Reddit is Making Sitewide Protests Basically Impossible (theverge.com) 73
Reddit has implemented new restrictions on moderators' ability to alter community visibility settings, the social media platform announced Monday. Moderators must now obtain admin approval before switching subreddits between public, private, or NSFW status.
The move comes in response to last year's widespread protests against API pricing changes, during which thousands of subreddits went private, disrupting platform accessibility. Reddit VP Laura Nestler stated the policy aims to prevent actions that "deliberately cause harm" and protect the site's long-term health.
The move comes in response to last year's widespread protests against API pricing changes, during which thousands of subreddits went private, disrupting platform accessibility. Reddit VP Laura Nestler stated the policy aims to prevent actions that "deliberately cause harm" and protect the site's long-term health.
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Your account is unfunny and so are you. If you're trying to do parody, this is not how it's done.
He call's himself JockTroll. Jocks tend to be unfunny and not nearly as clever as they think they are. I'd say he's pretty on-the-nose.
OK, taking private to public is sketchy (Score:1)
Moderators must now obtain admin approval before switching subreddits between public, private, or NSFW status
Seems OK. Its not quite fair to make a private conversation public without prior warning. Public conversations often need to be more elaborate due to low information readers. Such folks can misunderstand a conversation between individuals who have some specialized knowledge.
Re:OK, taking private to public is sketchy (Score:5, Informative)
Except that precisely the opposite was happening: mods taking subs private in protest.
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Mods of a subreddit could still effectively lock down a sub to the point of being unusable by twiddling the sub's stylesheet, locking posts, restricting posting ability, deploying the various automod bots, etc.
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but then they went back to public later, for the most part.
So what happens to content that was posted on a subreddit while it was private? Is it made public, or it stays hidden? I would hope it stays hidden, or else that's a pretty big privacy violation. Even moreso for any subreddits that started off as private.
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No, no, you are still missing the context. These were full denial of service protests that affected everyone, it wasn't like members could still post or comment, or in some subs even see anything. Even if you somehow could still post this was a full-blown protest, I understand you totally missed it (and given your low Slashdot ID I understand why Reddit might not interest you in the slightest) but it was the largest online kerfuffle at the time. But especially if you were writing content on Reddit, and on o
Just wondering... (Score:2)
I don't use much in the way of social media, so I have no idea if this idea is likely or even possible. What are the chances that some moderators could just move to the Fediverse and set up a Reddit equivalent there? They could call it "Feddit" - a name which works on several levels.
Getting enough people to host the content in a reliable fashion might be tough, but where there's a will there's probably a way. And the people running Reddit seem to be going out of their way to piss off the people who effectiv
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Re: Just wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
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I hope many or most of them are named after Mötörhead references.
Re:Just wondering... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no shortage of alternatives to Reddit, hell i bet what you are saying already exists either formally or as someones hobby project. As with all social media its the matter of taking the userbase with you, Reddit has big big network effects and tied directly to that is the convience of having the site being centrally managed, maintained, updated and admined.
It's not a tech problem, it's more a psychological and financial issue. It's a good idea, in a better world Reddit already operates in that manner but much like Twitter has withstood many attempts to dethrone it, man, those network effects are powerful.
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> There's no shortage of alternatives to Reddit,
Technically yes, but the Network Effect matters. If nobody goes there, then nobody goes there (to misquote Yogi Berra).
Reddit sucks eggs, so I wish there were alternatives that actually have people there.
Nobody moderates the moderators.
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Nobody moderates the moderators.
This is a time immerioral problem though right? Feel like if I was online in 1982 there would be many BBS admins who users had beefs with, i don't think a federated system nor any of those alternatives solves that problem, that feels like more of a human condition type of issue. (unless there is some sort of moderator democracy system on Federated sites, that would be neat)
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Several communities forked off of reddit over the last few years as a result of the admins' heavy-handed tactics. Granted, you might not think of WallStreetBets, /r/Drama, or /r/The_Donald as communities you'd want to visit, but they were (and are) large communities that brought a lot of traffic to reddit... traffic which is now happily congregating elsewhere. Obviously decamping to a new centralized website is not the same as joining the Fediverse, but to be perfectly frank the Fediverse is just one of a l
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furries that drive away any potential new users with their antisocial behavior
Hmm... we furries think of ourselves as extremely social. Granted, it's a different kind of sociability compared to normies'. But then, normies have this virulently irrational overreaction to harmless LGBT+ pron, even when there's some straight pron amidst it to make everyone happy, that one cannot but wonder who the antisocial side really is. Go figure.
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It is not so much the content of your missives as the fact that they are unwanted and you're unable or unwilling to grasp that they are unwanted. To put it in simpler terms: Furries are regarded as spammers. You are not entitled to an audience. Accordingly, as long as the Fediverse is infested with furries, sensible people who don't feel like being spammed to death will stay far, far away. Enjoy your ghetto.
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Ah! Well, with that I agree. I dislike seeing content unrelated to the place too.
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I can see the logic there.
Despite impressions to the contrary, I can guarantee no fantasy drawing, picture, painting, or AI-generated content, is harmed by being posted to the Internet.
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Logic fail.
No! Really!?
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Also, the Fediverse is largely overrun with furries that drive away any potential new users
Are we talking about the same Reddit? I follow the BoltEV sub and the other day someone posted a picture of themselves in their car while wearing a fursuit, and Redditors voted it up as if that's just a totally normal thing to do.
There's even a few furries here on /. I get the impression they're trying to challenge vegetarians for the title of "Most likely to tell you something about themselves that you didn't ask".
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The crucial difference is that furries are not a majority on Reddit, or alternatively, their content does not constitute a majority of traffic, nor is it promoted to the front page with any regularity. By contrast, the Fediverse is overrun with it, and pretending otherwise is part of the reason people avoid it like the plague.
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I dunno, this Redditor [reddit.com] got downvoted pretty good for complaining about too many furries on Bluesky. It seems like on Reddit furries have successfully perpetuated the narrative that they're a marginalized group who shouldn't be discriminated against, rather than the reality that they're just people who have adopted a bizarre fandom by choice.
Oh, and here's the post I was referring to earlier. [reddit.com] Furries are leaking into everything.
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Voat was a reddit alternative. It primarily attracted spicy content and users, and was not the best as a news aggregator.
Re: Just wondering... (Score:2)
There have been many attempts over the years as reddit cracked down on certain subReddits.
Ellen Pao caused the FPH guys to make their own website. I think the same thing happened with DJT supporters.
Voat was another attempt which ran out of money and steam.
But the network effects prevail. Personally I rarely find anything useful there any more. The comment threads are a mess, as bots and newcomers try to rack up âoekarma.â
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Not Discord. The Discord admins have been heading the same way as Reddit's.
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I mean, it is Reddit's website that you're on. At the end of the day you can still go setup your own discussion forum/bulletin board (and there are still a decent number of those active for niche interests - you see a lot of them for firearms content in particular since Reddit can be a bit heavy handed on those boards).
I'd compare this more to the idea of Geocities back in the day, compared to hosting your own content. While Geocities was easy and quick, if they felt like they wanted to pull your page tha
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Reddit mods gradually realizing that they don't own their subreddits.
The fact that this is news to anyone is hilarious.
Did you spin up back-end reosurces, build/configure the environment and supply the code/domain/etc? Oh, you're just posting noise on some else's paltform? It's not your anything. Why would you imagine anything different?
Grief. The entitlement and ignorance is strong in certain folks.
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Not long ago, the mods of some subreddits thought the subreddits were "theirs" enough that they could shut them down indefinitely as a protest for Reddit's new API rules. When Reddit threatened to force re-open the subreddits by replacing all the moderators, the existing mods caved in one by one, and that was the moment they realized the subreddits weren't "theirs" in any sense of the word and that Reddit can unilaterally override the moderation chain whenever they
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Protest with Posts (Score:3)
Protesting is completely possible. If there is a will to make a subreddit unusable as a sign of protest, then invite 'bad posts' and upvote them. When the many lurkers log in and see the same protest pictures & posts filling their feeds, the protest message will get out.
Reddit relies on the uploads, likes, and shares of the masses. The attention of millions of people is filtered through the actions of relatively few moderators. If the mods are mad, then they can allow the feeds to funnel garbage. Without a complete redesign for how Reddit works the ability to direct the attention of the visitors will rest with the mods. That is power; political power..
Reddit can solve their reliance on human mods by investing in robots. Reddit can solve the robot uprising another day; kick that resistance is futile can down the road.
Re:Protest with Posts (Score:4, Insightful)
They'll just de-mod the mods leading such an action and hand out bans to anyone participating. This has been done before.
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I think John Oliver or someone did that, "post him as a giraffe" threads or some shit.
As sister says, once the suits caught wind they clamped down. They're the only ones allowed to deliberately cause harm to the site's long-term health.
Spoiler: They don't actually give a fuck so long as they can sell everyone else's work as AI fodder.
Exiting Sitewide (Score:4, Insightful)
There is so much toxicity there that many entire communities have left for greener pastures.
It used to be good but according to Nicole Shanahan Silicon Valley lost its mind when Hillary Clinton lost an election and Big Tech went to hell from there.
Since their IPO all the incentives for a free discussion forum have gotten much worse.
Maybe ML can make the Usenet spam problem manageable now?
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Reddit was never good. It was just a slightly more civilized 4chan.
Go where though? (Score:2)
I'm not a fan of Discord, and it doesn't solve the same problems as Reddit can.
Old school forums are vaguely similar, but they lack the discovery methods.
I know of no peer controlled (peer to peer often) alternative that I care to force myself to use. Threads was a possibility, but it felt more like Twitter/X or Facebook than Reddit to me.
I just keep adding everything to my mental scorecard. Maybe it'll get me to stop doom scrolling someday?
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Why would Silicon Valley care? Their obvious preference for centrist policies has not been a problem when a right-leaning president ruled. The big loser was Fox News, which bet everything on Trump winning the 2020 election: Now, they have to spread Stolen Election and Climate Change Hoax conspiracies to placate their viewers. That cost Fox a few lawsuits and made them legally, sitting ducks. Now, that isn't bat-shit crazy enough so viewers are leaving for One News and News Max.
protest (Score:5, Insightful)
The Reddit protest was implemented in the worst way possible.
What should have been done was make the subreddits read only, and provide a link to a successor community. Making a subreddit inaccessible does not help end users. With no successor community to direct visitors to, there is no place for the users to migrate to, and the protest becomes ineffective.
Cause pain to make people notice. (Score:2)
I think they did what they meant to do. Protesting can be about simply getting attention, but it also can be about causing other people pain so they pay attention to you.
With your plan people would just go to the other subreddit and perform business as usual. Protest would have been a blip.
Lemmy apparently... (Score:2)
Just saw in a separate comment that Lemmy was the federated Reddit alternative.
I'm guessing it has the same problem Threads had in my first viewing. A lack of content and users. Sort of a chicken or the egg problem I guess...
Unless someone can come up with a way to scrape/copy Reddit user content (with their permission), and duplicate it on Lemmy too, I'm not sure it'll ever achieve enough content to nudge many people that way.
Reddit is not (Score:2)
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/r/UntilMoraleImproves (Score:3)
No, you're not going to win. No, it's not going to get better. On the contrary, it's going to get worse.
It's just a forum; everybody just leave. Do a Fediverse thing. No, it's not going to be as good as it used to be, not for a long while, maybe not ever. But it isn't going to be as good as used to be if you stay, either. You have to let go.
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At one point, Reddit was the inferior alternative to Digg. Then Reddit got better because of the influx. Fediverse could have the same opportunity.
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But then came enshittification.
And the fediverse already has that slathered over parts of it; but making it the hot popular replacement would only result in the same.
next protest (Score:2)
The next protest will be people actually leaving for good rather than staying and making changes. Good luck with that, Reddit.
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Central Ownership (Score:2)
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They are accountable to humanity, we can walk away. They just go to great lengths to make us forget that option exists.
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Bots spouting talking points at each other aren't a conversation, they're a shouting match. Nothing of value is being lost.
take the communities to Lemmy (Score:2)
Reddit has become a total shithole anyway (Score:2)
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So has everything else. In the land of shit, puke is King.
I miss usenet (Score:2)
Next strike (Score:2)
As long as people continue to work for free... (Score:3)
And yes, centralized platforms controlled by one company are not the right place to have discussions, anyway.
Ruck Feddit! (Score:2)
They are censor happy, stamping everything "bad faith", which is meaningless. No logic or critical thinking book I know of uses "bad faith". It's just a buzzword used by lazy mods.
F em!