Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.

this is a problem.

Lemmy is having some stability issues across its instances because of this growth curve: https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/693866c7-8f65-4046-8781-58aee70...

This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.

It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.

Alternative explanation: Users may not just roll over when the platforms they've invested countless hours into start abusing them.

The federated future for social is coming, albeit slowly in fits and starts. What is nice is that many of the communities on these two are shared because it is the fediverse.

EDIT: Downvoted why?

"...This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting."

Intentional sabotage is the only option left at this point.

That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.

Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).

Moderators are always going to be hated by some segment unfortunately.

Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.

And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.

In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.

As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

(I'm OP in the event it's not obvious.)

Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.

The fact that Reddit is taking drastic action against users who aren't breaking any rules is a pretty strong sign that Reddit's leadership has gone off the deep end.

edit: Nevermind Safari works. 1Blocker blocks comments with the "Block Comments" ruleset. Usually it is supposed to hide comments where they are not the primary focus. So some rule should probably be adapted for Lemmy instances to work.

edit2: Reported it to 1Blocker.

Maybe I just need to be going by Top->Day

Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.

I kind of want moderators on Reddit to stop moderating just to show how quickly it would kill the platform. Popular subreddits would be overrun with bots and hate speech within a week. Then the real user exodus would begin, meanwhile Reddit has to try and convince their remaining advertisers that bots and racists are worth advertising to.

Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back.

But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ?

It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO.

The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show.

PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation.

Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.

I got this in mod-mail:

"Hi everyone,

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.

Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.

If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."

I responded with the following, and have heard nothing further:

"Understood. Note that airwindows is my intellectual property and I control the website and the youtube channel which is my primary mode of engaging with Airwindows users. As such, and since there are no legitimate users trying to re-open the subreddit, it's an interesting test case. I await whatever further information you care to share with me :)"

There was also another subreddit where I was the sole user, called r/homesoil (a Minecraft mod me and my brother made). I believe that had been taken private long before, and I haven't received mod mail over it. Looks like it's strictly punitive, directed toward anyone aligning with the striking redditors no matter how small they are.

I was asked by another redditor, "Do you have a TM on the name? Could you sue Reddit to take it down b/c they should not have a forum named with your trademark?"

I responded, "Oh no, I created the subreddit. Not only that, people are allowed to create fansites so the mere concept of a subreddit that's solely my business name without me associated with it, is not itself a problem. For instance, there's at least one Facebook group using the name that's not me, and nobody is confused.

The test case (which may never happen, fair warning as this is kinda telegraphing their exposure if it did) would be the use of such a subreddit to try and convince people I represented stuff I don't represent.

In other words, the activity I DON'T want to see is: kicking me off my own subreddit, installing some other person as a mod, who then uses that subreddit to imply I support Reddit's position and leadership.

And in the absence of really impressive pro bono representation, my counter would not be trying to sue Reddit over that, but exposing the situation in a Youtube video, most likely as an aside in a video that's otherwise intended for a product release that would see a lot of attention. For instance, I'm doing reverb effects where the tone quality is tailored to work similarly to Bricasti hardware reverbs, which cost over $4000. There will be people paying close attention to my efforts there, so a mention of the Reddit situation would get outsider attention that wouldn't go to a video solely about Reddit."

That's what I'm interested in watching for. Not so much if control of the subreddit with my company name is wrested from me (might be a Wikipedia-like situation, where that isn't necessarily an issue) but if they're looking to do that for the purpose of misrepresenting my positions and establishing an endorsement where one doesn't exist. Right now, my sub going private is a statement of how I feel about the situation. If that changes, it changes, but if it represents me it'll be private, and sitting on that subreddit name.

My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move. Moderators got what they signed up for and once a community was created and they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest. In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation should have walked instead of sticking around to watch Rome burn.

How so? Reddit pays for the infrastructure and software, why would anyone expect they own their own subreddit? Are people really expecting Reddit to operate at a loss? If you want to own it, pay for it.

From a legal standpoint: I am unsure.

life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.

What all this seems like is a bad psy-op campaign to force people to do the settings the admins want, and make it "feel" its the moderators doing it. Similar how Twitter forces you to remove bad content rather than just auto-do it

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14faqrt/is_redd...

Same for always-NSFW.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fjbtt/our_subre...

Which seems like a bad option for Reddit, given that their only value proposition is that they have a lot of users.

Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.

Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

Especially now, there are a -lot- of new Lemmy communities popping up so I like to be able to see that kind of activity.

> In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation

But they've completely mishandled it. A prime example of that was a AMA where ~10 questions got answered.

There's a 3-way social contract between the platform (Reddit/npm), the nominal person in charge (mods/module authors) and the users. If the person in charge does something that is sufficiently disruptive to users', or platforms interests, the platform will step in. We can argue about where the line is, but beyond that point, platform intervention is inevitable.

Edit: Thought experiment: would it have been acceptable had the author of leftpad put up a poll for downloaders to vote before taking the module down in protest?

Look. This is always going to happen with user-generated content ("UGC") sites where the users who create the content don't own the platform. The owners will always reach a point of trying to extract as much value as possible from those users. Personal subreddits? Well they don't provide value (to the owners). We're long past the point of subsidizing users to grow Reddit. Now it's just value extraction.

And it happens to every UGC site and people are still somehow surprised. It's the most Lucy and the football thing I've ever seen.

This is why Wikipedia being owned by a foundation rather than a private venture-backed company is so important. Same for ICANN not being a for-profit company (remember how private equity tried to steal the .org registry [1]?).

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/private-equity-firm-trying-to-take-over-...

I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.

The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.

As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.

edit: it's back up.

If they want the job done a particular way, they need to pay for it.

God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

I guess we can start posting old content.

"We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don't want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.

Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.

If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."

This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform

And yes, that was the first thing I thought of. I saw a user similarly griping about mods, saying "all the mods are rigging all the polls" and then added, "sure, pretend the users are behind you, the mods, the ones who ban them for very little reason or mute them/ignore them for asking valid questions in mod mail."

A picture emerges… bit of a self-report! I'm curious what was 'very little reason' and then how many 'valid questions' were 'asked'. Some people seem to know who their natural enemies are, and they're really clear on wanting those impediments to be removed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848

and here's a comment excerpt from this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."

So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.

Power-tripping mods are the ones trying to tank the subreddits.

The communities that actually ask the users for feedback on what they want tend to all be back to normal.

- https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-land...

- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

Or the absolutely abysmal and tonedeaf responses every chance they had?

- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755640/reddit-api-change...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve...

Or the easily disproven libel? https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

That's been doubled and tripled down on? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...

Or literally changing or removing user's posts and comments? https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fafpp/the_admin...

That all sounds abusive to me. If anything, the API price was the straw and focusing on it and ignoring literally everything that happened since is just being disingenuous.

It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.

Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.

Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.

Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.

So really, what is a reasonable pricing?

They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data.

Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit.

You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs.

None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.

It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

In the end it was a way for many moderators to hijack a community and transfer it to their next pet social space (Discord seems to be the current favorite).

> Popular subreddits would be overrun with bots and hate speech within a week.

I really just wish there was an unfiltered view with an explanation of why posts were deleted. The lack of transparency is completely unnecessary. It'd be trivial to see if the rumors about mods taking money to curate messages in subs have any substance to them.

If they really are considering allowing users to vote out mods, I'd really like to see better documentation of their activities.

Building and running a software company is not free.

It seems like the content algorithm is fundamentally broken right now.

It's not great but it will hopefully improve. A lot of growing pains but overall its a really exciting time.

Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other.

I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.

This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one.

This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1357

Second, are you arguing that mods aren't also users?

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

- Cory Doctorow

A simple trick is to browse page 0 instead of page 1, by editing the URL.

Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc..

Or are you referring to the '80s?

That, among other things, is creating a lot of friction for new users at the moment though.

Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?

I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.

The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it.

This is a universal truth.

I will say that doing so on the "new comments" sorting type did still yield a good number of no-comment posts.

Is it wrong to claim that, though?

Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.

I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?

All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?

There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.

This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.

1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Over on Lemmy, it is the instance operator's choice whether or not to require e-mail, but most instances currently do as a measure to mitigate bot signups.

LinkedIn is a place for professionals to interact with other like minded professionals about the trials, tribulations and successes of work

Unfortunately, it morphed into what is basically a job hunting platform with social media behaviors as your gateway to getting a job, rather than just applying for a job.

This change is what leads to all the self promotion, the "always positive always on" hype posts, the corporate media campaigns etc. Not to mention every friend request got loaded with "is this random person trying to get me to recommend them for a job?" type thing.

The organic lets talk about work authentically with others in the profession type stuff is minimized and in some cases I think its gone completely.

To be honest, if it wasn't for the fact that it really is the only place to reach recruiters and hiring managers directly, I wouldn't be on LinkedIn anymore at all. It has otherwise lost all career value to me

Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there.

Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest.

But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out?

It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)

Reddit is all about the forum chat. Having trolls fill that up is more problematic to me as a user looking for value in the chatter.

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.

I got the same modmail message, even though I barely have 20 subscribers to that sub-reddit and it has been private since they dropped CNAME for a sub-reddit support.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/20/how-john-...

Admins are employees of reddit.com. I think you're talking about moderators, who are the volunteer petty tyrants that have always been the worst thing about reddit, and they are the ones "going rogue".

The future I presume is: As computation gets less expensive, content creation and storage is democratized and managing that platform eventually becomes easier with AI tech this walled garden approach is bound to fall. Its just a matter of time yeah?

In this case I understand it can be read as "Reddit aren't just going after big closed subs anymore" but the title, to me, doesn't make that obvious enough. I clicked it thinking "Oh no now people can't even have their own subs?!" when in reality it's just that one of the blackout holdouts is getting called on still holding out with the ~~new~~ not-new rule that they have stated they're going to start applying.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).

Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).

If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.

But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.

Reddit, on the other hand, makes <$1 per user worldwide.

So, a reasonable price would be somewhere between $4 and $200 per year

/s

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

It would depend on the subreddit. r/stoicism (aka r/bro-icism ;) ) seemed very unimpressed and self-involved, and didn't see how the concept of 'virtue' entered into it. r/datingoverfifty overwhelmingly sided with its mods, in part because that subreddit was so actively moderated that women over fifty could post there without getting harassed, and scam artists were quickly run off by the mods. As such, that subreddit had experienced moderation as a positive force and trusted its mods' opinions, and its mods were repeatedly in touch with the subreddit explaining what they wanted to do and why, and asking whether they had user support.

Looks like we saw different experiences, is all I'll say.

I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently

Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.

This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.

I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.

But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.

https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...

But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.

When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews

https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...

How many more you want?

Who is an asshole is an opinion. And no one likes being censored. One man's hate speech is another man's basic truism. It's why there is no federal law in America against "hate speech" because there's no objective way to classify it. Your disdain for people who disagree with you says nothing about them and a great deal about you.

Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server.

The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

I can understand the sentiment, however users of Reddit employ private subreddits for a variety of reasons. Top of the list is in order to facilitate safe discussions, secure from prying eyes. For Reddit Inc it is a benefit, since it encourages moderator groups and communities to remain within the platform. e.g.

> r/ArmyofScience

> A private community for the comment moderators of /r/science to organize and discussion moderation of the subreddit.

If such private communities were forced open, it would require moderator groups, or those other private communities, to join the exodus to other platforms.

There are also some more personal collections on the site, without a doubt. Switching those to public would constitute a huge violation the trust which users have placed in Reddit and only further erode the company's image within communities that make their home on the site as well as with the public at large.

Lastly, there are over 3 million subreddits in existence [0], so even changing this manually would be a sizeable task.

[0] https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/

Elon "free speech" Musk recently announced that "cis" is a slur on Twitter but that "deadnaming" trans people isn't, but this is very much an opinion derived from a specific world view and now he is imposing that across the board. Okay, sure, that is his right, he owns the place. But please drop the "free speech" talk when really you just want to elevate your preferred viewpoint over alternatives.

What we know is that people who spoke up about this care about it. People who voted in a handful of subreddit-run polls care. But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. They'll just ... remain silent, and wait for the storm to blow over. Which seems to be what the majority of Reddit users are doing.

Disclosure: I'm a 12+ year Reddit "power" user, and I don't care about the API changes. I didn't vote in any supposed polls on the changes. My perspective no doubt affects my understanding of this issue.

> Your disdain for people who disagree with you says nothing about them and a great deal about you.

You totally miss the point. It's not that they say things that people disagree with. It's that they're being a jerk. And then, often, when they get booted, they say "you censor people who disagree!" No, we don't. We get rid of jerks because they're being jerks, not because of their ideas.

If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.

> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.

The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins). Would that make you happy?

I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.

This has been my experience too.

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

"Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.

The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.

Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.

That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.

I don't know what the right number is, but Reddit has made it abundantly clear with this move that they aren't interested in finding it.

Honestly, I doubt there is one anymore (for me at least). Any trust I had for their corporate leadership before has completely evaporated. If they were to lower the prices to a "reasonable" level now it would indicate that they either capitulated (but didn't get to do what they really wanted and probably will try again later) or they are just being manipulative and wanted to use this as a way to show "goodwill" by bringing the price down.

The concept of the fediverse these days has me hopeful for a time where we don't need to worry about these big dumb corporate interests holding our data and the control over it hostage. Any publicly owned (or private trying to go public) organization with a profit incentive is bound to make stupid, short-term decisions eventually, and this is just one of many of Reddit's forays into that arena. They will continue to get worse and worse, regardless of how effective the protesting is.

Are they?

I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere.

The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there.

Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.

I am happy this API drama has run the gamut and is now tackling what has always been the true issue head-on: anonymous, first-come first-serve moderators of user communities. I have been on reddit for 15 years. These users have the loudest voice, have historically placed more importance on themselves than there actually is, and have an unhealthy amount of power over the content.

If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean. It's super frustrating to be banned or silenced from a sub because one of the mods didn't like what you said. Here I am, one of thousands of like-minded users wanting to participate in a sub about some topic, but my ability to do so is totally at the whim of this anonymous person who is just another user like me but doesn't have to answer to anyone.

We see time and time again that this power gets into the head of many moderators and they begin to exert personal control over the community. Mod drama on reddit is a taint. "But not all mods are like that." Yes they are, on long timescales. Generalization is useful. Many commenters, here included, miss the big picture. APIs/tools/UI will come and go. Reddit has a large cultural moat and that is a fact. Nitpicking details is petty.

In the context of an upcoming potential IPO, it makes sense for reddit to do the following:

Standardize the subreddits, the rules and terms of use, and consolidate control. Make the reddit experience predictable, not wildly variant at the whims of a handful of mods who control a vastly disproportionate amount of subreddits and content. Replacing mods with AI filters is a prime use case.

I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance. Every time I start typing a word on the subreddit search, like 5 different variations of a nsfw sub for that word come up. It's frankly gross. An idea floating around is to jettison the nsfw subs into a separate business that can compete with OF. This is a fine idea.

spez gets a lot of shit for what he says, but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them. I don't see any mods or supporters of this 'protest' posting with their name and face. Tells you all you need to know.

If people are using the site to advertise stuff, they have an incentive to try and make the experience nice. But is that really the main source of mods? I imagine if I was moderating as a sort of work related thing I’d be more focused on just fulfilling the requirements of my employer (rather than maintaining the general community spirit of the site, if that makes sense).

> You retain ownership rights in your Content.

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.

Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.

What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

Edit: I checked, and Archive.org seems to be snapshotting once per quarter or less. Not a realistic strategy for any sub with even modest traffic.

Github et. al added the connectivity and social aspects layered on top of what is fundamentally a version control tool.

Torrenting or cryptocurrencies are better examples, where fundamentally they are social in nature and in the case of torrenting it's ridiculously easy to jump from provider to provider.

1. https://postimg.cc/PPRMGw7k

2. https://postimg.cc/mcNMrzmk

3. https://postimg.cc/7CVG4vLT

I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.

Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.

> Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.

The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....

I actually think there is an objective way of classifying certain undesirable behaviors. In my own communities, we don't allow comments or content that denigrates other people based on their immutable personal characteristics. These would be things like race, nationality, or sexual orientation. These are attributes people are born with, and to treat anyone unfairly for not being born with the right values assigned to the attributes is fundamentally wrong.

But ultimately that doesn't matter. The reason we don't have federal laws against hate speech is because we as a society have decided it is not the government's place to tell people what they can or cannot say, regardless of how abhorrent we may find some of that speech. And this is a position I will vehemently defend.

However, a guy running an internet forum is not the government. The same expectations and rules do not apply to them, because nobody is forced to live under their regime. Ergo, it is not unrealistic for individual communities to form and enforce their own social code of conduct. What people in community A consider "asshole" behavior may not align with the beliefs of community B, and that is perfectly fine, because nobody is forced to engage with either. People shoose which online communities they want to engage with. People don't choose what country they are born in.

Having said that, it doesn't seem very active at the moment which isn't a good sign. Granted, I have no idea how active the subreddit is to compare.

The fact they didn't move while the platform was effectively shut down proves that the category bof service isn't even that important to them.

Just review how many people are saying they're better off having not been on Reddit and now have zero intent of returning.

I'm one....

Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,

For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community. And we could institute rules as we see fit. If the system allowed it, we could do it.

That was obviously just propaganda and a blatant lie.

> If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.

The fuck? Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board? Just wow.

Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.

https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14ae739/this_...

https://preview.redd.it/qty5883w6h6b1.png?auto=webp&v=enable...

https://preview.redd.it/c7o7zce1tb6b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...

This isn't about just moderators. There are a lot of people that are moving on simply because of the implication of having to use Reddit's own app. It's not out of spite like you seem to be painting this as, it's because Reddit has historically made terrible software and have relied on the very same people that gives them most of their value to even make "their" content browsable.

And no, spez isn't the only person putting his name next to his arguments - the Apollo developer he defamed also was.

I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet.

Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy.

So, there's 1 for you.

Even so, this is the remarkable exception(-ish) to the rule, and the subreddit still seems to be pretty active , in fact with a lot more comments than Lemmy

Since it's part of the Fediverse, a user on one instance/server can subscribe to a community on any federated instance, and make posts/comments/etc. You don't need a separate account on every instance.

Communities are typically moderated by the user(s) who created them, much like moderators of a specific subreddit.

I wonder what shareholders think of his 'leadership'.

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending

Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

Edit: I mean, I do get it, I just don't like it.

Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success.

Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing.

The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama.

Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ...

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement/

Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.

But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.

Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).

>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.

It will always be garbage

This is a hype road. There's nothing. There never will be anything.

It's just automated plagiarism.

The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content which this method can't ever create.

never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose.

And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website.

>God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed).

You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.

It's certainly improved a lot over time, but the reddit exodus wasn't really planned. I'm sure the lemmy devs are feeling the pressure.

At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.

If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.

you should tell that to reddtors. I believe they complain quite a bit about reposts, the same questions being asked, bots, and more.

but it's resource intensive.

The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

People define others whose opinions they don't share as "being a jerk" when they're just saying something they don't like, all the time.

I think that era died with Aaron Swartz, which is more than a decade past. In the past decade Reddit admins have been banning thriving communities for not toeing the party line.

Where were you when Reddit banned /r/the_donald and all the lesbian subs? Probably cheering them on for enforcing a political agenda you agree with? Then what made you think you would be spared from the admin's wrath when you turned against them?

It sounds like a typical case of “I can't believe the leopards would eat my face!”

> The fuck? [..] Just wow.

Stop it with the rhetorical pearl clutching. If you have something intelligent to say, make a rational, coherent, dispassionate argument. Nobody benefits from this type of emotional outburst. Imagine I would respond in kind, saying: “Omg! Wow! Wow! Wow! I canNOT belIEVE you would SAY something like this! What the fuck??? Wow! Geez! Golly!" This is just meaningless word vomit.

> Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board?

Do you seriously not understand what an analogy is?

There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table.

Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort.

I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.

they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to.

this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.

Not all investors will recognize that nuance, but 'reddit in chaos' was national news.

Stochastic parrot: inherently no new content

Reddit: some new content.

You'd be wrong.

... Also, one of the least diverse group (racially, religiously, culturally, politically and pretty much everything else) of people you could think of having such a control over """the front page of the internet"" (lol) lead to it turning into an insanely boring and one of the cringiest places on the internet. Twitter is downright refreshing compared to the average subreddit, which is saying a lot

The sad part is that I won't see the results of that rebalance of power, since I've only ever used Reddit on third party apps lol.

My other private subreddit for Wikipedia/github links has never flipped/flopped and it didn't get the same message.

Was it, though?

Sure, I'm not going to minimize the benefits of discoverability, avoiding the need for users to create yet another account, and taking the burden of infra maintenance off of someone who'd otherwise have to stand up a server to host phpBB or whatever.

But ultimately we don't strictly need these things. Isolated/fragmented web forums were doing just fine before Reddit came along. Maybe adding a little friction to the process of a first post to a new forum is a feature, not a bug.

> Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any time you hitch your community to someone else's platform, you incur the large risk that the platform owners will make changes that you don't like. It's not even "neglect and mismanagement": Reddit's owners have been doing what they believe increases the value of Reddit. Whether they're wrong or right about what changes accomplish that ultimately doesn't matter: those changes might not be what makes users and moderators happy, and users and moderators don't have much power to affect change. This protest/blackout may end up achieving the desired effect, but think of the time, energy, and effort wasted around all of it. Better to spend that time working on solutions that allow communities to own their slice of the platform, and have final say as to what happens with it.

So, what's the line? How much noise are we welling to dig through to find "some new content"? I'd argue reddit has enough noise to at least bring the question up.

in context of reddit, we clearly do not value that control at all. these last few weeks have shown how much control we truly have.

>Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work.

we solved that problem decades ago, though. I think even Reddit has RSS feed support (well, for now. I don't think it's native). I think leaving the centralizing to an underlying format is a better approach than expecting a benevelent dictator to always look into the best interests of the user while also seeking profits (or alternatively, an eccentric billionaire who cares not about profits).

Some inconvenience of signing up with an account is short term, and not exactly a huge barrier to begin with. I made 3 new accounts this week on various alternatives, barely took 10 minutes total.

That said, I've had a burner email for as long as my personal email for this very reason. I even have 2 burner gmails. It's not exactly a huge invasive measure like a phone number (which I'd never give to a site that isn't trying to take payments. Hell, still haven't given Amazon my phone number).

historically speaking, some subs have gone private short term simply to control some crazy amounts of spam or harassment. And there's many more instances where subs went restricted for a while. So this isn't the only feature of privating communities.

>not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.

No tools are ever designed for use in protest, so this is a circular argument. That's part of what a protest is.

No, it was always to "create your own community". Right down to the asinine mechanic where the Head mod is simply first come first serve. If Mod A makes a community, assigns Mod B to moderate it, and leaves for 5 years, B cannot override A when he comes back without intervention from Admins. On the contrary, A can kick out B despite doing nothing for 5 years.

They very much designed it for "petty tyrants" and the site should/would have built a much better system to kick out inactive mods if they cared about "being part of a community". But I think we both know that Reddit just cared about free labor (until news sites force their hand).

Hence, the "law".

If you read a bit deeper with the context of how reddit has operated:

>Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.

No, subreddits always belonged to mods, and users complaining about power modding has fallen on deaf ears.They never cared about moderator antics outside of a few specific instances across 15 years.

>Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.

This makes it sound like moderators are voted in, or hired. No, it's literally a factor of who has been a moderator the longest. Without admin intervention or the user deleting their account, the head mod of r/pics would be some 16YO inactive account. If they came back they can boot off everyone. Sure Admins would fix it, but why does a mod have that power if they are merely "stewards"?

their tools don't reflect their words.

>Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Yes, and taking away 3rd party apps definitely definitely helps that reliance. Making the mobile website an unusable ad to the app helps that reliance. I'm sure one day old reddit will be gone and RES will be non-functional and they will send a similar message.

>Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here.

And that comes to today's topic: is some small subreddit really worth threatening? I've heard other subs as small as 20 subs getting this message. There is no real "community", and I'm guessing such a move will simply make a small sub unmoderated, and then banned as part of the global rules. Why does Reddit care about such small guppies?

Then why did reddit make modding hierarchies based on who has been the moderator the longest? They've had a half dozen issues where this happened and provided no changes to help alleviate this supposed antipattern.

>If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean.

yea. And I think we both know what happened. You appeal to admins and admins do nothing. I'm sure some people can retrieve admin messages that say something to the tune of "it's the mod's community they can do what they want. Make your own".

So yea, I find it hypocritical and manupulative when suddenly the admins care about "community and belonging". You didn't care until it bit you in the ass. Again. This isn't the first time and at this point it's their fault they didn't change the rules in time for this.

>I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance.

I look to it forward to Tumblr 2.0 as well. No faster way to kill a site that relied on porn to drive traffic than to suddenly take it away. They want to ride that easy train until it becomes difficult, and then drop it and expect everything to go on as planned. I don't think it matters how you feel about porn here, this is just a nasty tactic.

>but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them.

He's going public and being paid some X million dollars. Mods aren't.

They've been user hostile for a very very long time. This isn't just about 3rd party apps profiting. This is the culmination of ignoring the user until they want to profit off of them. Shocker they aren't seeing eye to eye this time, time 1000th.

the inevitable move, maybe. The only move (for profits), yes. But they are executing this absolutely horribly. Reddit has never been an overly formal site, and I guess that is built into the culture of the admins as well.

>they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest

Historically speaking, they never did. We have seen mods run a sub to the ground several times and the result was users jumping ship to a new community.

So while inevitable, it is inherently hypocritical for Reddit to suddenly care now as if they ever cared about users.

on the other hand, if you deleted your account and walked you also cannot interact in any polls, unless the polls are off site. So while people are saying "no one left", clearly there is SOME population reflected in how much people here and elsewhere are talking about it.

Disclosure: would be 10 year old power user. Deleted my account 3 years ago, but still inevitably had to lurk in reddit for some communities. I'm just enjoying the fire rising as I inevitably predicted since the 2015 blackout days. Not very happy about the changes given that I used a combination of RES (which at this rate I'll be surprised survives more than 2 years) and anonymous browsing on Infinity to check. The discourse tbh has only gotten more polarizing, even on non-political subs and I wanted a goo d excuse to make a hard stop to reddit. Thank you, Reddit.

BTW: infinity's stance here is to try what Apollo didn't do. Infinity will be paid-only, and if that doesn't stick, it's done. That's basically a kiss of death for how I used Infinity, but best of luck to the devs.

Maybe this is a long requested feature that reddit could have implemented... nah. Clearly it's the mods who are selfish.

no, there's a concept in reddit called a "personal subreddit". You know how you can click a user and it will show you the most recent comments? e.g. /u/chankstein38 would be your comment history.

Well, in 2017/8 or something, You can choose to convert this into your own subreddit. Complete with followers, votes, and user comments on "your sub". Never understood the idea given reddit's semi-anonymous nature, but I guess OnlyFans models benefited a lot from it.

This sub is literally the user's sub.

The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.

Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)

That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.

Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:

Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":

<quote>

Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.

TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.

And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.

(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)

Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.

Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.

That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.

I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

</quote>

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>

Links:

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.

And in this case, that one person happens to be me.

Granted, 1% would still be a lot on this scale. So I'm not saying that as an insult.

A more noble alternative is that the level of internet discourse has become so much more refined these days that if you simplify a new position to an old analogy you're just retreading old "solved" ground rather than discussing the nuances that make this particular topic business as usual/the end of society. To be fair most people are anti shooting babies and pro killing harmful parasites but neither of those analogies are particuarly novel or useful in an abortion discussion unless it's the first time you've considered the topic.

Make a free alternative that handles massive load/scale and run it how you want.

Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple.

I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever.

What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you.

The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.

There's also /r/MKaTH, affiliated with the former but public. I'd taken that private and added a solidarity note. So far, no modmail, though it has far fewer members than /r/dredmorbius.

(OP, FYI.)

Having a specific subreddit affords the ability to:

- Curate the content presented. It's not everything I've ever posted to Reddit, it's a specific set of interests. Visiting via the "old" view shows those topics, visible at the Internet Archive presently: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredm...>

- Style the subreddit, as noted.

- Provides other subreddit-specific features including the Wiki (which I'd made heavy use of), moderation tools, and the like.

TL;DR: It's different in many ways.

Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

No reassurance, no de-escalation, no reasonable transparency of the decision making process. Just dictator moves, lack of communication in general except for a few emotion-driven jabs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/148w58w/vote_s...

"Hi Reddit, this is the CEO. I admit it, I didn't handle this well. Some of our recent decisions have not been met well by our users. There are great points being made, and I've decided to take this into consideration. Let's start over."

I've unsuccessfully been trying to create a Lemmy account for the past three days. The signup button just spins. I've used many different combinations of usernames, email accounts, browsers, origin IPs, Lemmy instances, etc. Maybe God hates me, but more likely I'm not the only one.

Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?

> Was it, though?

The great thing about Reddit is how it removes almost any friction from creating and joining new „forums“. The less friction or transaction cost you have the better. Without Reddit I’m not sure we’d have dedicated forums of people posting their grilled cheese sandwiches or Babylon 5 GIFs

I've contributed code to the project.

(OP, FYI.)

As usual, dang is reasoned, articulate, and fair. I have a better understanding of HN's policies and actions, even if I disagree in part on how this is being conducted.

I'm told (via email) that it was largely the flameware detector which adjusted this particular post's page ranking.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

(OP, FYI)

A DoS / DDoS attack on finding human mods for those subs, after a fashion.

Some have received the notice, some haven't, yet, as of last check.

Plus, I subscribe to about 30 subreddits, most of which pretty niche. Could I replace them with forums? Sure, and I do have fond memories from phpbb forums around the turn of the millenium, even moderating a few as a teen.

But then I'd have to check about 5-10 different forum sites daily, each with subforums for different specific topics. It adds friction.

It's much more convenient just opening reddit whenever I have a few minutes to scroll my feed and see what's up in my niche communities.

Reddit also gives the power to users to create niche communities. R/xbiking comes to mind, which is about a very specific bicycling subculture consisting of using vintage mountain bike frames from the 80s and 90s with a mix of modern and vintage parts to create cool all around bikes... Sort of. Anyways, to my knowledge this subculture did not exist anywhere before Reddit, and I can hardly see how it could have sprung up on bikeforums.net, for example. Petitioning the forums admins for a new subforum for a community that hardly existed would have been difficult, and the sort of posts R/xbiking sees would probably have been closed as offtopic in other subforums. Much easier to create and organically grow a new community on Reddit.

Personally, after being a bit reticent, I am now hopeful for fediverse based solutions (kbin and Lemmy notably) to replace this.

Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).

Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.

Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.

Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.