How much will it cost them?". They better have a plan in place to replace the mods they fire with ones who will do as good a job. One possible answer is that they're planning on using an LLM to screen the posts. I haven't thought of an
User content (Score:3)
I was going to comment that it's amazing that a platform which is heavily reliant on user generated content is treating the people who are creating and managing that content so poorly but, in reality, that's the model facebook used and it seems to be going fairly well for them. Everyone would much rather facebook show them what their friends are up to, but they just keep prioritizing ads and similar content and we keep using it.
I just don't think it's possible to build an "all-internet" message board anymore. The business guys eventually get a hold of it and the obsession to wring more and more money out of it takes hold.
hosting and compliance costs (Score:2)
You have to make money somehow. The problem is that no one is getting rich off of this crap. I mean if you were going to think of a way to make a lot of money, setting up an internet message board would not be high on your list.
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Totally agree.
It seems like a balance could be struck, but that just isn't the way the world works.
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Nobody cares (Score:3, Insightful)
It's literally a place to waste your time with puns and memes. It can die and all of us will just move on with our lives.
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Yeah, if you look at this list of subreddits:
https://reddark.untone.uk/ [untone.uk]
You'll see that about half of the popular subreddits are just meme-dumping grounds and porn.
If Reddit disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, little of value would be lost.
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Depending what you use it for. I use it for my city subreddit and region subreddit. News, events, pictures, places I have never hear, restaurant and store recommendations. I also use it for my 3d printing, tool restoration and a few bits and bobs. I used to be part of a WhatIsThisThing as I loved being able to identify things others couldn't, and then for stuff I couldn't find out what it is. But a Mod banned me because when I responded, I responded with a bit of a dad joke before the answer. This mod had a
Alternative (Score:2)
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There seems to be a large number of sties that match that acronym, including, among many others, a message board specialized for a particular game. Is that the one you meant?
Then Delete The Group (Score:2)
Just delete it. Don't give Reddit the satisfaction of going dictator on the subject. Burn the fucking house down. They want those subreddits...too bad. The only way to hurt them now is to make them 100% worthless to investors.
Auto delete bot yet? (Score:2)
Be part of the solution not part of the problem (Score:2)
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Terms and usage could easily be setup to prevent the "scraping" of data for ingestion into various automation systems, but that isn't the ultimate goal (just the excuse bein
Sandbox Analogy (Score:2)
Plan to reopen (Score:2)
Give us a few more weeks. We are loading up our sub with porn as fast as we can.
Reddit is Regurgitation (Score:2)
7 year old account deleted today (Score:2)
Tomorrow is the last day I can use the only tolerable iOS app for reddit. So today I deleted every post, every comment, and every other thing I did on reddit. Time to walk away.
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That's reddit's prerogative. It's a risk since they are pissing off what amounts to free labor and the most passionate of their userbase. Generally social media 'giants' stand on more tenuous ground than they think.
I know I'm likely to stop bothering when my app no longer works. It was just something to fill time and frankly wasn't that substantive even before the kerfuffle. Now the feed is even less engaging (there's obviously an effectively endless volume of stuff, but the stuff isn't worth it).
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It would be interesting to see the results if the unpaid laborers at Reddit try to unionize. That would at least create some very interesting legal sitautions.
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nah you'll probably be back the moment information you want related to some hobby of yours seems to be available on their platform.
Just like everyone quits facebook every few years but always comes crawling back because they are looking to reconnect with that old buddy and don't have any other 'easy' way to find them when their e-mail address quick working a year ago.
Reddit inst myspace at this point its meta, it might not be TBTF but its big enough it will take years to decline as circles of people / subs
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Someone not being willing to moderate doesn't mean they won't read the stuff. (OTOH, I generally only read Reddit posts that are handed me by a search engine.)
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Important to who? Yeah, to anyone who volunteers to moderate it, it must be important in some way, and for some reason, but not without limit.
If you had a name, I'd think you were being silly, but as you don't I suspect a troll...or possibly a shill.
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They're all in it for themselves. The last thing they will do is stick together, even if it could in theory benefit the entire group. Once someone sees it as an opportunity to get ahead of someone else, that's what they will do. Just like real life.
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Someone tried deleting all of his posts and the posts were back up some time later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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