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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#381

Post by vpeters25 »

safety1st wrote: post #212
spazx wrote: post #109

Smelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push…

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here. They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank. The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labo…

They were done the minute mods broke their habit of moderating their subreddits. Some dedicated mods might come back, but it is really hard to return to a lost habits so the damage is done already.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#382

Post by intothemild »

goykasi wrote: post #293
Loveaway wrote: post #128

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the In…

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. S…

I don't disagree with your line of thinking here.

But the big difference you're missing is that the kind of users that use old.reddit or third party apps are the power users.

Sure the Reddit app sits in its position in the app stores, but you ask most frequent users on reddit, and they all say they transitioned to a third party app.

So my point is i see things like the app as entry points for new users, and then those users either churn or end up transitioning to third party apps to make their experience better.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#383

Post by myspy »

realPtolemy wrote: post #297
photonerd wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment. It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company. FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with…

I disagree. Personally I still think Twitter is a goldmine for following the latest relevant releases of AI-papers (@_akhaliq), the current Stock market buzz (several accounts), and the Ukraine war from an OSINT and serious journalism perspective (@maxseddon). You get what you decide to follow.

I won‘t use it anymore since the third party shut down and the inferior product they themselves provide. And the heart of the Apple community migrated to Mastoton and it doesn‘t feel ethically right to use it right now due to right wing people being catered there.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#384

Post by TeMPOraL »

imiric wrote: post #314
Simulacra wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It's a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.

That would make sense if they wanted to emulate FB, which is questionable in itself, but how they're proceeding with these changes is completely killing the very thing that made them successful in the first place. It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all. It's a very dumb move, considering they had all the resources and power to do this right, and still increase their reve…

> It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.

You're assuming they care, or ever cared. Maybe I'm getting too cynical, but I feel it's pretty clear Reddit leadership doesn't give a damn about Reddit the discussion/community site. For them, it's just a late-stage company that's been pumped and needs to be dumped. Where we see Reddit as its own unique artifact, they see it as just another money-producing asset, mature and ripe for harvest. They'll destroy it to cash out, as it has always been the plan - it's almost always the plan with startups in general - and find some other thing to repeat the process.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#385

Post by leokennis »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #16

If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.

Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it!

You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#386

Post by [deleted] »

rdevsrex wrote: post #373
safety1st wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here. They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank. The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labo…

Exactly. I canceled my monthly subscription and logged out. I mostly loved Reddit for long for pieces anyway, so I'm going to pay more attention to Substack and see how that emerges.

[deleted]

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#387

Post by posguy »

bsimpson wrote: post #248
spazx wrote: post #109

Smelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push…

It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.) As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?

Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#388

Post by zarzavat »

Sparkyte wrote: post #214
Loveaway wrote: post #128

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the In…

Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it. What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against. And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.

I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that?

Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#389

Post by suby »

sofixa wrote: post #275
cjs_ac wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That's why HN looks like this. A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.

> A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more. That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?

The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist.

One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.

Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?

I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#390

Post by lagolinguini »

drumhead wrote: post #374
randycupertino wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, This happened on the r/audible subreddit, the official audibledotcom customer service account became a mod and started deleting all the threads remotely critical of audible or amazon. The subreddit revolved and they were removed as a mod but it was a solid 5-months of nary a harsh word. If…

The whole reason to Google Reddit results is for independent enthusiast opinions positive and especially negative. Corporatised subs are going to kill that dead for many things. Another nail in the coffin of Reddit. Love of money truly is the root of all evil.

I think you’re right. The more I think about it the more I feel like Reddit to me is the comment section for thinks that either don’t have a comment section or have a bad comment section.
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