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.
