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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

#301

Post by jrnichols »

tyg13 wrote: post #230
rcarr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators. To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. A…

> I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators.

THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi.

The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah."

We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing.

Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

ranger207 wrote: post #84
BoxOfRain wrote: post #13

To the people who've been in this situation, what would you do in Huffman's shoes? From my fairly naïve perspective it looks like he's doing a pretty poor job managing this crisis but am I overestimating the trouble he's in? At some point he'll either be forced to back down or replace the mods of the big subs with people willing to cross the picket line, I don't see why he doesn't just pull the plaster off now either…

Haven't been in this situation, but from previous reddit outrages his best course is "do nothing and everyone will forget about this in like a month"

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by hayst4ck »

killingtime74 wrote: post #283
hayst4ck wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are clearly feeling very righteous, but I think you should temper your righteousness. You might want to consider that while spez may not be the best human, he has had a commendable commitment to free speech. The Reddit platform has been protecting speaking truth to power, and in this case that power is himself. He has the power to shut down anti-spez content on reddit and for the most part has let his platform be…

If you want to go back to original sin then reddit should not have gone public and installed the investors as the ultimate power. Steve Huffman was one of the founders

I'll give you that, but I also don't think it was clear at the time that "next quarters profit" culture would destroy everything good.

The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."

Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.

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

#304

Post by schlauerfox »

donmcronald wrote: post #98
nielsbot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is explicitly what their CEO said. Many subreddits said they'd return on wednesday. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-...

Maybe I'm reading it in a biased manner, but that sure has the feel of "if we wait it out the pigs will get hungry and be back at the trough on Wednesday." I don't think they respect their users, he doesn't understand that's a big part of why people are getting so upset, and he just keeps talking. Lol.

They've lost me, I deleted my accounts and blocked the domain.

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

#306

Post by snuxoll »

predictabl3 wrote: post #172
Alupis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotta tell you - in 6-12 months nobody will even care anymore - and Reddit will still be used en masse like before. Talking with regular non-techy people who use reddit regularly - nobody outside our bubble even knows about or cares about the whole API fiasco. Most people I've talked with shrug and say they'll just use the official app if that's what it all means. The others asked if they can just pay and use th…

-- Kevin Rose, circa Aug 2010.

What broke Digg is exactly what will break Reddit. The 90:9:1 rule applies just as heavily to Reddit as it does to everything that came before it, including Digg. If you made a Venn diagram of Reddit power users to those affected by the shuttering of popular apps, the overlap would be immense, and I'd be willing to put money on it being the case too.

If you drive the power users away, nobody is sharing content or engaging in the comments regularly enough for the 9% of casual commenters to stay engaged and they leave - then the 90% goes because there's nothing at all for them to lurk around.

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

#307

Post by snuxoll »

larperdoodle wrote: post #104
dybber wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t been in a situation like this. I think they should call it off, and announce that they will go back to the drawing board. Then restart talks with the API users and third party app developers. What if they reduced the price of Reddit premium to $3/month and made API and third party apps only available for Reddit premium subscribers? - Reddit would get many more premium subscribers - App developers would be a…

I think the issue with this is that the bigger third party apps (Apollo) actually host their own backend which talks to reddit on behalf of the apps so they can quickly deploy fixes. I tried to find the reddit thread about it I remember reading to confirm, but uhh... the blackout exists.

Apollo's backend just handles push notifications, the app talks directly to Reddit for 99.9% of its functionality.

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

#308

Post by Yardsale420 »

__loam wrote: post #239
rcarr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.

I wonder if they will still make the AI sign an NDA so it can’t talk about the PTSD it has from work.

Because they make all their content mods sign one that also absolves them of all responsibility.

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

#309

Post by pyeri »

hayst4ck wrote: post #263
xyst wrote: post #50

Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers. - regular people get a break from their echo chambers - VOLUNTEER mods get a break - journalists get their news article The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users dat…

You are clearly feeling very righteous, but I think you should temper your righteousness. You might want to consider that while spez may not be the best human, he has had a commendable commitment to free speech. The Reddit platform has been protecting speaking truth to power, and in this case that power is himself. He has the power to shut down anti-spez content on reddit and for the most part has let his platform be…

Exactly, I see merit in your comment. They are making it some kind of "David vs Goliath" situation where spez is the Goliath but judging by the ease with which these mods were able to close shops and killed traffic to their subs all of a sudden, this now seems more of a "elves vs dwarves" situation where both sides have somewhat roughly balanced powers.
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