48 hours will not even ding reddit. Do it for a month and it will count, assuming reddit doesn't simply re-enable the subreddits. But obviously the mods here are walking a fine line between pissing off their users and getting reddit to bend over.
With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut everything down for a week (I don't blame them, but that's a failure mode we had not considered). This caused us to go dark completely without an easy way to reach the users to tell them what was going on.
When power came back traffic was where it was before within 20 minutes, and the next day we even had a surge in traffic that we didn't ever pass again. If you really want to see an effect I would suggest a period somewhere between two weeks and a month backed up by a threat to do it for three months if they don't recant. That would have some serious teeth in it and threatens to completely derail any IPO plans they might have.
Anything less and you're just showing that it is reddit that is the boss, not you. A good rule for a community is that if it isn't your domain, database and server it isn't really your community.
I don't think the direct losses of the 48 outage will be what matters here.
Rumors are that Reddit wants to IPO later this year. This blackout will put the spotlight on two issues:
- Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community, especially the moderators who provide an essential service for free.
- Reddit is out of touch with its own community, and keeps pissing off the very people their existence depends upon.
If I were planning to invest in Reddit, this would make me think twice.
> Reddit is extremely dependent on the goodwill of the community
Are they? Assuming they all go dark for 48 hours, then come back online, and business continues as usual... wouldn't that somewhat prove that Reddit doesn't have to worry too much? What if certain subreddits go dark for extended amounts of times, multiple weeks, maybe even a month. And then new copycat subreddits pop up, what do you think will happen?
Reddit will be fine, the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know, it's the powerusers and moderators that care a lot.
(FWIW, I absolutely think the protests are justified and Reddit's pricing is insane, but I'm cynical and don't see them being affected by this all that much)
There are already reports of some large subreddits shutting down permanently, such as programming humor.
The idea that this action can’t possibly hurt Reddit I keep seeing is amazing to me. It absolutely will hurt Reddit. Even if it’s not an existential blow. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is. Simply saying it can absorb all this like it’s nothing is myopic.
And FWIW, I’m glad most people aren’t as cynical as you, and willing to attempt to change things.
Nothing, but it would result in even more backlash.
I could see them doing this for the most popular subreddits like r/videos, but if you start doing this for even medium sized subreddits it’s going to have even more severe consequences.
People aren’t stupid, and they aren’t as docile as you think.
These theoretical questions to me are the equivalent of “Why didn’t the US just kill every person they encountered in Vietnam that was a male of fighting age instead of fighting against an insurgency?
Well, they could have. They had the ability to. And it probably would have resulted in a different outcome. But it would had some pretty severe consequences.
> People aren’t stupid, and they aren’t as docile as you think.
People have a very short attention span and a very low level of commitment if they're not directly impacted. Remember the outrage about Musk on Twitter? It's all but died down. Or the various attempts to create some alt-right social networks.
People don't have an obvious other place to go, and the majority of the community of /r/whatever will just go to /r/whatever-else.
Ultimately, we can only speculate on what's going to happen. Neither of us can say conclusively, we can't see the future.
All I can say is that subreddits are built on the idea of autonomy - it's not just that they have their own mods. It's that this is a semi autonomous community. If you look at a lot of the subreddits that decided to go dark, their moderation held polls/voting about it and asked for community input.
Reddit admins are there as a safeguard - in the case of a subreddit doing something illegal or so unsavory it poses a larger threat to the site.
In the past over the last 10 years, this model has mostly worked. Even the subreddit r/the_donald, during the lead up to it being banned the moderators there described having discussions with the administration about what they would have to do to avoid being banned. Just because Reddit has always had the ability to be more forceful doesn't mean they've exercised it.
The action people keep suggesting here - a hand wave and all of a sudden these subreddits are "nationalized" (for lack of a better term) like a South American dictator taking over an oil company would completely shatter the trust that has been built, and it would have a lot of effects on the site. Just like when the South American country starts nationalizing companies. Capital flees.
They might not even be visible right away, and it probably wouldn't result in Reddit itself closing down but I am confident it would ultimately harm Reddit substantially (as opposed to many of the comments in this thread claiming it would have no adverse effect.)
Using Twitter as an example when the acquisition isn't even a year old isn't valid, in my opinion. Talk to me in 2 years.
This is the part that your side doesn't get - having power to do something and not using it doesn't mean you're giving off an "illusion".
Everybody who runs a subreddit is fully aware that Reddit admins have the power to shut them down if necessary, but the precedent that has been set is that there would be a lot of communication or they'd have to be doing something flagrantly illegal for that to happen.
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand conceptually - because it's how the international community works. Countries generally get sanctioned, not invaded.
Yes, it's not a perfect system. Yes, countries like the United States stage coups and regime changes, but it is better than the old way of invading and trying to rule a country like they're a colony.
>Then why join this debate in the first place?
Because the goalpost I keep seeing put in place to frame this discussion is that if Reddit doesn't immediately collapse after shutting down third party apps, then all the protests made no difference and clearly nothing has changed. My point is that it might take multiple years before we see how hollowed out the site has truly become. And it might still be a very popular website from a traffic perspective, but I believe it will have lost the core "engine" that makes it work.
Also I have a lot of work to do that I don't want to do and commenting on here is a way that I procrastinate but I think this is probably a safe assumption for most people spending their morning commenting here.
You're making all kinds of assumptions about the people discussing this. Some of us have actual experience running large communities and this informs some of the statements you see people making here.
Whether or not you believe that the moderators are what makes reddit or that the users do so is only a subtle shift but it makes all the difference. If moderators flex their power they will stop being moderators because clearly the no longer seem to have the ordinary users interests at heart. This is why this is such a dumb play. You either have a 'batna' or you don't. Reddit holds the cards, and this is pretty much begging for them to show that they do so. Worse has happened and it never made a difference, as long as ordinary users aren't impacted to a degree that makes a difference to them things will stay as they are.
And a 'look at what you made me do' defense won't hold water, the users will blame the moderators because they can't get their fix, not reddit.
Reddit will die like every other community: through attrition, not because the moderators throw a fit over something that they may well see as important but which does not offend others.
>Whether or not you believe that the moderators are what makes reddit or that the users do so is only a subtle shift but it makes all the difference.
Moderators ARE users of Reddit. Drawing a line between "moderator" and "user" isn't the line that matters. The line that matters is "lurker/regular user" and "power user"
Moderators are power users. They're part of the small percentage of users that contribute a way outsized amount to Reddit by curating portions of it.
If the rule of thumb of online communities that 90% only lurk, and only 10% contribute, they're part of the 10%. That 10% is what makes Reddit work, period. Moderators use third party apps to aid in moderation, but a lot of power users just use third party apps because they are a lot less shitty. This ban ultimately targets all power users - the entire 10%.
>This is why this is such a dumb play.
I think the "play" you are referring to here is the idea of temporarily or permanently shuttering a subreddit.
But it's actually the opposite - if Reddit exercises their power resurrect subreddits (I think they could get away with the biggest ones like r/videos, but anything medium size and smaller no way) they lose, BIG TIME. And so many of these subreddits are participating they'd have to do it for hundreds of subreddits just to juke KPIs for their fail to launch IPO.
The idea that the users will just blame the mods is silly, as I said most of these blackouts were discussed at the subreddit level and the overall community sentiment is positive. And some of these people have been moderating these communities for years. You can't just replace them with randoms and expect the experience not to deteriorate.
Here is an example on a subreddit with 50k subscribers:
This right here. I've been on reddit since 2010 or so and the dejure "most important thing in the world to talk about" is ever changing. Hong Kong, COVID-19, Ukraine, Harambe, Victory (the AMA person?), the great subreddit purge to name a few. Everyone claims they're going to delete reddit but will simply forget about it in a few weeks. haha
I've been on Reddit since 2009, and never cared about any of that stuff or claimed I was going to leave Reddit over it. I absolutely am leaving Reddit over this.
I am keeping my account, because I might need it to promote my business (it still has utility in that area and I am pragmatic, I am not going to not do something that could help my business for ideological reasons), but I will no longer be using it on a daily basis or contributing comments/posts unless they back away from this.
> I am keeping my account, because I might need it to promote my business (it still has utility in that area and I am pragmatic
ok, so you're not leaving. Everybody else will be just as pragmatic and the rest won't care. Realize that you just pretty much proved the point of everybody here that believes that this likely will have very little impact. If you were principled you would leave.
There are plenty of people, especially in entertainment who don't use social media but have accounts to announce things like a new project they are working on.
I think it's disingenuous to say that someone who only posts to Twitter twice a year, to announce that they are on tour but does not browse Twitter regularly or use it aside from that is an active Twitter user.
>Everybody else will be just as pragmatic
My intention is to only utilize my account to promote my business on subreddits I think are relevant, whereas before I commented regularly several times a week. If everybody makes a similar change, Reddit would lose a lot of commentors.
>If you were principled you would leave.
The multiple threads you and I are going at it in all boil down to the same basic thing: what each of us thinks will be the result of Reddit's changes to allowing API access. What subreddit moderators will do, what Reddit as a company will do in response, how users as a whole will respond, etc...
At this point, I think we have both fleshed out what we think is going to happen in multiple ways and it's clear we disagree so further discussion on that front is pointless.
I will say that I don't feel I have been making an argument that people will (or should) leave on principle. Or that I myself am leaving on principle. I am choosing to leave Reddit because I don't want to use their terrible web application or mobile application.
If that changes, and I'm able to use Apollo again then my stance will change. Because I am pragmatic. I don't think there's going to be some Mastidon alternative that pops up. I think convincing Reddit to change course is the best path forward than trying to get an alternative going.
You're saying a large percentage of the current userbase won't (probably >90%)
However, all users aren't the same. While I did not moderate any subreddits, I contributed substantially to several small ones in the way of posts, upvotes and thoughtful content. That's the stuff that really brings value to Reddit - it's the long tail. And even if the percentages are right, if the 5-10% that leave are some of the most valuable users of the site it will have a HUGE effect.
There are things about Reddit that are not widely known - the often thrown around stat of a small number of accounts moderating a huge number of subreddits is the tip of the iceberg. There's also a subreddit that you only get invited to if you have over 100k comment karma, called the Century Club. That's been around for a long time. Reddit knows it needs power users, not lurkers that add no value but advertisement impressions.
If they are trying to pivot to just become a site where you can infinite scroll memes and focus on the big subreddits, then they're directly positioning themselves to compete with Facebook and TikTok which seems pretty bad strategically IMO. It definitely doesn't bode well for the next decade of Reddit.
> Nothing, but it would result in even more backlash.
I doubt that. But it's fine to disagree about such things, the mods are actually showing reddit that they are a risk factor themselves and you can bet that counter insurgency planning is underway. The 'vocal minority' is a minority. I don't think reddit would be above killing of a few hundred (or even a few thousand) accounts that they consider to be trouble makers (whether or not that is true is something else).
The general unwillingness of people to do unpaid labour for a website that is actively working against them.
It's difficult enough to find anyone willing to actually put the hard yards in to moderation as it is, let alone when all of the resources and tools currently at moderator disposal get shut down.
Evidently not, since that's already a motivation that isn't sufficient to get enough people actually doing the work - and if anything, Reddit taking the step of unilaterally usurping community leaders for not being profitable enough would only reduce the perceived power of a moderator position.
I think the people that we are arguing with don't understand that being a moderator of a subreddit isn't just about being able to ban people. It's about being a leader of a community.
You decide rules and shape the "culture" of the subreddit. Yes, there are absolutely people who are moderators and on insane power trips. That's always been a thing, for every form of online community I've ever known of (IRC, forums, etc...) But there are also many who view the role differently. That's why moderators of subreddits like r/programmerhumor, a meme subreddit that is also a place for programmers (specifically newer programmers) to blow off steam and joke about things they're stressed out about believe they have the power to shut down the subreddit permanently and Reddit will not "bring it back."
If Reddit crosses that line and brings subreddits back, installing puppet leaders who on earth is going to invest time into building a community on Reddit again? Knowing it can be yanked from them at an arbitrary whim - not even for breaking moral rules, but for threatening profits. This is a much more delicate balance than the commenters are painting it as. They clearly don't understand why Reddit works and seem to think it's pure network effect that has consolidated things away from independent forums.
When people talk about googling something and adding "reddit" as a keyword, it's because they want to read authentic discussion from real people about a topic - and sometimes a topic that is somewhat obscure - not an SEO optimized landing page that's going to ask for their email and try to sell them something.
That only exists in communities that are curated and participated in by people who care about them. Removing that removes the core of Reddit's being.
It's not a matter of "wannabe", it's "wannado". Having a bunch of sycophants in the sidebar isn't going to restore a community unless they're actually committed to making the subreddit an enjoyable place to be, and if they were committed to that they'd already be doing it.
Being a moderator is a lot of work. You'd have to find a sucker to provide free labor for you. You can maybe find a few, but can you find enough to replace all moderators once you pissed them off enough ?
> There will be no lack of people that would line up to have moderating powers in a large enough subreddit.
I don’t see how having bad mods not willing to put in the work and is just taking the role for the power is good for the subreddit and Reddit as a whole.
less a replacement and more an alternative made years ago whose last post is 4 years ago and is currently restricted
and the pinned post is saying they need moderators so back to square one. creating a new one isn't a problem but scaling users and finding people to run it well is
I wonder how all the various subreddits will work without their moderators. If moderators stop doing their jobs I have a feeling many subreddits will devolve into chaos - spam, off topic posts, crazy people posting the most vile and repulsive shit, … etc.
If they enable the subreddits without moderation, they'll die very soon. They really need moderation and users often don't realise how much crap they're protected from until it's too late.
I suspect that would be a far more effective protest, though if successful it may well kill the subreddits. The mods are trying to have their cake and eat it too: make a 'principled stance' without risk to their subreddits. That won't work.
> What if certain subreddits go dark for extended amounts of times, multiple weeks, maybe even a month. And then new copycat subreddits pop up, what do you think will happen?
For the most part, nothing. The new subreddits will likely be ghost towns.
> the vast majority of the end-users doesn't care or doesn't even know
I'm not sure. I've seen several subreddits where they've done polls about going dark and they've overwhelmingly supported going dark. For example, r/AcademicBiblical is currently around 80% in favor of going dark and that's not a subreddit I would think is just chalk full of Reddit power users.
Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business.
This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community you don't actually own the community.
People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.
While I miss forum days as well, reddit has permanently shifted the space. For someone with a lot of interests, are you going to sign up for a forum for each one and keep tabs on those? It's difficult to even think about how I want my online "community" to look without reddit, even though I'm glad to be leaving.
This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.
I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.
Forums were also dedicated to "mostly related" things (like a subreddit) and it was a bit of effort to create a new account on a different forum, and you were obviously new at that point.
So "brigading" and such weren't really much of an issue (and the issue has always been people barging into a community, knowing nothing about it, pontificating on some post/issue, and promptly leaving).
Forums still exist, but you need a slightly strange sort of person to continue to put the effort into them when Reddit is "free and easy".
There are lots of solutions to needing to create an account now. There's social logins, and the prevalence of password managers if you want to use an email and can't remember if you already have a login.
Reddit is easier because you already have an account, but creating an account on a random site has never been easier to do or manage, so it's not that much harder (and importantly, people already do it because not everything is on reddit so it's not "new" to learn how to create an account somewhere).
I wonder if online discussions will shift to Discord channels. Sure it’s another centralised “forum” but it does seem like a credible alternative - a lot of discussion already seem to happens there.
The voting system is gamification of forum posting. Instead of posting when you feel you have something to say, people end up chasing a number for the dopamine hit.
There's nothing terrible about downvotes as such if they are done right, but this is one thing Slashdot did right: you can never be more than +5 or -1 on any post.
Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account.
Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.
We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over.
It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.
I was so bitter about the experience that I wrote a script that crawled the top 10000 subreddits looking for possible takeovers, and my friend and I took over a few dozen lucrative subreddits*. Think generic words like r/skateboarding (not one of them). Just add a spammy automoderator account to your modlist so it can't get taken back over.
It goes by the "last activity" timestamp of your creator/modlist, so even if you are actively moderating your subreddit (like attending to the mod queue), your subreddit can still get taken over if you aren't posting.
The system is so, so stupid.
* If you search the takeover requests subreddit you could even see that we weren't even stealing the subreddit from the original owners who did all the work to grow the subreddit, but rather from other takeover bots.
That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.
Until someone starts one … heck you are looking at one right now; specialised but it works in more or less the same way (with more restrictions on downvoting).
That's true, and puts reddit in an even more powerful position.
If those mods were anywhere near serious about this they should just roll their own reddit and attempt to migrate their communities. I'm pretty sure that would elicit an immediate response from reddit but that would be a much harder fire to put out than this one.
Showing off mods who will continue working after mild token protests in the post-IPO ad-infested trash hole the site becomes against users' wishes is a great signal for short term gain.
Lmao, maybe certain groups of people can boycott stuff, but human beings in general sure can't.
I'm pretty sure the average/more casual Reddit user either: doesn't use 3rd party apps, or doesn't care and will just use the official one.
It's Twitter all over again "omg everyone will leave it now that Elon's in charge". Yeah, that hasn't happened. At. All.
Now, knowing how us fleshy meatbags work, you're probably thinking I'm in favour of Reddit/Twitter/Elon or whatever. That is not the case.
All I'm doing is reiterating that humans gonna human and that no meaningful change will come from a few hardcore users when the average user couldn't give a shit.
While you're not wrong, I think it's that certain group of people that matters. They're the most engaged, and if you think that group follows the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule then that's really all that matters, since they're the ones creating the content that the lurkers consume and go to the network for.
I feel like 48 hour long outage for a social media website is huge. That's 2 days for people to look around at alternatives. Remember when google plus launches FB argued that they had zero hours to lose and they were kinda right.
Reddit can solicit new mods and ban the old ones. It's probably the quickest way out for reddit and users will likely hardly notice except for those subreddits where the mods are very closely associated with the community itself. But that's definitely not the bulk of them and not the larger ones, though there are some exceptions.
I don't think it's all that difficult. Message the top 100 contributors of every subreddit that goes dark to ask if they want to be mods, and if they say yes put them on a two month trial.
I remember when Ronald Reagan fired all air traffic controllers in the US, that definitely had me wondering about the wisdom of the move and yet it went off without a hitch. Not a single plane crashed on account of that.
Top contributors might not be interested in moderating though. It’s a different kind of activity - like being a tennis player vs being an umpire; Don’t think Roger Federer was ever interested in being an umpire.
P.S. Also moderating anything on the internet has been derisively called being an internet janitor.
I think you're misinterpreting how mass protests work: unlike, say, a strike, the goal doesn't have to be to directly apply pain to the target until they yield. Instead, a large scale protest demonstrates, first and foremost, the ability of the opposition to organize (lending credence to the threat of further, more extreme action), and to pull more people into the organized opposition.
Yes, I totally understand the principle, but the persons creating the blackout are themselves entirely optional and they don't seem to fully realize this.
Protests are much stronger if you have a viable alternative lined up. They don't have any.
Reddit admin are bricking themselves to be resorting to telling moderators that they will only make better moderation tools if their subs don't participate, so they clearly don't agree 48 hours is an idle threat.
I agree, this won't by itself ding Reddit enough to properly move the needle, however it will raise awareness massively, and suddenly every user who has noticed a subreddit they follow has gone dark will have a "take" on how they feel about the whole situation.
I think what Reddit would prefer is a "rip off the bandaid" situation where they just get all this over and done with as quickly as possible, with the least amount of noise possible.
I think this is one major reason that until the AMA that's happening today, all official communication has been happening in backchannels despite effecting a large number of Reddit users, whether they are effected directly by a 3rd party app going away, or indirectly, by a subreddit they are a member of being moderated with worse tools.
There's another fine line the mods walk: in the past the reddit admins have threatened to simply clean house and appoint new subreddit moderators in the event of an extended subreddit blackout.
This argument, regardless of its factual correctness regarding the impact on Reddit, is an argument of helplessness - it argues there is no point in acting, because nothing will be achieved.
Sometimes you have to act, even if it will have no effect, because it is the right thing to do, where our sense of moral indignation is so great we are motivated to act regardless of the overall outcome or what we may or may not reasonable expect to achieve.
It simply points out what the ground rules are, if you want to make a point then you can do that but it won't amount to much if it doesn't lead to results.
There are actions that would be much more likely to result in a response, the mods are clearly engaging in a balancing act rather than a principled stance and I predict that if they stay this course they will simply be supplanted by more pliable individuals. A credible threat requires some actual work and preparation, not just the clicking of a link that another party controls anyway.
Twitter has proven that not even that would matter. Network effects are too powerful. People use Reddit therefore people will use Reddit.
Once a company has a large enough network effect they can do almost anything and people won’t leave. I’ve come to believe that it’s the most powerful form of lock in.
I actually did quit Twitter and nothing will be able to make me go back there. Principles and all that. But I suspect that the fraction of people that followed through on their statement that they would leave Twitter is super small. I also haven't gone anywhere else and I feel much the better for it.
Hey, can you please stop posting unsubstantive and flamebait comments? We already had to ask you that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34972773) and it's still mostly what your account is doing. We have to ban that sort of account. I don't want to ban you because you've also posted some fine comments - e.g. these:
but unfortunately we have to moderate by the bad things people post, not the good things. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Thanks to LLMs traffic can be artificially boosted to the point where ghost towns feel like they have momentum. That problem just won't be getting any better.
> But obviously the mods here are walking a fine line between pissing off their users and getting reddit to bend over.
I'm actually surprised reddit hadn't introduced more democratic options for controlling subreddits that reach a certain size. There may be a lot of users that really don't care about 3rd party apps and want to keep their content flowing
The only thing untrue about it is, you can't buy SpaceX stock. I would suggest reading publicly available information about Elon musk, Twitter, and SpaceX.
It's a shame because of all the social media platforms, reddit is one of the best. There isn't so much grandstanding (I couldn't tell you a single username on reddit), and the ability to rapidly create special-interest subreddits means that discussion revolves around the topic, on the whole.
I left facebook because it became a place where people I knew spent their time curating a false virtual identity of themselves and seemed to become a place to establish social status rather than any meaningful conversation. I've avoided instagram for the same reason. Twitter seemed a good platform for open discussion, but now it looks like a pit of misery.
Mastodon is pleasant and friendly, but I find it hard to talk about the topics I am interested in. Like twitter it is more person-focused. What would be nice is if there is a way to cut across it easily in a more topic-focused way. Hashtags are present, but they don't have the feel of a forum. For positive or negative, there isn't any 'algorithm' on mastodon other than reverse chronology, and I think that does miss out on highlighting interesting topics and replies. Also there is no moderation or guidelines for hashtags, a feature which helped guide people to the right discussions in reddit.
For me it's because most good subreddits are focused on a single issue and not using the home feed let's you avoid all the "hot political issues of the day" where everything has been said millions of times. I don't need another 1000 comments of the same old 5 tired talking points
I also like not being insulted and topic specific subs allow strict moderation and the banning of unpleasant people.
Pissing off the people doing thankless free labor to keep your subreddits moderated and site functional seems like a poor choice. This is going to be quite an event when it kicks off Monday.
what puzzles me the most is that reddit's reasoning for charging money for their API is that "it's bad that other people are profiting from our work and it's too expensive to maintain without someone paying it".
hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators. if you wanna charge for API access, you should also pay your moderators since you are profiting from their work.
Another thing is that many moderators are paid but by other companies and PR firms. Reddit doesn't see any of it.
A lot of the content on Reddit is promotion and semi-hidden forms of advertising. Again Reddit doesn't see any of this spend.
In both cases Reddit is paying other companies for using their platform for making money.
Why would a corporation pay hundreds of thousands for ads when they could spend tens of thousands on some employee time to post, comment or moderate and get better results?
I imagine that the commercial entities using Reddit are using third party tools but the changes will hurt normal users more visibly.
I agree that there is a lot of commercial use of reddit that reddit fails to monetize. I have no idea how much of that is moderation, but it doesn't really matter: restricting API usage is the wrong way to solve this problem Instead, the easy fix is to update the standard ToS to be non-commercial use only and introduce paid plans for commercial use. I'm pretty confident that would be way more lucrative than advertising anyways.
Optionally, follow up with a badge or something that tags all content from commercial accounts as such, and allow users and mods to report commercial content that doesn't have such a badge.
This is pretty much what Reddit is doing. All the major 3rd party apps fall under commercial usage. The main issue is the price is insanely high for commercial apps.
Those third party apps aren't commercial use of Reddit. I am the user, not the app. That's like saying you can't use Chrome to view some website that prohibits commercial usage. That argument makes no sense.
They are seeing it as commercial use because those alternative apps have their own advertisements from which they make the majority of their money, which is specifically banned under the new terms.
Ads have nothing to do with the API changes. First of all, there's bot, to which ads are completely irrelevant, yet they're still affected by the API changes. Second, although there are 3rd party Reddit apps with ads, not all do. For example, Infinity for Reddit is ad-free (and open source), yet they're also affected by the API changes. In fact, Infinity's only monetization is via Infinity+, which has no extra features whatsoever, and only exists as a way to support Infinity's developer. Ads, or monetization at all, should have nothing to do with this.
Edit: sorry if I phrased something badly or was contradictory, I'm a bit tired :P - good night!
You're missing my point here. I realize that the broader discussion is about the API, but this specific thread is about a different kind of commercial use, which could be using the official reddit app or web client. We're talking about user behaviors that are inherently commercial; that's orthogonal to the way those behaviors are actually implemented (official client vs direct API access vs indirect API via third party apps vs...). For example, a PR firm could organize an AMA with an actor to promote an upcoming movie, but that actor could be using the official Reddit client. That's clearly commercial use, but Reddit gets nothing from that.
My point is twofold: first, I think this kind of commercial use is probably the much larger missed financial opportunity for Reddit. Second, if Reddit's intent with API restriction actually is, in fact, to try and capture some revenue from these kinds of behaviors, then they're clearly ignoring the much more targeted, and much more effective, approach of updating the ToS and directly restricting commercial use.
Using the above example, the PR firm would be required to have a commercial account, and Reddit would be free to set the pricing for that commercial account however they wanted. This is better for Reddit (they can charge way more than they would earn via API calls), it's better for users (more transparency re: what is or isn't commercial content), it doesn't affect third-party apps (no restrictions of API usage), and, if the pricing was right, it would be acceptable for the PR firm as well (paying for commercial exposure is standard practice basically everywhere else).
This would also give them a way to distinguish between commercial API usage like third-party clients, where the API is acting on behalf of individual users, vs commercial API usage like "scan reddit for mentions of this keyword and notify me", which is providing a direct commercial service without ever actually interacting with other users. These different kinds of usages could then be funneled into different pricing tiers for API access.
From a strategic perspective, I can't imagine a scenario in which Reddit's current approach is the right move here.
I think the situation is the opposite of what people believe is going on. Reddit just wants its biggest profiteers to start paying for what they’re taking.
The changes actually won’t hurt normal users at all. Users somehow don’t understand that this is not about them. The proposed changes are about limiting exploitstion from a handful of commercializing individuals.
Free access to the API is getting expanded, from 60 calls to 100 calls per minute. Developer resources will continue to be protected for non-commercial use. And bots and mod extensions are to remain unaffected.
But yeah, meanwhile regular users somehow think they need a call to action, even though nothing will change for them… except maybe the guy who runs Apollo will kill his app, but not because Reddit killed it. It’s because he doesn’t have the time to rewrite his code to be more efficient.
> the guy who runs Apollo will kill his app, but not because Reddit killed it. It’s because he doesn’t have the time to rewrite his code to be more efficient.
That’s not a fair summary of his position. If you read his testament, they really screwed him over, lied to him, and didn’t give him a realistic chance to turn any reasonable amount of his revenue to Reddit.
Even if he could lower the average number of API calls per daily user, they’re not even in the same ballpark, expense-wise.
Yeah, I have personally seen companies inflicting hundreds of millions worth of damages to themselves of not billions as part of pre-IPO work. Extra hilarious and sad to watch when the IPO has to be aborted.
Why is it so predictable? I know investors don't care about anything other than returns, but what returns do you get when you tank companies in such diametrically opposed ways from how they've operated before?
There are different kinds of investors involved in an IPO process.
The investors that have pre-IPO stock and who are looking to sell as quickly as possible, gain from IPO pops, so it's in their best interest to maximize short-term profits. That group of investors include a lot of the existing investors, and in almost all cases the founders and C-suite of the company.
Yes, they will need to be completely transparent about their outlook at the time of the IPO, and disclosing the current and historical active user counts is a pivotal figure in that data.
I wouldn't be surprised if this move actually damages Reddit enough that they can't IPO because the user engagement numbers will take such a sharp negative turn.
Highly likely that one of the risk factors they disclose in their prospectus is that the revenues are highly correllated with active user numbers and traffic and if those things change, revenues will be impacted. Even without this latest drama it would be amazing if they didn't have something like that in there.
Every IPO files paperwork that basically says "The SEC requires us to say we're completely full of shit, everything we do is a lie, and you will lose all your money."
And then it's perfectly legal.
And they continue to do that, go read any prospectus, it's all about how everything will die and the company is dead.
Looks like selling company you helped build because you believed in the idea to people who are only interested in profits often leads to worse service and dissatisfied customers. Who would have thunk.
Honest question, does this include artificial inflation of costs? I have seen figures that Reddit used to run with 20 people, and inflated to 2000 in 10 years. Old reddit is also superlight in bandwidth. New reddit is not.
In at least one real life example I have personal insight into: yes. They hired tons of devs to make the company look bigger and look like they were aiming for continued quick growth post IPO. Reality was that they did not have enough tasks for all people they had quickly hired.
Yeah, they're probably somewhat bloated like Twitter was, just like Twitter they don't deliver nearly as many new features to justify the large employee count, they don't do much of their own moderation either.
A large portion of those might be for checking reports etc, since reddit at least does seem to do a slightly better job trying to keep humans in the loop there.
I'm curious: how does Reddit profits from anything?
It seems to me the only revenue they seem to have is ads?? But I use it on the web and never seen ads (except for actual posts that are ads, but those usually get quickly downvoted and I don't even see most of them)... I think people who use Apollo or other apps also like to use Reddit on those because, among other things (like nicer UI) they do not show ads (and probably don't make any money either). Hence, it seems to me, perhaps naively, Reddit is giving us stuff literally for free.. they can't even monetise user data like Facebook, as most of us are anonymous users...
So, would be really interesting to understand how they're making money, which could help understand their motivations here.
There are definitely sponsored ads that pop up in a feed by default. Downvoting them doesn't change their placement.
There's also reddit premium (no ads, customizable avatar, reddit coins) along with a award system where people can give awards that cost reddit coins to exceptional comments. These awards cost reddit coins which can be gained through either getting awards on comments, or subscribing to reddit premium.
I would love to hear someone elaborate on this part. The API returns the same information as you get from the HTML interface right, but structured? If the API and the website had the same traffic, then wouldn't the HTML part (which is more complex I guess), but more expensive? If the API disappeared, wouldn't the HTML rendering require the same infrastructure? I'm not clear on how maintaining the API adds much overhead, except maybe compatibility inertia because it's a public interface. But infrastructure-wise?
That's not the same. The mods work out by their own choice, and usually have no bills to pay for this work. Reddit on the other is a company, and has bills to pay. And Reddit is not tiny. Not sure how big their costs are, and what they earn, but from my understanding, it's not a money-printer wasting bills on golden keyboards and parties, not are really profitable yet. So they are probably on a thin line, still struggling to survive long term without external money.
> hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators.
That work is not forced, they all choose to "work" for free and can quit any time they want.
And that work may be unpaid in monetary terms, but many of those moderators enjoy their share of internet fame or a sense of power over "commoners" or their feeling they are doing something for a common good, that they are happy to continue working unpaid.
I didn't realize Reddit API development was "forced".
Whether they enjoy it or not is beside the point.
Moderators are providing value to Reddit. If all mods quit, and no one stepped up to take their place, what would happen? Now who deserves to take profit monetarily for that value?
As far as Reddit "development" they should have stopped a long time ago, the site is horrible to use and has been for a long time.
Do you reckon their C-suite are not waged? (What revenue are they working with?)
This is a common issue with discussion of companies, people say "look they're not making any money" just because the company accounts are not recording profits.
But if you pay out all your money as C-suite wages (for example) then you have "no profits" as a company but people are certainly profiting.
Another angle is political steer; you can make profit outside the company, or make social change, and so forego intrinsic profit.
No doubt they are waged and have a substantial number of shares, which is why they are desperately and rather scummily trying to juice short-term profits pre-IPO. There's a big pay day in the offing, and they don't care who they roll over to line their pockets.
u/skinnymuch had it right, sorry if I made it confusing. Basically I'm saying even if the company report no profit, then the executives are probably making bank (earning large personal "profits"!).
It looks like they might be prepared for that already in some ways.
Reddit used to be a place where you go for relatively unbiased opinions. Some mods and subreddits were better than the rest, some worse. But atleast there was an illusion of being unbiased. Mods to for brand/product subreddits atleast officially were not linked to the company.
But that is no more the case, just realized a few weeks back that /r/midjourney is modded by the official team and reddit does not seem to be doing anything about it.
Guess Reddit is trying to become more like Facebook with major brands managing their own subreddits, so no more random mods needed.
Nah that's not uncommon, plenty of brands will have a social media presence, including Reddit; it's just that (from my perspective), the really commercial ones never gained much traction and didn't rise to the top anywhere.
Reddit marketing is done best if it looks grassroots.
I used to moderate a lot of large subreddits back in the day, and don't understand why the mods don't just shut them down indefinitely, until reddit capitulates.
What, I won't be doing a bunch of free labor for a multimillion dollar company while being called a dictator all day? Yes please!
Reddit would probably have to step in and start removing moderators, digging their hole even deeper.
They're going to dodge everything. That "AMA" will be nothing more than a PR-fest of non-answers and dancing akin to one tech CEO or another in congressional testimony.
I saw rumblings about the AMA maybe beating the most downvoted "Pride and accomplishment" comment. Thinking of that I just yesterday got Diablo 4 and realized just how normalized always online, microtransactiony BS has become. Maybe Reddit too will not so slowly boil the frog.
Well, one part of the subreddits say they'll be closed for 24 or 48 hours, others have said they'll be closed until this has been resolved.
Likewise, several major apps (I know of Apollo and RIF) will shut down on the 30th, before the API changes take effect. I'm sure some people will relent and use the official app / website after that, but others will just quit.
I'm not sure yet myself, it'll suddenly make a big gap in my idle mode browsing. I'm sure there'll be other things I can get on with though.
I deleted the Reddit app a few months ago because the comments are a hivemind and it was annoying me, but TikTok seems to scratch the reddit itch without the annoyances.
It really isn't. I have a lot of contrarian opinions, and HN doesn't dismiss them as quickly, and there are more people that will engage in reasoned debate with them.
HN is a western status quo community. There isn’t much intersectionalism or dissenting ideas. I do see people say what you’re saying, but without giving any guidelines or examples of contrarian opinions that do not get dismissed.
From my perspective, the HN you’re describing is equivalent to tech, IT, startup, VC sort of subreddits. Obviously HN has broad news too but the Overton window and acceptable dialogue of HN is limited to how those sorts of subreddits are.
The context most of Reddit seems to be missing here is that Reddit will do whatever it wants and has many times before in anything they find unsavory.
When the speech police benefits the mods, they are all on board with it. Now that it doesn't, they seem so suddenly shocked.
These free power tripping mods standing up for themselves can be steamrolled by employees, and probably will be.
It happened to more than one sub I was in. They installed their own mods to 'keep the peace', and despite warnings that bad actors were at play, shut down the subs anyways.
Yep, if they really think they’re being exploited, they’ll simply quit. It’s much different from relying on the only available, poorly paid job to make ends meet.
It’s incredibly frustrating when you take the time to write something out- something that benefits others and does nothing for you, like sharing your experience or knowledge- only to have the comment removed for one bullshit reason or another.
I have never written hate speech or anything racist or in that vein on Reddit, yet I’ve been censored and banned so many times by what I can only assume are children (or children at heart) with too much free time on their hands. I was a mod for a large subreddit for years and not once did I feel the need to ban anyone. The downvote system is pretty effective- the comments and posts that are downvoted enough, and it doesn’t take much, are hidden. There. The commenter retains their right to free speech, and doesn’t get frustrated that they were moderated/censored/punished for expressing themselves, and if the “community” decides it’s a “bad” comment, it’s hidden- effectively deleted as far as anyone who is truly prone to clutching pearls is concerned.
That being said, my mental health is way better now that all my accounts have been banned from subreddits I liked and I’m essentially pushed off of Reddit to healthier activities such as touching grass.
I'm glad your mental health is better, but you come across as an unreliable narrator. I very rarely have my comments removed, and when it has happened, it's never because I posted interesting facts about Cavendish bananas or how VLIW is underrated - it's at least a little controversial or rubs people the wrong way.
The problem with downvotes is brigading (trolls overrun your community), and people have to get exposed to toxic shit before it's downvoted enough to be hidden. You're free to go to voat or whatever if you want. I like communities with good moderation, I seek them out.
This is true until you start touching 3rd rail topics. And having an experience like parent poster's even one time is one time too many IMO.
I've never had a long and thoughtful post censored, but it's frustrated me the once or twice it happened with a short comment that I didn't believe deserved it.
I agree we need moderation to avoid being a cesspool, but a light touch is absolutely essential.
I've had long and thoughtful posts censored. Yeah it sucks. It makes you not want to help people, at least on Reddit. Why would I spend my valuable time helping someone out when it might just get deleted by a 16-year-old modding a subreddit in-between CoD matches?
I don't mean to brush Reddit with broad strokes, but I have to insist mine is a common experience. It is almost certainly true that if you stick to a few "sophisticated" subreddits and comment conservatively (both in frequency and in content), you'll rarely or never encounter the toxic traits of Reddit.
Many Reddit’s are run by angry folks, I’ve asked questions before only to be scolded and other times to crickets because it was not a funny picture/video or meme.
Any real forum I could find on the same topic always had nicer people and my questions got replies.
The problem is that forums cost money and time to host, update, prevent spam, etc.
Oh and I hate the Reddit auto-moderation, a post will never get posted because I was too new and then your dependent on the email to the Reddit moderators to move it out from an email they may never read.
> when you take the time to write something out - something that benefits others and does nothing for you, like sharing your experience or knowledge
Sharing your experience or knowledge is not a completely selfless act. Some enjoy the feeling of being an expert, others use this as an opportunity to push their point of view, some just like to help but even that is a benefit for them.
Feeling good when you do good things is, in the main, what makes you a good person. I'm not sure it's sensible to describe such people as essentially selfish.
“Feeling good when you do good things” could be seen as a definition of hedonism ;)
I’d describe selflessness in this context as accepting that a community might have different rules and see someone’s actions as not helpful, despite their best intentions.
I have been banned from subreddits for comments like that. The equivalent of "I don't think censoring GTA V is a good idea". Seriously.
Maybe the mods thought it was a bot account? Maybe they just disagreed with me. Maybe my account was too new but they didn't bother sending an explanation message? I don't know.
GTA games have been making fun of pretty much everyone. But there's this one group that you're not allowed to tell jokes about.
I'm old enough to remember how gamers laughed at people like Jack Thompson who wanted to censor and ban video games. But now people like him are moderating gaming subreddits and saying that censorship is good actually.
If it's the group I think you're talking about, you forgot your triple parentheses.
I have no idea who Jack Thompson is. Gamers are disproportionately shithead teenagers whose parents neglected to teach them that the n and t words are not the peak of comedy, so it sounds like Thompson is much needed presence.
I'm not going to hunt down the exact comments, but ones I can remember (and please pardon the lack of composure):
- Banned from /r/the_donald for saying something that wasn't even really critical of Trump, it was a fact, no ounce of opinion.. basically the mods were banning anyone who commented anything less than absolute, blind praise of Dear Leader.
- Banned from /r/clov (a penny stock subreddit) AFTER posting incredibly well-received research on the company, because I was skeptical about their earnings numbers (which did come in below expectations).
- Banned from /r/politics for saying something along the lines of "I wish Mitch McConnell would keel over already", which is absolutely a bullshit thing to get banned for, on /r/politics of all places. That's probably one of the least-"human rights" subs on Reddit. There are few places where your right to free speech is more-often challenged. Regardless of your political affiliation, I think you should be able to wish death on Trump, Biden, Obama, whatever.
- I was never banned from /r/AskWomen, but I think anyone who has been on Reddit an appreciable amount of time knows of their reputation for removing comments that have any potential to offend even one person on the planet (you can comment there if you are not a woman, they just want it off top-level and that your flair is your gender). I gave up commenting there pretty quickly. I mean I get it, I'm not a woman, but it is one of the most popular subs and you're naive if you think only women read AND comment on posts there.
- Banned from /r/robinhood for nicely, professionally (LinkedIn-appropriate) suggesting in a thread that Robinhood better-educate its users on the risks of options trading. Nowadays you can actually gamble with options in your Robinhood IRA account. That's nuts to me, and I am 100% sure it will be illegal someday. Vlad and co. really have no shame. I am an atheist, but sincerely hope Vlad Tenev goes to hell.
- When I messaged the "head mod" of /r/robinhood something like /u/CardinalNumber about the ban, I got some automated message back saying my message was reported to Reddit (I figured out it was automated because A) he replied to me immediately, and B) when I replied to that, I got the same exact message a second time. Reddit actually banned me for 3 days. It baffles me that companies like Robinhood let these guys have any association with their brand. I assume he was getting so much hate mail (he has banned A LOT of people from /r/robinhood) he just set up a program to report anyone who messages him- figures he gets a message, it's probably hostile. And as far as I know, he's still a mod there.
So at this point I was ready to perma-ban all my accounts by wishing death on Greg Abbott. I mean look, the dude is a prick. It's an opinion as close to fact as an opinion can get. It wasn't a death threat, it wasn't racist, it was the kind of comment the First Amendment was made for... we should be able to criticize public figures, especially government figures.. anything short of a death threat imo. Anyway, that's what happened. I wished death on Greg Abbott on /r/news or something like that, predictably I got hit with the perma-ban. Now I have huge swaths of my free time back haha. A double-edged sword to say the least.
I realize without the verbatim comments it's easy to read this comment and conclude I am probably being dishonest about the tone or nature of the comments, and that my bans were 100% justified. I can't disprove that notion, but for what it's worth, I wouldn't mind posting all of those comments on LinkedIn
with my full name and picture attached to it(with the exception of the wishing death on Mitch McConnell and Greg Abbott).
Unrestrained bullying, increasingly smaller numbers of article editors and a cruel clique of editors. It’s basically in maintenance mode, it’s not increasing in quality or knowledge.
Kind of like OpenStreetMap's community. I would guess the same can be said for anything like there where it's a free, open, global, community-led effort. There will always be a hard-core niche of people who live and breathe the thing and are naturally protective of it e.g. picky with other people's contributions.
I own the DocuSign subreddit. We are going dark permanently… until Reddit decides to reassign it to reps from the company. This is part and parcel of the hollowing out of the platform.
You don't own it, you were just either the first person to create the subreddit or someone who has since becomes the longest-serving moderator on it.
I'll never understand how camping on a subreddit gives anyone the right to say that they "own" it or gives them more power over everyone else indefinitely. It's a big flaw in Reddit, I think all subreddits should be put up for some kind of vote every ~2 years.
Because that’s how Reddit is designed, and that’s how forums worked before Reddit.
If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch. Reddit isn’t stack exchange. It’s more like running an open source project.
The problem is that there’s this hostile corporation that sometimes tries to kill their own product every few years overseeing everything.
> If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch
That's much easier said than done - say you don't like the moderation or content of /r/gaming, how are you going to spread the word about your new subreddit? It won't have as good a name as /r/gaming, it's not a default sub so it's more difficult to find, and you might find that mentions of your subreddit make it onto a powermod blacklist, ensuring you can't even link to it from other subreddits.
How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
> How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
I think that over time the concept of a default subreddit has been imbued with a significance that it didn't originally have. Basic UI design dictates that if someone shows up at the front page of your link aggregator website they should see some links, so they had to show some subreddits even before the user did anything. I don't think it was originally meant to imply any kind of guarantee or quality or approval by Reddit. But for various reasons, mostly to do with the huge growth in traffic to the Reddit front page (as well as some political meddling by the admins), that is now the impression a lot of people have.
You could also apply this for thinking to domain names and usernames on most sites. I’m not sure if I agree or not, but the same system exists there too if owning names by being the first to claim them
>How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
Reddit hasn't had default subreddits for a few years. These days you're onboarded onto r/popular and then algorithmically recommended a few you can subscribe to.
By this logic, Americans don't own their land, they were there just in time to conquer it. Or I don't own my home, I was just the first person to buy it.
Except that ownership of land, in America, on balance, provides a little more security than, um, "owning" a Subreddit. But hey, I don't know much about Reddit, and I've not followed much of the discussion, but has it not come up yet that Reddit could penalize these, um (again), "owners" for their uprising by taking their "ownership" away and opening back up these Subreddits?
Reddit has a sea of moderators who quietly moderate hobby subreddits that they're interested in, and then a small number of power moderators who moderate hundreds of subreddits each (and who have coordinated these blackouts). These powermods spend most of their time on metadrama and have little concern over the quality of their subreddits. I think Reddit should absolutely be stripping away control from these powermods.
> Reddit could penalize these, um (again), "owners" for their uprising by taking their "ownership" away and opening back up these Subreddits?
And the US Government has never done anything similar? Heck, they don't even need to be punishing you to take your land, they can just have plans for a highway that will pass through where your house currently is.
Ownership is indeed a fuzzy concept, but the level of protection afforded to your "ownership" of land in America is orders of magnitude greater than that afforded to moderators or subreddits. If you want to draw an analogy to real property, Reddit is the "owner" of the "land" (subject, as always, to the whims of the state) and the moderator has a licence to reside there.
I have a legal deed to my house. If someone else decides to claim it the government (aka men with guns) will show up to restore it to me.
Your "ownership" of a subreddit amounts to a single row in a database on one of Reddit's servers, which they can change for any or no reason.
Moderators (and users in general) need a reality check about their relationship with the sites they frequent. You are not a part owner. You are not an employee. You are one of ~500M monthly users who they use to generate advertising revenue, and your loss will not be noticed.
There is no objective and constant set of universal rules for what defines ownership because it’s a made up concept
Unless you’ve ingested something to burn for calories, or destroyed something then nothing is strictly and forever yours to keep and dispose of as you please.
The thing is, along with all the large subreddits, it's all these niche subreddits that have helped train all these LLM to be able to do the things they can do.
If reddit is thinking that their content is king, then closing subreddits that help generate that content is not ideal for them.
Yes, absolutely. Sam Altman has come out and said it, although specifically he said that social media wasn't of any particular importance for training data.
This can also be seen when you mention davidjl, who was a user super into r/counting. There was a thread of that yesterday I believe.
I mean in theory each subreddit could be a website of its own, but Reddit works for two reasons; one, it amalgates all of these various communities into one platform, look and feel, and two, they pay for it. Lemmy is pushed as an alternative, but it has two issues; one, it's decentralized, so users have to scout on the internet to find servers to find communities on, and two, there's no monetization so whoever hosts a server will have to pay out of pocket; that cannot scale to the scale of Reddit, neither in terms of server requirements or cost, unless the owner finds a source of income from the service. Reflected sounds of underground spirits, basically.
I tallied (roughly) the number of subscriber accounts, across all these reddits. It's around 1 billion. Obviously, it's not conservative as many will have subscribed to multiple. But, I see MAU (monthly active users) is about 1b. So, this is huge.
EDIT: Seems the source for MAU I found was way high, making this potentially even bigger. Every other source I've found is 400-500m range for MAU on reddit (as another pointed out).
Around half of the top 250 are participating atm https://save3rdpartyapps.com/ which I think gives a better idea of how big it is. Despite that, I think it won't be enough to change anything. Maybe if we got all top 250 subs to participate and extended the protest to being indefinitely.
I brought up the percentage of subreddits, which does matter, because it determines how many subreddits remain to fall back to. The activity level of the subreddits who are blacking out, however, doesn’t matter for that, and it was pb7 who brought that up, not me.
I stopped counting at lower subbed communities (below 100k IIRC), seeing diminishing returns. If they all add up that much it's interesting, as many of those communities are very niche, so may have a higher weight of unique subs.
The problem that every social media has is that manual moderation does not scale; even with tooling, the major platforms like Facebook employ thousands of content moderators as contractors, a lot in low-wage countries.
Having an army of willing volunteers helps, but it's not good enough because these are unpaid, untrained people without the psychological helplines that professional moderators have. I hope Reddit has good tooling to prevent the volunteers from seeing the worst of it.
That said, I do think that everyone contributing their time to social media like this should get a cut from the revenue; I'm 100% confident Reddit has exact numbers for the value per subreddit and even per post, so they can apply math and give the moderators a percentage of that, and even the posters of good posts.
I mean yeah then you get the problem of reposts and simple copiers, but that's already an issue, it's just that the issue is karma instead of money.
Reddit admins only have site-wide rules to worry about. They don't need to care about whether a particular post is appropriate for a particular subreddit. If they did that would make their job a lot more complicated.
I've been tentatively looking at Lemmy, obviously nowhere near the activity of Reddit but it's not a ghost town either and the Fediverse aspect is a big plus in my book.
In addition to a lot of other small details about lemmy, I don't like the way lemmy federates, I think if somebody made "subreddits for mastodon" instead that would have been more interesting.
Main instance (lemmy.ml) has quite heavy political censorship though. It’s not obvious or visible, and including under anti racism rules. Criticising non western countries leads to calls of orientalist and bans [0].
Also without a business model they will struggle to maintain the servers required for even a tiny fraction of Reddit
I think it's too early to complain about censorship. Moda are still probably adjusting to what is acceptable, and there are several instances where policies differ. Same as turning down whole of Reddit because one subreddit has strict moderation.
Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are no ads at least not yet.
> there are several instances where policies differ
For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?
The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.
Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."
If there are issues, you just migrate. It sounds bad, but if you expect one web site to forever serve you, you are subjecting yourself to their enshittification in the long run. Better to know these things have limited life times and plan accordingly. Early adopters are usually the most interesting crowd anyway.
I don't mind if something is slighlty difficult to use, as it serves as a filter to participants and limits growth (subreddits with over 100,000 participants tend to be kind of guerrella marketing, meme-infested shitholes).
The obvious drawback of course is that you lose the non-tech savy interesting people and experts. I don't know how to mitigate that, but still very interested in seeing where this all goes.
I think they should be able to govern their instance as they wish, but it's odd that they don't understand that putting (for example) criticism of the Chinese communist party under a general anti-racism rule — without explicitly mentioning this — is rather confusing. It's certainly not what the average new user would understand as racism.
This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.
Yes you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s made out to be relatively censorship light, but in reality it isn’t. Things just need to be clear and up front so users know whether they want to use that instance.
You are writing this using the best Reddit replacement.
If HN had a subforum feature and an ability to embed pictures or videos in posts, or some kind of markdown light syntax, Reddit usage would die for me.
reasons why HN doesn't work as a reddit replacement:
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
I agree with everything except the mobile usability. Hacker News has some of the best mobile usability of the websites I am using. It is not perfect but it is way better than Reddit. Hacker News is very comfortable to read on mobile and the only thing which could be improved is the too small voting buttons.
I agree that Reddit is borderline unusable in its mobile website, and the official app is ad-ridden, but 3rd party apps (the ones they're trying to kill) are fine.
I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.
Thread with many replies, the deepest replies end up very squashed right in portrait, it's annoying to read. As is the flag/dead style but that's another matter. Obviously nothing I can't work around.
Reddit is 100 times as big as HN. I think (well, it's a pet theory at least) that internet forum dynamics change at each order of magnitude. If so, then HN can't be Reddit no matter what features we build.
If not in the content-mix sense, then in the sense that there is one and only one homepage, and that it's everything posted to the site.
Though in truth: there are some alternate views. "Pool", "Invited", and "Best" are subsets of submissions. You can also do a blank search on Algolia and set a time window to view the best items of the past day, week, month, year, or other arbitrary interval.
It's on the radar, but it will probably never have the critical mass that reddit has; can its servers handle and afford millions of users and billions of requests a month?
Currently it surely cannot handle the scale of Reddit. They do „tens of thousands“ now and will have to discover the bottlenecks for „hundreds of thousands“ first.
Anyways, maybe this gives Lemmy a boost towards the next level.
Looks like it's 5/10 of the ones with over 30M subscribers and 9/23 over 20M, I was actually surprised that it's only that many in total for the 30M group.
I presume some might still make the decision given yesteray's attempt at blatant slander by Spez.
I've noticed that Askreddit seems to be conspicuously absent from this list.
I also wonder about the moderators of the ones that aren't going dark, many larger subs are moderated by a select group of the same people more or less.
All this will result in is Reddit secretly taking over these subreddits, take out the mods and give them to "trustworthy" people. They will first ask nicely, and if you don't bend over, they will do so anyways.
Maybe it's the chaotic neutral talking here but I reckon mods going on strike for two days while leaving the subs public would show just how important they are to Reddit Inc. and why their unpaid work still has a cost to the company.
I've modded medium-large subs before and though it's been a few years and I'm sure the automation has improved and I doubt it's perfect. A small but significant part of the mod queue on big subs is a steady trickle of things intended to offend, shock, disgust, or harm: goatse-type stuff but also violent gruesome mutilation & death photos, straight up child porn.
The consensus on HN is largely that being hurt or offended is the moral transgression, but some of the base motivation of moderation and moderators is protecting people from that kind of harm. Intentionally exposing people to it through inaction to make a point to another entity is not particularly neutral, I don't think.
Reddit banned my 17-year-old account as I was reporting all the scammy/crypto ads as misinformation. I didn't comment or post anything that would be considered a TOS / Policy violation, but they still banned my account under that. I asked for a review from the admin, and they replied that their decision is final and that I should look at the Content Policy and not violate it but never giving me the exact reason / policy violation.
Why invest your time/effort into any ecosystem which doesn't have a proper redressal mechanism?
I am not contributing to reddit anymore, I think as with all entities/companies/empires they are past their prime and they are on the down. I remember when a lot of users jumped ship from Digg to Reddit, I wish another entity comes along which is better than reddit.
This is another gigantic nothing. Equivalent to ants standing together to protect their ant hill from destruction against the might of pest control and the land owner.
While Reddit is a dumpster fire, it is still a business and you never owned the 'subreddit' and it is not yours either and its API is subject to price rises. This sort of risk should not be underestimated and it was only a matter of time that the API was going to be paid. Like Twitter, it has now happened to Reddit.
Going dark for 1 day will do nothing to Reddit and it will be just business as usual.
The first digital strike? Interested to see what's going to happen.
At this point is probably be useful having mastodon like reddit. If I'm not wrong, archive.org keeps a dump of all reddit discussions until 2023.
What people on stackexchange are doing is more like a strike, if you're looking for a digital volunteer force strike. They're stopping their moderation work.
Reddit people are temporarily disabling the subreddits altogether. Like disabling the busses (the thing the company pays for) rather than stopping to drive them (the work you want to get a certain compensation for).
Not sure it's a great comparison as it's not about wages (or wage-related things) at all in reddit's case
I post on a handful of niche reddits (science/tech, not porn, like the average redditor), and the user experience is abysmal. Besides the upvoting/downvoting nonsense and imperious mods, half the time my posts get caught in the spam filter (despite my account being 5+ years old), and I have to check incognito mode to see if they showed up, and message the mods.
At the very least, it's nice to know that rather than a lukewarm welcome, any would-be Eternal Septemberists will be met with "kys leddit spacing, phoneposting, ******" should they try 4chan as an alternative.
They've already resorted to using server access to change other people's messages that were calling him names, changing it to calling donald not-duck names. It doesn't get much more stupid than that.
A nice idea, but my opinion is that we need to openly boycott all of Advance Media's holdings and investments. Don't go off Reddit for a few days and watch something owned by Warner Discovery, or read Epicurious for recipes to cook while you "wait". Hit every rev stream they have. This isn't just about Reddit's IPO, this has to be about permanently breaking the back of a media conglomerate.
Existing reddit clones are unfortunately run by political outcasts from both extremes. So they tend to not be as open for the average user.
Plus, even just looking at Mastodon/ActivityPub activity, it's dropped back down to nearly half of what it was in January at the peak of the Twitter exodus.
I think instead of going dark they should just leave their subreddits un-moderated. The amount of junk content that would fill the site might be enough for advertisers to pull money, which is ultimately what this is about.
Going dark is the equivalent of thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting.
yeah, it's made so it updates in real-time, should have a maximum of around a minute of delay if the server is running properly and Reddit aren't blocking us
According to some moderators the official moderation tools are not good enough to handle large subreddits so many moderators use the third party tools.
Most moderators overwhelmingly rely on the utility function you get in 3rd party apps that isn't currently in the official app, so I genuinely believe this is one aspect of the protest. I could be wrong, but I genuinely can't see a situation where this amount of action is purely around seeing ads.
Pretty unanimously, 3rd party app developers have said they'd happily show Reddit's ads in their feed, but Reddit never came out with this feature. I don't think any 3rd party app developer was expecting a free ride on Reddit's API forever.
Official numbers show that only 3% of moderation actions are performed via third-party apps, putting a definite nail in the coffin of that fabricated argument.
I think from doing extremely light research, it seems pretty much _all_ the 3rd party apps are better for moderation than the default client. However it seems unanimously people tend to prefer to moderate on desktop.
Surprisingly, the server response time is very long even though all it sends back is a mostly empty static index.html. Is it the absence of caching that's responsible for this?
apologies for that, I'm rather new to the language I'm using for this site still, and I put it together rather fast, so there were loads of issues with it crashing, all fixed now I'm pretty sure
(tldr it was accidentally doing millions of requests a second, maxing out the server cpu and ram. even other services were crashing on it lol)
why doesn't reddit just let users host nodes to serve the subreddits? make it distributed, like bittorrent. that would take a lot of load off of the reddit servers.
If you control the server you can serve ads and collect user data. Those two things make up the majority of reddit's revenue. So you are not wrong, but it would be like saying "why don't restaurants just let the chefs host meals in people's homes?" ... because then the restaurant doesn't need to exist anymore.
Hmmmm. None of my subscribed subs are participating. Interesting to note subs that participated are the noisier (lower snr) subs, which probably serves the bulk of their users and would hurt Reddit’s visitor numbers the most.
I've also been using PowerDeleteSuite[0] to delete all submissions and comments, as deleting your account will not delete posts, just change the user to [deleted].
I get that you want to protest but I don’t like the idea of destroying information permanently that might not be available elsewhere, it’s really frustrating when you find a comment that seemed to give you the solution to the problem exact problem you have but it got deleted. Is there a less destructive way to do this?
I just deleted my account of 9+ years with a good number of comments.
The reason is simple: I don't know of any other way for me as a user to actually do anything against Reddit, aside from not using it. But I hate the idea of a company doing a successful rug-pull while profiting off my thoughts and ideas. Sure, it's a bummer that the info is lost - but I feel that every small bit of success they have now will increase the likelihood of something like this happening again in the future.
I'm a relatively new r/ user and I can't understand your, and many previous, comments that call reddit some variation of 'shit', and 'toxic'.
I am thoroughly impressed. I have my interests, and have found so much information - far more than Google, and even ddg - it's now my goto search engine, along with algolia, and I kick myself everyday I wasn't on r/ several/ many years ago.
Where's the shit and the toxicity?
Exactly. Reddit has always been a shit hole and it just shows that Reddit always was able to pull the rug under its own users. A 1 day protest is nothing but hilarious as if that would do anything to Reddit.
The right action at this point is to delete your accounts.
Imagine there was a free or quasi-free API for Facebook. Facebook would lose large amounts of money on content because they can no longer monetize it with ads.
I think the Apollo creator mentioned the fact that Reddit doesn't even inject ads in the posts it delivers through its API. He seemed confused about why they hadn't.
Which begs the question why the hell they didn't work on getting the apps used for browsing Reddit to display ads? Just include them as posts like they do on the website, perhaps just with a label added. If the apps try to filter away the ads, revoke their API keys.
If users pay extra, omit the ads from the API. If companies want an entirely ad-free API, for training LLMS etc, they can pay extra.
This problem seems like something that could have so easily been avoided. I think I would happily pay a small monthly fee to keep an ad-free Apollo browsing experience, especially if it could be done in a way where the money was split between Reddit and Apollo. But.. they never even tried?
> Which begs the question why the hell they didn't work on getting the apps used for browsing Reddit to display ads? Just include them as posts like they do on the website, perhaps just with a label added. If the apps try to filter away the ads, revoke their API keys.
Yep, that's what Telegram did - there can be ads in public channels, they're clearly labeled as such in the API, and third-party clients must not filter them or will get their access revoked.
I wish this wasn't downvoted. It's a fair conversation to have, especially for those not in the loop.
People tend to like things they have, no matter how unreasonable. If you own a building where nobody lives, and I move in secretly and live there for five years, then you finally discover me and want me to get gone... good luck. Somehow I now have legal rights. I never paid you, did nothing for it, usually these people also completely trash the place (this is the part I don't get), yet you can't make me homeless on the spot.
We tend to feel entitled to things quickly, and reddit users (myself included) are used to just using the service via whatever third-party app. If reddit wants to change that, I'd like to get the opportunity to make it worthwhile for them to continue to support this.
Instead, it seems that the developer of the app I use needs to front these costs, and within a number of days (after being free for over a decade). My rational side tells myself that I have no reason to expect otherwise and that I should have questioned why this is all free in the first place. But I also don't like it and support any movement that aims to come to a different agreement with reddit. Surely if it was fine for many years, something can be worked out in the next months and enacted after a transition period.
It's not like reddit doesn't know how many people use reddit this way and that having them all pay a little bit for access is way beneficial as compared to cutting them off. What they're doing seems dumb from any angle that I can see and that's what makes me additionally support these protests. Talk to us, reddit.
There's no issue with a non-free API, the issue is the pricing they've decided on and the timescale they've given to adopt it. 30 days notice isn't long enough to adopt a new pricing strategy, especially one so unreasonably priced.
If reddit would pay subreddit moderators, top commenters, users that submit very interesting stuff, and in the case of Apollo, people creating the Apps that enable you to use Reddit in a pleasant way, then the story would be different.
The problem with making something a viable job is that then most of it will be done by people for whom it’s just a job. That sets a non-terrible but fairly hard quality ceiling. I’m not saying that unpaid labour is better all things considered—rather, all solutions I’ve seen are kind of bad.
Facebook moderation is especially awful, however. Pre-2022 (at least) a fairly common tactic against anti-Kremlin posts was to have the troll farm report the user and/or random posts of theirs in large amounts. Done! Many fought it out and got reinstated after several weeks, but some just gave up and quit Facebook in disgust.
(And that without mentioning the “Khokhlov” incident: “khokhol”, genitive plural “khokhlov”, is in addition to its literal meaning of “tuft” a fairly standard pejorative for Ukrainians; unfortunately for Facebook, it’s also the surname of physicist Aleksej Removich Khokhlov, presidential nominee and later vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which some years ago got several science-adjacent people and IIRC even a science monthly covering the election suspended for “hate speech”.)
This sounds like there could be an open source version of Reddit, if the company itself doesn't add a lot of value via software features. Similar too Wikipedia. Of course the network effect favors the platform that is already big.
There used to be a free API for Facebook. I can't remember the name of the app (maybe Seesmic?), but I used to have a combined Facebook and Twitter feed in a single Android app.
Facebook's API model used to be the app can see everything you can see. Resulting in fun apps like friendship graphs, interest similarity scores, photo collage generators. Basically, features from a Facebook Labs team that doesn't exist.
Then Cambridge Analytica scooped up all the profile data of all of your friends when you completed a fun Buzzfeed style quiz and that created enough outrage to change it.
Whether Cambridge Analytica was actually able to make any use of this data to "subvert democracy" is very debatable. If you look into it, it's just how they marketed themselves.
With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut everything down for a week (I don't blame them, but that's a failure mode we had not considered). This caused us to go dark completely without an easy way to reach the users to tell them what was going on.
When power came back traffic was where it was before within 20 minutes, and the next day we even had a surge in traffic that we didn't ever pass again. If you really want to see an effect I would suggest a period somewhere between two weeks and a month backed up by a threat to do it for three months if they don't recant. That would have some serious teeth in it and threatens to completely derail any IPO plans they might have.
Anything less and you're just showing that it is reddit that is the boss, not you. A good rule for a community is that if it isn't your domain, database and server it isn't really your community.