Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
2 years ago by kingthrillgore to c/technology
I'm still pissed off that I've never had a facebook. I never gave them any info about me. I gave them no reason to have a profile on me.
Yet because OTHER people have facebook, they know my name, my address, my phone number. I don't know if they can identify me in pictures that other people post, but it wouldn't surprise me.
That shouldn't be allowed. I did not consent.
There's a guy in the world of pro wrestling named Jim Cornette that said a quote this reminds me of.
Cornette is known for holding grudges, and being hateful. He keeps a shitlist of people he hates.
Well in the 1980s he was working for a wrestling company, and hated one of his coworkers for a year. Then a new guy came in and was so much worse.
Then one day he says to the first guy "You know, you used to be at the top of my shit list, but with all these new fuckheads coming in, you managed to move down a few spots simply by not doing anything!"
I think Meta is doing a decent job with Instagram. I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it's a decent enough platform. And the only one still allowing for engagement with your actual friends rather than exclusively professional content creators.
WTF are you on about? no one likes instagram shorts and the feed is a jumbled mess of bullshit and advertisements. I deleted mine a long time ago and don't regret it for a second.
I really don't understand how people use Instagram. I've tried, but it's about 45% ads, 10-15% posts by people I don't follow, it's not in chronological order (or any sense of order for that matter), and regardless of whether I was on there yesterday or 2 months ago, it'll show me about 40 posts before saying "You're all caught up from the past 3 days!" and then refuse to show me any more.
I guess this is why I'm here on Lemmy and went crawling back to Tumblr, one of the last vestiges of the old internet. At this point, I'd rather watch a platform die than become marketable to advertisers and shareholders.
I mean except for collecting all possible data and psychological profiling of users to serve them targeted ads, it’s a decent enough platform.
It's not. Instagram is popular the way it is because "It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests" there.
Don't worry that'll change, they haven't owned it for that long yet.
Meta is a little hard because they acquired a lot of existing social networks in their prime and have kept things subtle. Think about how long it took EA to finally strip Maxis of everything but The Sims. The only way you would know something is owned by Meta is from the splash screen.
The problem is that FB is the "core forum" for tons of niche hobbies. Irts the only reason I still have a account. They successfully killed off the old php forums.
If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments
Meta probably is the hardest one given that in many influencal countries WhatsApp is the app everyone uses for communication
Yep, agreed. The biggest problem there is that Meta is generally not making life worse for its users than they're used to. Facebook and Instagram are giving you almost the same shitty experience you got a decade ago.
Yeah they're subsidizing the price to get between you and reality.
Affordable purely by the money you pay upfront. They earn more by the ridiculous amount of tracking they do, and they're also forcing you to stay within their services.
As with so many other things, you're paying with more than just money.
I left Reddit 6 months ago when I was permabanned for asking a question about what is forbidden. They can kiss my ass. And I hope they go broke.
Aw man. I left Reddit on my own terms as soon as the writing was on the wall re: 3rd party apps.
To have access ripped away without notice must have bred some deep hatred for the platform.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it's now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
I genuinely tried to leave but lots of communities didn’t leave Reddit and therefore had to stick to Reddit. I did with RRSS-feed and avoided their app.
Recently figured out we can Sideload Apollo app with almost all functions available. So did that.
Thankfully never used twitter! I read valuation dropped from 44B to 9,4B recently.
I’m not the right person to start a community, that’s the main problem. I’m not fit to be a Moderator and such.
It's super easy, the main problem is no one will move. I still moderate a couple on reddit, but it was hard enough getting people even there, certainly no one will come here.
The hold outs for these sites are so fucking dumb. They act like social media is somehow an important part of their existence when just 10, 20 years ago it was an emerging technology. These early iterations of social media are toxic as fuck. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They don't deserve your patronage and are taking your goodwill and turning it into social decay.
10-20 years and you people can't give it up for something better. There is no argument. You don't owe them loyalty. They aren't innovating. They have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism.
Yeesh.
No, because then they'll all flood here. Then I'll have to consult with 9,006 different rules between each sub, while subsequently making sure I'm bending to each power-mods weird and unwritten agenda.
No I'm good with reddit. I encourage reddit. And I encourage all the weirdos to use reddit!
Nope.
If you encourage it, it will continue to fester and rot, and the entire internet will lower their expectations.
We need to destroy these companies. We need to smash them to pieces, and hey guess what - it's going to hurt a bit! We need to be prepared to stand up against evil, corrupt, racist, bigoted robber barons. We need to make some sacrifices to fix the internet.
Burn the fuckers to the ground, and let spez rot in a hole.
I think you have misconstrued what I'm saying here. I hope reddit exists to collect the weirdos, and be a breeding ground for the gross shit it is, and keep it away from here. We don't need to inherit the 2024 users of reddit, no one wants them. Let them echo in their bot chambers until they literally spin into the ground. Keep Lemmy normal.
I get what you're saying, but it never works like that.
You said it yourself: "I hope reddit exists to...be a breeding ground..." And it will. The worst of humanity will collect and fester and grow in numbers. And what's going to happen then? Some will spill over to here, and other 'safe' communities.
There's no way we can thrive and simultaneously isolate ourselves from assholery; and by encouraging it to thrive elsewhere, we're only expanding its power and reach; and at the same time, enriching and empowering asshole billionaires like spez, Zuck, Musk, etc.
No, we need to fight them. We need to wade hip-deep in the shit to shovel it down the drain, rather than hoping it'll just go away on its own.
Look at it another way: If you have a garden, what happens if you designate one corner as "the weed corner?" It grows, spreads, and takes over the rest of the garden.
Same. This place is great, even with the tankies from lemmy.ml and the fascists from hexbear, at least we somehow still get along.
What's the deal with having a .world user complain about ml and hexbear in every single thread lately?
It's crazy. Almost like we all have the freedom to say whatever the fuck we want, including complaining, because we fucking can.
I'm not from .world and also complain about it sometimes. In my opinion, it's a legitimate reason that makes Lemmy less attractive, as a consequence, you have to set up blockers to keep your sanity which is a hassle for the average user.
hexbear isn't fascist
Don't confuse authoritarian regimes with fascism. China is an authoritarian state running a diluted version of communism, but it's not fascist. Russia under Putin is leaning more towards fascism these days for sure, but they're not fascist outright yet.
Maybe what the hexbear folks gravitate around the most is the idea of authoritarianism. The flavour doesn't matter as much.
Lemmy was better before the Reddit exodus last year, when people started insulting others by calling them tankies and fascists. Before that, it was much more peaceful.
No chance that is an alt account?
They were tankies and fascists before anyone ever came here and found out that they were.
Calling them such didn’t create them.
Basically… A tankie isn’t not a tankie just because theres no one there to accuse them of being one.
I agree, so I've been posting photos and things. What we don't need is a bunch of autoposting bots.
If you want to find the busy threads though, sort of Active and All. And just see what is going on across the lemmyverse
I prefer scaled to active sort for that reason.
I agree though, more content and more content diversity would be great.
The small percentage that contribute content regularity in social media platforms instead of just consuming are great.
I'm too boring to have much content that would be good for anything other than microblogging myself though.
Lemmit bot was one of the first things I blocked. Idk if it's still around. It would copy like every post and comment from Reddit lol. It clogged my feed so bad. If it's still a thing, block it, you'll be glad you did.
On Reddit, everyone is trying to get a million votes and just brutally murder with words everyone. It either gets really hostile, or just lots of bots posting bot shit.
On Lemmy: Even the posters I disagree with, I have a lot of fun with them. We say stupid shit all the time and accept the upvotes/downvotes with our shitposts.
That's been my experience as well. I'm using a Lemmy client that allows me to tag users, and I've been tagging people who have posted comments that annoyed me. A few are obvious trolls, but the rest have posted many comments that I liked or agree with since I've tagged them. It's been refreshing to see, actually
I need to perform a magic trick to make my feed “better”. At least it’s not that addicting
Lemmy's feed is intentionally (or I think it is intentional at least) worse in this aspect than Reddit's feed, in order to not be as addictive. Take that how you will.
And you can still tailor it to yourself. Instances have different mindsets to different topics and things they allow or don't and there's tons of people to agree with or disagree with but everyone is cordial.
I just don't have a reason to go back
It's so much better. Personally I don't hope it grows much either. Satisfies my content itch, have still had some good quality convos here, seen some great comments threads. Absolutely none of the bullshit that Reddit purposely encourages. Plus most of the zeebs and the chronically offended seemed to have stayed with reddit, and I'm super OK with that.
I'd argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I've seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.
I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit.
The difference is that when that happens on Reddit, you can't go anywhere else. On Lemmy, you can go to any other instance and do it better if you feel the mods elsewhere are bad.
Then just go to a different Instance. I agree the powermods are a headache, but at least with Lemmy they have way less power. You can start a new sub with a matching name on a different Instance, and draw people away from the power mods. People get pretty sick of the power mods, pretty fast.
I agree with everything you said, but I gotta ask: What is a zeeb?
I believe the definition is somebody who is totally lame.
The lack of commercialization being shoved down and up your orifices is really nice.
We all do
Launches entire US nuclear arsenal against Russia
Very good Joshua
Damn, I hadn't lost since June
It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.
I missed the part where Aol. was promoting toxicity and hate while attempting a short-term grift on its users like Reddit and X have.
That fact that Aol. is still alive is amazing by itself. It’s just another sleazy, beleaguered company that used to be meaningful. You leave because other companies have better products, not because they offend your sense of morality.
(Or maybe they do.)
I think you underestimate how ignorant people can be. The reason Aol still exists is because they are grifters too. My Aol example was to show that people are docile idiots and won't change their habits. Aol is grifting just as much as reddit does. They're just grifting different groups in different ways.
That's why i think reddit and twitter will continue on for a long time. Maybe not as powerhouses but they won't implode or go away any time soon.
My mom was still paying for dial-up AOL in 2016. She had been paying them $20 a month for over a decade while having high-speed internet that she was also paying for.
When I asked her why she didn't cancel it, she said she would lose her email.
So I canceled it because AOL provides free email because they make money off of the ads.
Hotmail was owned by Microsoft when I signed up in the late 90s. It's no surprise it's still around. It hasn't been my primary email for a long time, but I still use it as my MS account. So really it's just my Minecraft account.
I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don't know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it's always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on
There are a lot of subreddits for which there is no real replacement. Sometimes the strength in a community is the people. Doesn't matter if reddit sucks if the people are there.
I don't know, I feel during that exodus we got the best of the best. I miss some of the niche communities, But there's so many fewer assholes over here.
Those still on are a bunch of bootlickers IMO
There was this one post for a call for mods about "doing a social good for the community".
Like bro, this is a video game subreddit. And you're doing it for free, to help another dude get really rich.
Ideally, it would be because they care for the community they moderate, which I believe is the reason most mods do it.
Then you have creatures like awkwardtheturtle, who knows what motivates them.
I learned if you Google "fertility doctors who used own sperm", there isn't one or two incidents. It's A LOT.
I don't understand why anybody would do such a disgusting thing. but it helps me understand narcissism and power hungry behavior.
If all mods quit that'd be perfect. Reddit has shown they'll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to). But if no regular users wanted to pick it up then they'd have to pay admins to moderate. I don't think we'll see it though. There's always going to be someone who wants it enough who has enough time for whatever reason.
Reddit has shown they’ll replace mods when they actually need to (or want to).
But, their business model doesn't work unless those mods are working for free. So, while they may replace mods, unless people keep signing up to work for free to help a for-profit company deliver value to its shareholders, eventually it's going to collapse.
It’s amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit’s investors can make more money.
Well it used to be (when Reddit was FLOSS and Reddit didn't take communities off the founders who created them, at most they'd close the community) that people saw it as choosing Reddit to host the community instead of creating it somewhere else. However, Reddit has since changed the rules drastically, and essentially taken the communities people created there.
Best response for mods is to move your community somewhere else, and put in an automod rule redirecting people to the new community on Lemmy or whatever. Reddit will probably eventually try to take over and keep competing with your community under the original URL.
I was reading this post recently: https://howtomarketagame.com/... - I guess it applies to communities equally as much as it applies to anything else.
That's when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
"But we'll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday."
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless "We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power" idiocy.
I mean... everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders' money.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to "nsfw" because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn't really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
...so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course "accurately reflecting the subreddit" wasn't what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said "remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we'll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing".
Thanks for sharing this I guess I left before all of this happened and I haven't heard any of it.
lol no if anything they’ve become far left shitholes.
Reddit would close the sub for being unmoderated until someone asks to be the new mod
mission accomplished? That has the same effect as making it private, doesn't it?
Well, the power hungry mod that lost their power wouldn’t be very happy with it and larger communities wouldn’t stay closed very long
A lot of subreddits have done that. The problem is nobody notices...
That's what I did with all mine.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
They're better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don't mind the new alternative.
I sure hope so, but I don't see much changing. I guess we'll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I've long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.
their daily traffic has only gone up since then
The quality on Reddit has really gone down with content creators disillusioned or gone, fake content everywhere (I've seen almost an entire scrollable thread copied comment-for-comment), and so many users wiping their comments.
The owners are acting like everything is fine, but I think there's a good chance it keeps hollowing out until the appeal isn't there even for casual users. They can't really turn back at this point, they burned the bridge.
i'm not yet sold on this "old vs new" thing. while i do agree that it would be better if people were more engaged/active about boycotting things and pulling out the pitchforks, my understanding is that hasn't been the historical precedent in situations like this. the pitchfork stuff certainly did happen quite a lot in the past, but my understanding is that it was for more extreme problems than a social media company shutting down third party apps (which many people didn't even know about). but then again, it might be hard to compare this to the company transgressions of the past.
my understanding is that frustration is building, and if things continue in this direction, they will reach a tipping point where people do actually stop using the website all together and switch to alternatives. and, this ban on protests will give the reddit executives much less information on how close things are to that tipping point. (not to mention that the ban itself will probably accelerate things.)
but i could be mistaken about this, and i'm open to changing my mind on it.
You can't even make an allusion to torches and pitchforks on Reddit. Legit, they'll ban ya.
I have made like, idk, maybe three reddit posts in the past year. Apart from incredibly specific niche topics which don't have enough folks here to get a good answer, I don't use Reddit.
But that complacency isn't happening to everyone. A lot are just festering, slowly digesting more incredulous and radical propaganda/influencers. Every ones base reality of the events that are happening over the country is getting completely skewed by the new types of outlets like tiktok that they flock to because of the lack of accountability by our elected officials and journalists/news organizations.
During just this last hurricane Helene I've heard more anger and outrage about the government than anything to actually do about what's been hit or what the people and rescue workers are actually doing. This is how we get mass shooters and assassinations becoming more prolific, people aren't just complaining and going about their day. They're nodding and grinding their teeth while smiling.
The old alternative is better IMO, makes change happen one way or another. Specifically the unsanctioned, and non-peaceful protests. Boycotts don't work in the days of ad-revenue, since ad-revenue funded companies have immunity from user dissatisfaction in that regard (can replace a substantial amount of users with bots that look at ads and they still get ad-revenue).
What we need are old-fashioned style pitchforks and fire protests against them, but in the digital age, using cyberwarfare, like this.
(reposted because SJW deleted my others)
People haven't been using the alternative, and that's the problem. Reddit and tech giants have grown complicit. They do not believe people would do it to them, or they think they could survive thousands of people trying to do it to them, if one can then many can.
Protests: a pressure valve to release steam. You gotta let them get out there and march around for a little bit. Let them walk it off. Then proceed to implement the next new tyranny a little bit at a time.
The violent ones produce change one way or another. They're significantly less desirable for leaders, and that's kind of the point.
I have to imagine that when some c-level suit saw that term in his moth-eaten copy of "Social Media for Dummies," I don't think it was intended to be taken quite so flagrantly visibly literally...
So that's what happened?! I rarely come here, but last weekend was so bad that I started updating my subscribed communities here.
I thought I interacted with too many downvoted posts, and screwed up what reddit thought were my main interests. Guess I was expecting too much from reddit...
(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
Thanks for sharing this perspective. Complacency won’t grow the userbase here.
To be fair, a lot of users don't seem to want the user base here to grow at all. I don't feel that way but I've had enough discussions here to know that this is literally not the case for everyone and it kind of sucks because stagnation is how social networks die.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven't reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
Agreed. I can understand fearing being as bloated and bot filled as reddit. But we don't need to grow that big to be a thriving active community of users.
Thanks for bringing this up. I think I’ve heard this too and I have to say I’m of two minds about it.
In one end… I am frustrated with Reddit’s greed and I think they’ve lost most of my respect at this point. I think I’m kinda bitter toward them, so seeing them lose market share might bring me a bit of schadenfreude.
On the other hand, Reddit’s content quality really feels like it’s gone to crap in the last 5-6 years or so. When I came to Lemmy (and Mastodon), it was refreshing because the community seemed to have a bit of that scrappy, fringe attitude that I missed from early Reddit. I’d be sad if that went away due to over-population.
Basically, I like Lemmy and I want it to be even more successful so that algorithms have less control on our lives. At the same time, I dislike Reddit because they’re going whole-hog into enshittification. I guess I just convinced myself that I want Lemmy to continue to grow ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The difference is that Lemmy is not centralized. So it can't really be over-populated. If an instance is poorly modded and doesn't have that vibe you like you can find one that does. The more people using Lemmy the more options there will be, it's the opposite of Reddit.
started StarTrek.website.
I don't use that because you are (or someone is) modding it wrong. You don't allow people to talk about which parts of Star Trek they don't like and others might want to avoid. Fuck that. All parts of Star Trek are not equally good.
oh yea i got banned on r/startrek for expressing mild dislike of the discovery show, wasnt even rude or anything. Tried to appeal the ban by asking why i was banned got instantly mod muted and perma banned.
Fuck that Subreddit. I called someone an idiot there and they banned me. I don't know if this changed but at the time ALL the moderators were privated. I found out one moderators and called them them all cowards and losers. It was THAT exchange that got be banned from reddit entirely.
I came here and never looked back.
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit’s platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits.
You quit reddit because they didn't ban subreddits you don't like?
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.
Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.
“Those who make community protest impossible will make hacks inevitable."
― John F. Kennedy, pretty much
Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.
The Lebanon subreddit might as well be a zionist propaganda reddit.
I got permabanned from reddit because I said to a zionist who accused all Lebanese of blaming all their problems on Israel 'no, we just blame Israel for what it deserves blame for' and apparently that constituted a call to violence against a marginalized group.
Meanwhile the amount of genocide justification and thinly veiled threats of genocide almost always go unpunished. Stuff like saying that no one in the world cares for Lebanon except its cuisine and landscape (implying the people can disappear and nothing will be lost) or telling people not to worry about future problems, implying that they will soon entirely annhiliate Lebanon.
This isn't even just it. Anyone calling out the sheer amount of propagandists or showing how real the Hasbara program is (look it up) will get their posts removed. Even the Syria subreddit is packed with low-effort videos and anti-Lebanese propaganda. For example: Any show of what appears to be crowds of people celebrating is attributed to Syrians celebrating the death of Nasrallah, and any violence happening is automatically attributed to Hezbollah Lebanese (or even Lebanese in general) just attacking Syrians for nothing.
Those videos show no indication of who the people are or what they are doing, and that is how you know it is fake. They also keep making huge claims of Hezbollah conducting massive bombing operations in Syria against random civilians when there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support that, not even news articles or reports from Israeli sources. Just show a bunch of amublance workers and then claim it is a Hezbollah bombing.
It is as depressing as it is disgusting.
When something grows to that size it becomes recognized as a useful tool with which to conduct social engineering. Reddit has been a weapon of information warfare for well over a decade.
Yes, what shocks me most is that there was a small window of time in which media organizations covered Israel's troll farms on there, but when Russiagate happened they essentially mentioned it only in passing from then on. To me, the subtext of that was Israel gets a pass as it's not belligerent social engineering.
fuck u/spez
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit
They've made it incredibly clear that anything you post on their platform is theirs, and if they do something you don't like you can go fuck yourself.
Fuck Reddit.
Oh absolutely, my account has been overwritten (as if that does anything ) and deleted for over a year now.
It does. I was looking something up and ran face first into a redacted account that once had the answer I needed. I was very conflicted about it.
I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
The guy who admin my lemmy instance is also the mod of r/Brasil and he and the Brazilian mod team worked a lot to avoid the subreddit to become an alt-right shithole like the rest of country subreddits (the losers from the alt-right national subreddit even had to pay for reddit ads to try to funnel user there).
It was customary in r/Brasil to never mention the other subreddit, but yes I'm talking about that one.
I agree. Especially with how some moderators talk down to users, they sure licked those boots stomping on them to not lose their reddit powers.
Looking at you, r/de who's "protest" was to "allow memes" for a week.
There is no chance in hell any of these cowards would stand up for their community. The ones that did are already here.
Roll it up
So long as we're being blunt, this criticism can be levied at Lemmy too. There is less accountability here and your only option is to 'find a similar federated community' because nobody seems to want any kind of accountability or standards in the mods. Well, you have basically 2 major communities and both of them are equally stupid but in opposite directions. Viable option indeed.
The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
I soft quit Reddit last year and deleted all my profile’s comments and posts. I only kept it around because I had heard Reddit was restoring deleted posts and I wanted to make sure mine were gone for good. After several months I stopped checking.
This article made me finally pull the trigger and go in to delete my account. Surprise surprise, two pages of old comments had been restored.
It seems like the new account deleter scripts replace all comments with random text rather than actually delete them, which I'm sure makes it harder for reddit to undelete.
Reddit is already dead, the corporate AI shell is all that remains amongst some folk who dont realize everyone is a bot or an idiot.
/r/android used to be one of the hottest subs - it's literally just posts from the same 2 OPs linking to their professional news articles.
Before the API change I was looking into making an extension for RES that would automatically block any user account above a configurable ratio of posts to comments. It was BANANAS how much content was from bots on the front page even on smaller subs, and that was before the protests.
That would have been a lot like how I remember message boards being back in the day, (late 90's early 2000's) and honestly I don't think I like it. People like me (with both low number of comments and posts) wouldn't be able to reach that bar to entry. I get the bots wouldn't either, but that still eliminates human users as well and I don't know if that's a good thing.
They counted comments and the number of upvotes (or what have you) in an attempt to stop trolls and bad actors. If you didn't have enough comments you couldn't post anything to the message boards and therefore could really engage with the message oars above a certain level. I remember that some also used to limit the number of comments any one user account could make per day, especially new users. It's been 20 years or more at this point and I don't remember those blogs or message boards, honestly.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It's literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn't get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I'm sure they're still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o
She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.
This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won't be done because it's "illegal", that didn't stop these guys now did it?
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
Heresy? Is that Roblox Burlyman? It's heresy, right?
Few enough people use it i doubt they’ll do that.
I was going to suggest otherwise, but after checking the viewing stats on r/linuxhardware, out of 193k unique views in July, 7,300 were from old.reddit, which accounts for 2.8%, and that kinda blows my mind. Just a couple years ago the numbers were much higher.
The views on that sub have increased a lot over the last year, but engagement is the same or lower, so I heavily suspect a lot of the views there are just bots inflating the numbers.
They killed i.reddit.com after the APIcalypse, so I wouldn't be so sure.
The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Wow. So many power-hungry people in one room.
They're about to make another wildly unpopular move. Get your popcorn ready.
Let's be honest with ourselves - no, it won't be wildly unpopular. This change affects very few people and the people still using Reddit at this point likely won't care much, and I have doubt any future change would cause much outrage either.
Because think about this - who is actively complaining and gnashing their teeth about the continued downward spiral and still scrolling, posting, moderating there at this point? I'd love to believe more people would jump ship - but if it ever happened it would take a far larger-scope fuckup than anything we've seen so far.
You know they're going to keep escalating.
The fact that they felt the need to do this says a lot.
Not in any way the average user cares much about.
The causal social media user cares for two things:
A constant uninterrupted stream of content
Dopamine in the form of upvotes/likes/what have you
If these two things aren't interupted, 90% of users won't care.
Then why go to the trouble of making this change?
Lack of imagination.
Mods can still dump 10k trash messages in a sub making it unusable. (Or smart messages in the case of most subreddit who are trash anyway).
Set-up automoderator with rules reventing anyone below 5 billions karma to participate.
Ban everyone.
I'm sure there are a lot of other options.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
They could just not moderate it tho. Reddit is a toxic workplace (for free) for mods.
At least here you don't see a single ad.
Yet
Instance owners could potentially insert ads to help cover server costs. Users would likely just migrate to a different instance, but I could definitely imagine one of the bigger instances doing that eventually.
I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.
Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.
Lmao now even the moderators get cancelled by Reddit.
The platform can't die quick enough, it turned into such a fucking cesspool of powertripping mods and circlejerks. And it's impossible to ever get in contact with admins because they replaced them all by bots. There are also so many bot posters that at some point it'll just be bots moderating bots, moderated by admin bots.
I recently wanted to ask something on reddit after 2 years away, because a certain mod dev is there. Got a message it got deleted because i don't have the karma to post in that sub. Thanks for the effort, never again. That's why i don't write on Stack Overflow, too.
if i post or comment on reddit, anything at all, my account will be suspended instantly. i think they have black listed my ISP or maybe my entire country. i can appeal the suspension every day but nobody will read it. i literally can't use reddit.
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
I just checked and theyve banned my private subreddit for lack of moderation
So rather than allow subs to remain preserved while the replace the mods in place they will push subs to shit on themselves in this latest bout of enshittification.
I fear Reddit might be going the way of Twitter and Facebook, too many users which makes them too big to fail or their failure is sooo slow that by the time they do fail they will have cemented their footholds in our politics they will puppet our politicians more than now.
I mean it's safe to say it was probably the last opportunity to do a protest on that scale even before these changes. Maybe they can still do "remove any post on wellthatsucks that isn’t a vacuum" type of change.
Probably old Reddit imploding will bring a few more this way, but safe to say that most people who left Reddit because it's changed for the worse since 5-15 years ago have already left. Still, I have seen a few new users join Lemmy after TechLinked mentioned the site and a continuous trickle would be welcome.
On another note, hearing the "council of Reddit moderators" makes me imagine a cringeworthy meetup in someone's basement.
I came here to banish reddit but this thing wont leave my feed. I guess I'm going to have to take the time to filter the word.
I'm so glad I have a Reddit alternative now like Lemmy. Every news article I see about some corporate move Reddit makes, it seems further and further removed from the community-driven website I had hoped it would be.
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit's POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.
Reddit worked with mods ahead of announcing this change, Nestler tells me in an interview. The same day Nestler and I talked, for example, she said that she had spoken about the changes with Reddit’s mod council, which has about 160 moderators.
Didn't they boot out everyone that wasn't a suck up?
Ugh reddit mod community makes me so angry.... Glad I left that shithole
You'd think this would drive away what mods are left, i imagine they are mostly there for the illusion of power they get at this point and this will be a step towards removing that.
But then, the entire corporatization should be enough to drive people away on it's own but it doesn't seem to be.
Most mods are corporate stooges anyways
You also have some newer mods who are controlling the narrative for profit.
They can't have anyone but themselves breaking the site. 😂 People should figure out a good way to protest Reddit. Ddos attacks can't be fixed. 😁
I'm sure there will be ways around it. Mods can automod-delete every comment, change the rules of the sub to only allow posts of nonsense, or nit moderate at all.
The main problem is that protests don't succeed at reddit because people like moderating for free for some reason. Strangely Reddit has more leverage over mods than mods have over reddit.
Fuck spez
What is reddit? Never heard of it.
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There's still one protest possible.
LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!
Same with twitter.
save