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Are the Reddit Protests Over? (gizmodo.com) 97

Posted by EditorDavid from the what's-Snoo? dept.
"Three of Reddit's biggest communities are no longer focused entirely on John Oliver in a form of protest against Reddit," reports the Verge.

Gizmodo argues that this means "the Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won." Despite the infinite blackout threats, most moderators relented as the weeks rolled by. Three major holdouts were r/aww, r/pics, and r/videos, some of Reddit's largest communities that account for more than 91 million subscribers. The three subreddits reopened weeks ago but adopted rules by popular vote that prohibited content that did not feature HBO's John Oliver, rendering the forums useless for their previous purposes.

For a while, the subreddits stood strong, but r/videos was the first to backpedal, dropping the John Oliver rule but requiring all posts to feature profanity. Soon that rule was abandoned as well. Last week, the moderators of r/aww announced the John Oliver rule was over, and over the weekend r/pics quietly gave up the protest as well, as reported by the Verge. "More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people's attention has shifted to other things," an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change.

According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today the only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness.
The Verge: Two other big communities have switched back, too. r/pics (with more than 30 million subscribers) had perhaps been the most visibly tied to John Oliver: Oliver himself posted a series of silly photos specifically for the community to use, and at one point, the moderators of r/pics invited Oliver to join the mod team. But sometime recently, r/pics removed any obvious trace of its connections to John Oliver; the Wayback Machine shows that r/pics was all about John Oliver as of Friday but no longer on Saturday...

r/videos (with more than 26 million subscribers) actually dropped its John Oliver rule back in June; it was replaced by a new rule that all posts needed to contain profanity in the title after a community vote. Earlier this month, the r/videos moderators reverted the rules to what they were before the protests started...

In June, more than 8,000 communities went dark to protest the API pricing, but in the weeks since, many subreddits have opened back up (some after feeling pressure from Reddit) and are operating as they did before. Many users are still disgruntled, though, and made their feelings known in July's r/Place canvas.

More than 1,800 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.
Some key passages from the moderator's announcement at r/aww: What about the protest, though; did we win? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, as Reddit's minimal attempts at positive outreach remain overshadowed by the plethora of depressing developments...

At the end of the day, Reddit's API changes have gone into effect. They did not extend the transition period or reduce the exorbitant prices. They granted exemptions to a few apps and moderation tools, but that's about it. The best thing I can say is that they did honor their commitment to ensuring the continued functionality of some mod tools... Despite some reassurances and promises from Reddit, their conduct and these changes have driven away many developers, leading to the shutdown of some tools and an uncertain future for others.
The announcement with a link labeled "and more importantly," which leads to a picture with a message for Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (who uses the name "Spez" when posting on Reddit.)
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Are the Reddit Protests Over? More

Are the Reddit Protests Over?

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  • You know what would have been better? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @03:52PM (#63742978)

    Instead of trying to block access or manipulate communities, stop visiting Reddit. Lack of eyeballs = lack of revenue since no one would be viewing ads. Granted, it would have been difficult to coordinate such a boycott, but the only way to make your voices known is by hitting companies in the wallet.

    But then, I have said the same thing about Amazon and others, that people should simply stop buying from them, but since that is so simple to do, it won't take place.

    • I agree, the hand wringers and drama queens should have just stopped visiting Reddit instead of defacing it.

      This is over just in time too, my bowl of popcorn is empty.

      • And virtually no one would have noticed because the people who are pissed off are actually only a tiny percentage of the users.

    • Wasn't that the idea of turning communities private, forcing fewer eyeballs?

      But yes, despite that, I don't click Reddit links now.

      • You will.

        • I keep hearing this. Most of Reddit’s users weren’t even using it for most of Reddit’s existence. What makes you think they won’t find other places to shitpost or go back to wherever they were before.

          When I gave up reddit I just went out and found like 20 forums, signed up, bookmarked a few threads I liked and hooked a few of them up to an RSS reader. It’s way more content and discussion than I need.

          I don’t care if reddit outright dies or not but if they lose a few year

          • Sounds like shit talk to me. You'll click on a Reddit post if only out of curiosity real soon.

            • Oh sure but that’s not going to keep the site growing or make for a good IPO and by this time next year it might not even be worth that spammed to shit with chatgpt.

      • I don't see how reddit moderators have been positioned as being the "good guys" when they're totally not. Exactly how have the changes that reddit made ended up with a worse reddit? it simply hasn't. What it did was aggravate a group of people who realised they never had the imaginary power they imagined they had.

        • Even when the mods were total power tripping NEET dictators, Reddit was almost impossible to moderate especially against professional posters and dedicated hobbyist trolls. Now they’re pretty much fucked and anyone who knows better is finding other places to go.

          Reddit didn’t win but their stupid ass mods didn’t win either. They’re going to have a long slow decline as a containment zone for the shittiest internet posters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Instead of trying to block access or manipulate communities, stop visiting Reddit. Lack of eyeballs = lack of revenue since no one would be viewing ads. Granted, it would have been difficult to coordinate such a boycott, but the only way to make your voices known is by hitting companies in the wallet.

      except not even with such a boycott would they have been hardly relevant. because they are not the all important bright knights they imagined to be but just more meat, identical to that of millions of other users that are perfectly fine playing to reddit's rules, and enough of which will be more than happy to take their heavy burden from them and good riddance, nothing to see here.

      your approach is solid in theory, it would be handy not just for frivolities like this but for serious problems. it hardly works

      • Agreed.
        Me, I have no reason NOT to visit Reddit when I find, through searching, that there's a possible solution posted there for the problem I try to solve. I have no other reason for visiting Reddit. To me, it's a tool amongst thousands.
        Now, if I were a very active user or a moderator there, I would have asked myself "does this change negatively affect what I do there?", and if the answer was "yes", I would have tried to quantify the negative impact. Is it something that makes my activities a. impossible,

        • I have no reason not to read stuff I find on reddit, but I also have no reason to post to reddit. If I want to create content, which I often do, I don't want to create it for someone who's going to screw up the site.

          "Protesting? Trolling? Other forms of childish behavior? Nah, not my type."

          To you, protesting is childish? So to be clear, adults tolerate and accept and therefore enable abuse?

          • Not all protesting, I should have added. But online protesting is largely useless.

            • Not all protesting, I should have added. But online protesting is largely useless.

              You said protesting and trolling. If the people on Reddit weren’t obsessed with pretending to be good people they could have tore the place the fuck up like a giant 4chan style raid and they would have won in a week but for some reason the former internet hub of jailbait creepshots is too good for a little goatse and crapflooding.

              • And there's the big "IF".
                Anything is possible, in theory, "if" that and the other.
                If people would act homogenously, etc.
                Problem is, they don't.

                • No way. Relatively small groups of trolls can absolutely wreck the fuck out of a major website you only need a bunch of these groups for a place like reddit. But Reddit likes to think it has some goody goody culture and somehow trolling is synonymous with right wing activity there. So they can’t coordinate like 4chan, SA, Usenet, ED, or IRC networks could for that kind of thing.

                  Once I casually said something like “lol I’m just trolling“ after some gentle teasing and some guy reac

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Threni ( 635302 )

      "But then, I have said the same thing about Amazon and others, that people should simply stop buying from them, but since that is so simple to do, it won't take place."

      People don't not do things because they're simple - they don't do them because they don't have a problem with them. I like Amazon - the prices are good, they don't fuck me around if there's a problem and the whole process from ordering to delivery causes no problems.

      Likewise, if you don't like reddit or think they should be tolerating people

      • Likewise, if you don't like reddit or think they should be tolerating people scraping data or accessing APIs for free forever, don't go to reddit. But I couldn't give a fuck about all that - I just want to follow a few subreddits from time to time. This protest was obviously going to fail because reddit would have lost money if they did, and no normal person is going to be remotely interested in APIs or third party apps etc.

        Reddit is going to get scraped even if they turn off APIs and rate limit anyhow this whole thing was pointless and they’re going to lose money anyhow.

        and no normal person is going to be remotely interested in APIs or third party apps etc.

        Reddit is going to do just fine with a bunch of facebook quality posters right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, yes. And no. If people were smart, understood what actually benefits them as the population of a country and could organize, do you think politics would be run by an alternative between crappy and even crappier? Do you think large corporations would screw up everybody they can? Do you tking already far too rich people would be able to take more from others to get even richer?

    • Instead of trying to block access or manipulate communities, stop visiting Reddit. Lack of eyeballs = lack of revenue since no one would be viewing ads.

      What's in it for me, the Redditor? No seriously you are shouting for a call to arms, but for what and for whom? The changes in Reddit largely affect moderators, which is why the protest was led by moderators. A few Redditors who used alternate apps likely already quit. But for the rest of the millions who use reddit every day, why would we care?

      It sounds like a nihilist attitude, but as someone who uses reddit and continues to use reddit, this entire debacle hasn't affected me, at least reddit's actions hav

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Statistically, most boycotts don't last very long and are ineffective. Of all those guys who burned their expensive Nike shoes a few years ago, statistically the majority of them ended up buying a replacement pair.

      Boycotts do work sometimes, notably with apartheid in South Africa. Those are the exception to the rule though, and tend to be examples where participating in the boycott has minimal inconvenience for those involved.

      It's just human nature.

    • I've stopped using both amazon and reddit fwiw

    • A few did this, but over the long haul, it looks like most did not. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

      I frequently helped people on r/leaf with problems with their cars, but I no longer do. Now I'm only active on mynissanleaf.com. I just decided not to keep helping a company that responded so poorly to the mods. The actual API issue I didn't have a concern with, but their response to it was far worse.

      We'll see what the long term impact is. If the most active and helpful mods and posters (content c

      • This whole "influencer" culture has GOT to go.

      • That graph doesn’t even cover the protest period. But I’m sure the loss will be a drop in the bucket. Reddit is likely losing quality users though. Don’t forget that internet culture was driven by SA and 4chan despite being niche sites during the same period. Before that it was driven by a handful of usenet groups and IRC channels.

        Can you tell me a single meme from myspace or yahoo forums?

  • . . . but enough jannies will do it for free, and think losing that "job" (i.e. petty power) is the worst thing that could happen to them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      When petty power is the only thing you have in life, it matters.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        While true, if petty power is all you have in life, you should think about changing something instead.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          I agree. But when you're talking about Reddit mods, they know full well that's all they can ever aspire to.

  • Vocal people just went to other sites (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:01PM (#63743004)
    I'm now on Lemmy and also surprisingly using Hacker News again after not using it for years. I also go to smaller topic related forums directly too. Discussing software on Github is also fun. Reddit will probably keep its momentum of being on Google for a few years just like Wikipedia did while most people went to more specialized wikis for in-depth content that doesn't show up on Google.
    • I read this on Slashdot and will discuss it on Lemmy. Reddit kept many of the eyeballs, but the voices that create the content are unhappy.

    • Is Lemmy any good? Is it an echo-chamber, and/or, how heavy on censorship is it?

      • It has enough users now that many of the main communities are relatively active, news/politics/technology/gaming/porn/memes etc. The niche communities are still not quite there. Sync for Lemmy was just released so the app situation has really improved. The interactions I've had have been mostly friendly. It'll take awhile to get out of its beta phase, but that's with any new social site/community.

        • It's like reddit, but with everything moved to weird new places, because of course that's what everyone wants in a message board, a completely rethought interface to learn.

          I wish Lemmy well, but I doubt I'll ever use it.

          • And to me, that is the point. Anyone can set up their own reddit/subreddit and run it however they want. Yes, it makes things more chaotic, but that is the trade off. Reddit will always be there, but people have to play by their rules. What's nice imo is that if anyone doesn't like it, they can go do their own thing. It may or may not be better but at least there is an option now.

    • Re: Vocal people just went to other sites (Score:4, Insightful)

      by DishpanMan ( 2487234 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:36PM (#63743090)

      Same here. This whole binary winning/losing thing is so odd. What the reddit/twitter/facebook issues did best were to get enough people to look for and come up with alternatives. Lemmy, Mastodon and other federated services are giving alternatives to people who like the social concepts of twitter/reddit/facebook/Instagram but who don't like the providers. These alternatives are just that, they are not there to "win" but to be developed a different way for a different audience. People are free to decide where they want to spend their time, it's just nice to have choices now.

    • Is that join-lemmy org, which keeps spitting a 502 Bad Gateway message?

  • Theirs progress?

  • Reddit is a dead man walking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:24PM (#63743060)
    A chicken running around the yard without its head. Reddit just doesn't know it's done for yet. Its reputation is shot and its place on the internet is open to be taken by an usurper. People who are still using Reddit are waiting for someone to come along, not clinging to Reddit, not supporting it.

    • Somethings wrong with reddit now? How is them wanting to make money on selling access to their API to a couple moderators supposed to matter to me or the average user again?

    • I'm thinking Reddit's remaining value is as an archive of past discussions, which has a lot of value in training LLMs. That this value was taken without Reddit getting a cut is probably what set Spez on the path to tyranny in the first place. The question now is whether he can extract enough value from future use as an LLM training resource to keep the lights on.

      • This is just like when people realised that the very short era of being able to sell recorded music came to an end. For around 50 years there was a revenue model based around something that was only enabled by technology, and then technology took it away. Now we are back to the previous era where it's the performance that has the value.

        LLMs are scraping everything and companies are mad that they were unprepared to monetise data they didn't create when all they were trying to sell was ads. Whether that's

    • People who are still using Reddit are waiting for someone to come along

      It's just a message board, so it shouldn't be that hard for a competitor to implement (famous last words). Whatever happens, I hope they call the new competitor Blueit.

    • Reddit just doesn't know it's done for yet. Its reputation is shot and its place on the internet is open to be taken by an usurper.

      An interesting theory. Based on what? Do you have any numbers to back that (currently baseless) claim? I mean reddit is up and functioning, user numbers haven't dropped (and their most significant drop was temporary when the subs went dark).

      People who are still using Reddit are waiting for someone to come along, not clinging to Reddit, not supporting it.

      Well yes, we are all just here waiting for the next big thing. But network effect is an actual thing. I don't use reddit because reddit is a well made website (it's not), or has a good app (LOL fuck no), or because people are nice (this is the internet). I use it because

    • Usenet is a thing that exists. So...

  • Let's wait for the dust to settle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday August 05, 2023 @04:53PM (#63743120)

    Before casting the verdict on how this ends.

    That Reddit will "win" was a given, at least as far as I am concerned. I mean, they own the servers. If they want to close your account, they can. If they want to disable your subreddit, they can. If they want to take away your "ownership" of the sub and run it themselves, or hand it to someone else, they can. There was literally no way that the mods could "win" this on that ground.

    But there is a more important question now waiting to be resolved.

    Reddit consists of three groups of users. First, the mods. No introduction necessary, we talked about them pretty much exclusively for a month now. Then the consumers. The people who go to Reddit for information or entertainment, they make up the bulk of the users but their contribution to the whole site is very much limited to asking a question now and then and hoping for an answer. And finally, the contributors. The people who go there to answer those questions, to engage in discussions, to post content (be that sage advice or memes, anything is valuable).

    And I think that last group and whether that last group stays will decide what happens with Reddit now. We've spent most of our time talking about and pondering the fate of the mods that lead this "revolt", but the actually interesting question is whether the contributors will remain. I think nobody ever asked them.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I agree. At some point of monetization, a site starts a downward spiral. That may take a while to become obvious. If the contributors now look for alternatives, Reddit may already be dead without knowing it.

    • And I think that last group and whether that last group stays will decide what happens with Reddit now.

      You made a mistake in analysis. That last group is a subset of the second. This isn't a corporate help desk. Contributors aren't getting paid, they are largely made up of people who also make up the second group. I help answer questions on several subs. But I ask questions on others, and I just lurk on even more. That is the typical redditor, and that is very much the result of building a system that is not targeted at any discipline specifically.

      The number of experts who contribute their expert insight to

      • Well, yes and no. It's a subset, but a fairly tiny one. If you frequent some of the more popular and less "banter" based Subs, you'll find that you always encounter the same people contributing. When you then compare the number of "regular posters" to the subscriber number (and yes, of course just because a sub has a million subscribers doesn't mean that a million people read it every day), you find that there is often a VAST difference between the people who actually write and those who just consume. For e

        • I understand where you're coming from if you only analyse one sub. Yeah most subs have a minor number of contributors vs consumers. But that's my point. This isn't Stackexchange. This isn't a hub for a specific discipline. The contributor on one sub is a consumer on many other. The two groups you list are the same people. And there's no reason to believe that if someone continues consuming that they won't continue to contribute. I mean what has honestly changed for them? Why would someone who posts advice o

          • Well, I can only talk about me, but yes, I still read some subs at times, I stopped posting altogether. I can't put my finger on the reason, but it just doesn't seem "worth" it anymore. I felt that my messages were liked, not just by the people who read them, but generally, that they contributed to something. That feeling is kinda gone.

      • You made a mistake in analysis. That last group is a subset of the second. This isn't a corporate help desk. Contributors aren't getting paid, they are largely made up of people who also make up the second group. I help answer questions on several subs. But I ask questions on others, and I just lurk on even more. That is the typical redditor, and that is very much the result of building a system that is not targeted at any discipline specifically.

        Your average redditor has about as much as interesting to say as your average AOLer, yahoos answers poster, or myspace slob. This is just how it is when you try to be “the front page of the internet”

    • Great analysis! I used to be in that last group. Then when the blackout happened, I realized how very little contributing to the site got me. I went from about 5 heavily active subreddit subscriptions to 2, which I mostly just consume local news and food pics from. My quality of life went up!

      I think there's also a 4th group to your analysis... the addicts looking for attention/free therapy. They're a pretty toxic drag, and all the really big subs (r/pics etc) pander to them

  • It seems at best incomplete to call a win without at least mentioning any activity numbers.

    There was never any doubt about Reddit's ability to 'win' in the sense of getting rid of the disobedient; they control the infrastructure so obviously they can ban or remove mod status from whoever. The question was whether they could impose obedience without the people who provide them with most of their value either getting shoved out or getting fed up and leaving.

    So what happened? The openly dissenting mods a

  • So Reddit wants to change their business model from small third party apps hardly anyone uses to selling AI data that is many, many times more lucrative?

    As long as it doesn't mean suddenly lots of new, intrusive ads (fucking Slashdot!), why would normal users care one lick?

    • Because Reddit's moderator tooling and accessibility are both garbage. Users addressed this with third party applications. So you'll lose out on some disabled contributors, and moderation will get appreciably harder.

      Harder moderation means that moderators are even more overworked and likely to leave. A lack of moderation means giving over the community to the bigots and trolls. Bigots and trolls chase everyone else away.

      Reddit's content is mostly from real people, and that's thanks to the moderators. Reddit

      • Maybe you don't need as many moderators to police the "bigots and trolls" when you have generative AI tools. Or maybe you pay human moderators with that AI windfall.

    • Reddit is going to get scraped anyhow. Maybe OpenAI and a few other deep pockets will buy API access but even then maybe they won’t and will just scrape it anyhow.

  • ...as Xwitter is being called Twitter again...

  • As a mod of several very large communities on Reddit, it's not over.

    Reddit's reputation and loyalty its users had is GONE. We may still be hanging around, but now we're just using Reddit the way Reddit used us: to promote other things, including Discord, kbin, Mastodon and many other communities.

    Most communities have now split and spread across multiple sites on the Internet.

    Reddit has done us a tremendous favor by making people realize they shouldn't focus their time and resources around any specific cor

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. The most important mistake Reddit management made is to make it clear to everybody that they will eventually need an alternative. Hence people are looking. It is a slow process and it may take years, but all contributors and mods on Reddit now know that Reddit is not their friend. And that knowledge will not go away.

  • The real winners are spambots. What the new mods and Reddit readers will discover is that Reddit will have more bots and AI spammers. The new mods will have weaker tools to deal with this.

  • The first problem is that Reddit was just never as important as their "community" imagines it is. The vast majority of the traffic finding Reddit is searching for information and having to sort through piles of disorganized subs to find what they want. Sadly, all too often laced with hot takes and trolling. The protests and locked subs just lead this population to look for alternative sources. Very few outside the Reddit community actually care about the protests. They just saw the locked subs and moved on.

  • Them "winning" isn't really about who's in control of the subs, it's a competition only with themselves, they're only "winning" if this increased revenue and value. Which as far as I know anyone has yet to hear. Did it increase the number of people using the official app and seeing ads? Then it was a win. Did it increase the value going into the eventual IPO? Then it would be a win. Personally I'm not sure it actually managed either of those things, but I guess we'll find out eventually.

    I know I for o

  • Just one small data point but Reddit lost for me.

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