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Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

reddark.netlify.app

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Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#61
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.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#63

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.

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.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#64

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.

> I own the DocuSign subreddit. 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 o…

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.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#66

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.

> 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.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#70

Too bad we don't have a viable replacement for reddit atm or this would have been end of Reddit

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.

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