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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

#761

Post by ppeetteerr »

rndmwlk wrote: post #736
ppeetteerr wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised to keep hearing that charging for API is lazy and bad for a business. They can do whatever they want with their API and price their services as they see fit. Reddit isn't going anywhere because it's a good product for the end user. It's expensive to run and unfeathered access to their content was part of their acquisition strategy. Now they want to go public and want to be a real business. I'm with Redd…

An ironic sentiment considering Reddit is entirely reliant upon free labor of both moderators and users who upload content to provide any experience whatsoever. Reddit is, at the moment, purposely expensive to run. They could have chosen to be a much smaller operation and act as stewards, but they want to turn a Craigslist into a Facebook. OpenAI will get the data one way or another. Frankly they’ve probably got abou…

I didn’t know moderators were being generous with their time only because Reddit was not profitable /s

Reddit will do what it wants with with their costs. It’s not a publicly funded entity. Building on top of someone else’s content is always risky. Just look at what Twitter did a few years ago.

If you want publicly available services, you need to socialize them. As long as it’s a for-profit company, they will do as they please.

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

#762

Post by AlexandrB »

jconnop wrote: post #138
marcell wrote: post #113

Making a subreddit private is a built in, native reddit feature. If the mods are still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community, how is it breaking any rules? Sounds like they are just making use of a reddit feature.

For small subreddits that may work, but for the larger ones Reddit doesn't care, they won't let such technicalities get in the way of their revenue. The only way to really "win" here is to abandon the platform en masse, and delete all your content before you walk out the door.

Just wait a little while, because reddit seems to be actively undeleting stuff right now.

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

#763

Post by rkangel »

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 have stats, but one anecdote:]

I was originally a desktop user of Reddit, before the redesign. At some point I also installed Sync Pro to read occasionally on mobile, but it wasn't my primary interface to Reddit.

I'm generally pretty open to redesigns. I don't have the dislike of change, and am ok with taking a little while to adapt to something new. Its usually an investmet in a better approach (e.g. MS Office introducing the Ribbon). So when the Reddit update happened I wasn't one of those people who rigorously stuck to Old Reddit - I just waited until I got used to it.

What actually happened is that I stopped using Reddit online at all. Everything was so slow. It just became a chore to read threads. I didn't make this decision consciously, it's just what happened over time.

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

#764

Post by dimmke »

anaganisk wrote: post #728
dimmke wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access. I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.

The percentage of their party apps, vs people using the first party app, just based on Google play downloads is very miniscule. It is like saying using youtube-dl to consume YouTube is killing it. I mean we all love sponsor block and uBlock origin, do we have the same sympathy for YouTube?

The other thing about this that is so crazy is that services like Facebook Twitter and Instagram have all had heavily locked down APIs for a long time. Like, you couldn’t just start using their API you had to sign up and get approval. It moated social media management software like Hootsuite.

I know this because at one of my previous roles they wanted us to build a simple version of software like that and integrate it into their content management system but we couldn’t without also paying the full ticket for third party SaaS so it killed the project.

They could switch to something like that. Where compliance is checked and revoked. It would kill bots but not apps. But this was never designed to work, it’s how disingenuous it is that pisses me off.

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

#765

Post by duxup »

mlyle wrote: post #60
janalsncm wrote: post #31

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don…

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko... “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

> “and that is not democratic”

Whose fault is that?

Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.

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

#766

Post by dimmke »

Dah00n wrote: post #758
dimmke wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t even mentioning the NSFW poison pill they added. Even if the pricing had been workable, this was never designed to do anything but kill external API access. I definitely would have paid $6 a month to keep using Apollo.

>NSFW poison pill Could you explain what you mean by this?

Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.

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

#767

Post by deeviant »

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…

It's crazy the amount of people that seemed to be straining to support Reddit, it's almost, suspicious.

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

#768

Post by alickz »

appletrotter wrote: post #751
efficax wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if we accept the CEO’s lie that running the API is costly compute isn't free man. it probably costs millions of dollars a year just to pay the cloud providers to support those apps. i doubt that's a lie...

Well simple logic would say that if they get $.12 per user/month, the costs to serve each user (in terms of compute) is probably below $.12 or else they would be losing money, no?

i thought they _were_ losing money?

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

#769

Post by AlexandrB »

pbae wrote: post #61

The masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they're taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

> Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don't treat users like shit, the better.

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

#770

Post by Dah00n »

dimmke wrote: post #766
Dah00n wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>NSFW poison pill Could you explain what you mean by this?

Something that has gotten lost amidst all the pricing talk is that Reddit said their API would also stop serving any content marked as NSFW, essentially making it useless for any third party app (general use or moderator use) even if they could come to an agreement on pricing.

I see. Thank you. That is quite important information, and it is a clear problem for moderators in my opinion.
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