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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

#511

Post by PartiallyTyped »

jeltz wrote: post #445
goykasi wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreement with you here. You have one of the first logical arguments for any push back. > figure out a solution that doesn't involve a single dev spending 20m USD a year just to maintain an app that people like Absolutely, I was hoping that would happen when I saw the first Apollo thread(s) a few weeks ago. But Christian took this very personally, and he decided to take his toys and go home. reddit is not at all…

Why shouldn't he have taken it personally? He got 30 days notice from Reddit that they will change the pricing in a way likely to kill his business? With more advance notice he could have investigated ways to adapt his business or tried to lobby politely for a different pricing model. With this short notice he basically was forced to shut down. I do not fault Christian at all for taking it personally, Reddit handled…

And to add insult to the injury, u/spez was caught red handed lying about the conversation and what took place, and then when that surfaced, doubled down.

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

#512

Post by thesaintlives »

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…

The same echo chamber some of those very mods operate in. Pot, kettle, black. Suck it up. You think the hot air from those servers comes by magic? Plenty of them need replacing. The king is dead. Long live the king!

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

#513

Post by [deleted] »

brynjolf wrote: post #503
Kiro wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was dang I would ban you for talking smack.

Aren't you the coolest kid in the playground, or the guy on the sideline cheering on the coolest guy. Actually just staring in hoping someone would notice you. Yeah I think is it he last one.

[deleted]

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

#514

Post by Aachen »

nosebear wrote: post #216

Personally, I couldn't care less about Reddit itself, but what's really annoying is that half of my Google searches end up in temporarily closed subreddits. Reddit has become some sort of a Stack Overflow lately - I hope all that knowledge will be moved somewhere else.

Aren't they on the internet archive?

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

#515

Post by TeMPOraL »

imiric wrote: post #482
TeMPOraL wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That makes sense now, as a scheme to increase valuation before the IPO[1]. But I wouldn't say that that has been their strategy all along. They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part. The API has been free since the beginning, after all, which has allowed the site to prosper. Though it does feel like they're ready to sacrifice the co…

> They're still not profitable after all these years, and the relationship with the community has been amicable, for the most part.

IANAEconomist, but I think the current go-to explanation is that companies can remain unprofitable indefinitely, focusing on increasing growth and stacking more and more loans / investment rounds - as long as interest rates are near-zero, making money cheap. Now that they've gone up, there's enormous pressure to unwind the stack, and such companies need to start making money right frakkin now, hence the sudden squeeze[0] done by Reddit (and other SaaS businesses).

--

[0] - The so-called "enshittification". I dislike the term, but it was coined to describe exactly this direction of company evolution.

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

#516

Post by Aachen »

javawizard wrote: post #462
silcoon wrote: post #18

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711 554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments => not on the front page. No, it's not the algorithm.

What makes you so confident it's not the algorithm? I'm pretty sure it's been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-06-05 see top entry: more comments than points, yet stands solid at #1. Pretty sure I've also seen 2:1 ratios before rather than the 1:1 that this is (but I don't remember around which date that might have occurred or how to easily ctrl+f for it while browsing past days).

I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes/flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.

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

#517

Post by evanreichard »

raincole wrote: post #397
jon_adler wrote: post #189

Why did reddit choose to charge app developers (causing financial uncertainty) for API requests instead of charging the end-users? By purchasing my own usage and loading an API key into Apollo, I could continue to pay Apollo for the app alone like today, and pay Reddit separately for the API access. At least this way, I could decide if I’m happy with the price for API access. I can only assume Reddit deliberately wan…

You overestimate how tech-savvy an average user is (by a huge margin). No one knows what an API is in real world. And no one is willing to pay just because they sees more than 100 images on r/funny in a short period. By "no one" I meant that kind of userbase is so small that if you design your site around them you can say goodbye to IPO.

I don’t think the parent post is proposing that Reddit should restrict access to their own mobile app. They’re proposing that if you want to use a third party app, then put that behind “Reddit Premium+” or whatever.

The average reddit user wouldn’t care or know so they would just use the normal reddit app with all its tracking and ads or whatever, which is what reddit wants right now anyway.

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

#518

Post by senectus1 »

AHOHA wrote: post #412
senectus1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they're unpaid volunteers. too bad. I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community. I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez

Volunteer means they are doing good for the public, these morons aren’t paid and their only motivation there is to have that sense of power over other users to feel important.

hmmm "Good to the public" maybe not... "Service to the public" yes they are.

They're mods. They provide a service. But yeah... closing the community down is willful destruction of a utility. It makes sense for Reddit to rip em out

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

#519

Post by sgift »

lost_tourist wrote: post #463
catiopatio wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter seems perfectly healthy. I came back after years away. It sounds like you’d just grown used to the previous manufactured consensus.

There are a LOT more MAGA "verified" troll bots on there on anything to do with politics. Why are MAGA people trolling on the Bernie Sanders feed for example? Anyway, it's okay if you only follow mostly "fact-based" accounts and don't bother with any political or news sources.

If someone has the words "manufactured consent" in their comment it's a dead giveaway that MAGA bullshitting is what they want, thinking it somehow represents "free speech". So, from the perspective of the GP Twitter is probably now more healthy than ever.

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

#520

Post by jacquesm »

Of course they did. What else did you expect?

The thing that I find interesting is that Reddit moderators are apparently not above weaponizing the community but seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. If something doesn't change then Reddit is dead, so from the managements point of view all they've done is increased the problems rather than reduced them.

It's super easy to criticize the Reddit management for their inability to articulate what is going on behind the scenes but in my view that only means that there is no good news. Reddit is hanging by a thread financially and this revolt has made it worse. So reducing the ability of the moderators to revolt is a first logical step in the direction of stability, which is where they will need to go.

Spez should step down, he's made way too many unforced errors. But the assumption that another manager will be able to dig(g) Reddit out of this hole is quite possibly not valid.

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