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Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

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Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#161

Post by gsatic »

All the Freebies on the Internet of the past 20 years be it email, search, chat, news/content, video, streaming, social etc have been funded by Ads.

The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy.

Theses changes, what's happening at twitter, the tech layoffs, govt regulations and fines, are all signs using Freebies for Attention Capture are not going to endlessly scale.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#162

Post by seydor »

distrill wrote: post #54
themagician wrote: post #32

Great opportunity for people to create derivative subreddits without oppressive mods.

i feel like mod oppression isn't much an issue outside of the free speech absolutism rhetoric that plagues places like twitter. and tbh most of the people screeching about this aren't spending much time on reddit to begin with.

mostly because they have been banned tbh

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#163

Post by titusjohnson »

majormajor wrote: post #146
erellsworth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the value of that free labor. Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrut…

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there. I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid mode…

> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))

While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#164

Post by Zamiel_Snawley »

SecurityMinded wrote: post #112

I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode. Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don't think any for-profit company makes such promises. If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rul…

If they had made prudent allowances for uses of the API other than 3rd party frontends, this likely would have been a much smaller deal.

Moderators(who are doing tons of free work to make reddit a tolerable place) use API based tools to help them moderate. If reddit is going to make their (volunteer!) job harder, why shouldn't they just pack up and leave?

The official reddit app reportedly does not make adequate accommodations for some disabled users, but dedicated third party developers did. They later said that they would give exemptions for accessibility use cases, but stipulated that they could not charge for their service. Some people the perceived this as: "we won't make our app accessible, we'll give permission to do free labor for us if you want, but don't you dare try to get paid for it."

Then there is the disingenuous interactions with the Apollo developer.

All-in-all, people think that reddit is acting in bad faith.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#165

Post by smileysteve »

donmcronald wrote: post #72
autokad wrote: post #15

I wonder if this will become similar to what happened with digg.com

I don't think so. Digg was a vote driven news feed one day and a commercial feed the next. It was like visiting a totally different website in terms of content. Reddit was sitting there with the "old" format, so it wasn't too shocking to see everyone migrate. This isn't a drastic change and there aren't any competitors that are offering anything better (ignoring the benefits of something decentralized).

I was getting tired of being pestered with "Install Our App" or the new slower javascript interface, so I started using RedReader

It's a whole different interface

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#166

Post by tomstockmail »

SonicScrub wrote: post #134
tomstockmail wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're not doing it, so they will be replaced. There's always someone willing to step up.

Is that the case? Wouldn't the mods by definition be the most passionate people about reddit, and therefore the sort of people who would most likely be upset about the recent changes? And therefore anyone who would potentially do the job of mod likely to also be upset by the changes? If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption that these people can be easily replaced for granted.

>And therefore anyone who would potentially do the job of mod likely to also be upset by the changes?

Not if they get a chance to be in charge. Also many don't actually care about the changes despite what the mod blackout is asking people.

>If was working for Reddit I wouldn't take the assumption that these people can be easily replaced for granted.

Well this posts article tone makes it sound like they expect the mods to get bored. Which most will. And like I said, they are replaceable.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#167

Post by predictabl3 »

SecurityMinded wrote: post #112

I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode. Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don't think any for-profit company makes such promises. If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rul…

> If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rules as they see fit.

And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk home.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#168

Post by Quikinterp »

rurp wrote: post #119
muttantt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will replace the mods.

Ah yes, because LLMs are so reliable at understanding nuance and social context.

Human reddit moderators already can't do that from my experience

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#169

Post by Zamiel_Snawley »

gsatic wrote: post #161

All the Freebies on the Internet of the past 20 years be it email, search, chat, news/content, video, streaming, social etc have been funded by Ads. The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy. Theses changes, what's happening at twitter,…

Honestly, if they were just screwing developers of third party frontends, people probably wouldn't have cared that much.

They are also screwing their moderators who use API-based tools, and people who need accessibility accommodations that reddit does not provide.

Not to mention the scummy behavior towards the Apollo developer.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#170

Post by actionablefiber »

linuxftw wrote: post #118
whatyesaid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.

I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.

Do you think users will continue to report posts if they see that reporting too often will cause them to be shadowbanned?

Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?

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