I'm thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y'all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.
Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y'all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.
Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.
Subs which did that had their mods replaced by reddit admins
The real question you have to ask yourself is how long they can do that before it starts to affect their bottom line.
Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.
I came here to banish reddit but this thing wont leave my feed. I guess I'm going to have to take the time to filter the word.
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
Indeed, fuck reddit and their Russian shills. I was permanently banned for commenting about the Russians receiving a dose of their own medicine and I did not use a single swear word.
I protested, they said, nope
Protesting on a site that's fully automated their administration just means getting told "fuck you" twice.
There's no real bureaucracy under the hood. It's just "friend computer says you're guilty" followed by "friend computer says you're still guilty plus you had the gall to doubt friend computer's immaculate wisdom".
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
It's because it was being done by terminally online Redditors, not using the site was more painful for them than the site itself.
A boycott that doesn’t hurt has no leverage.
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
The internet always moves on; the most popular bulletin boards and usenet groups and web forums eventually fell and people moved away. Even Digg had a powerful following and heavy user traffic and due to Reddit style changes everyone left too. Reddit just as likely.
There's still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
And all things Meta.
Twitter and Reddit went so much to shit and lowered the bar so much that Meta actually became almost not bad in my eyes, almost.
FUCK SPEZ
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience “fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we’ll remove everything that’s not about X”?
No that just isn't allowed. I'm not joking, the admins have removed entire mod teams and installed new ones because the mod teams decided to change the topic of the sub.
You know what's not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.
The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.
Quite a few of the mods are severing alternative interests. The partisan subs are run by literal party staffers and think tanks. Lots of the big brand subs are run by marketing agencies. Reddit's financial model is to sell these spaces. You don't just have some random mega-fan running /r/Marvel. That's a Disney staffer.
None of these guys are going anywhere.
I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.
fuck u/spez
...we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm
Seems like that's about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.
My account was banned because I kept reporting people and it was easier to get rid of the complainer than it was all the bigots she was complaining about... but... now I feel very "You can't fire me, I quit" about it
It's amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit's investors can make more money.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That's when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
"But we'll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday."
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless "We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power" idiocy.
so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you're a leader. but they're better than the alternative. that's the whole point.
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
In the next protest mods should allow content like porn as another way of protest.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o
She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.