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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

#71

Post by katbyte »

paulddraper wrote: post #51
redmerchant2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big subs have figured out an extensive set up of bots and moderation guidelines, while investing their own time, all for free. Reddit’s mod tooling is extremely abysmal, that’s part of the protest. (Only 3P devs have bothered building more advanced tools.) A new mod will not have the expertise or careful set up from the previous mods. Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry, particularly on a sub like Mus…

> Most of the mods are debatably not power hungry Everything made sense except this part. Power goes to everyone's head.

lol no it doesn't. most sure, but not everyone.

imho it affects people who didn't seek/don't want power differently from those who went looking for it.

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

#72

Post by donmcronald »

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).

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

#74

Post by depereo »

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…

I added reddit.com to my ublock filters - it was kind of an automatic click a few times a day and it's been a nice way to break the habit so strongly. I've got friends doing the same, and our microcommunity has formed around another platform already, after collectively losing reddit.

It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.

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

#75

Post by darknessmonk »

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…

> To the people who've been in this situation, what would you do in Huffman's shoes?

- Extend the 30 day to apply the pricing to 6 months (at least) to let people figure it out their stuff ; - Give some leverage for the _existing_ 3 party apps that contributed to reddit till this point on the form of a smaller price;

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

#76

Post by xyst »

ThomW wrote: post #18

... until they just take over the moderation of their largest communities and this whole thing ends. I mean what's so magical about the moderation of something like r/videos other than the mods being free labor for Reddit?

People underestimate how much goes into moderating a community. You can train the bots to remove posts based on age of account, or karma. But to respond and remove racist trash in comments or just spam takes a lot of time. Especially for large communities, the time spent can become a full time job (in terms of hours).

And when you have to insert paid moderators, the cost to moderate all of the huge communities will blow up Reddit’s internal budget.

It’s easier said than done. Just ask FB or Google (with YouTube), they have difficulty moderating their own platforms and they have billions of dollars at their disposal.

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

#77

Post by jfghi »

linuxftw wrote: post #57
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…

I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be automated moderation, if they're not already. Enough flags on a post? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.

Even if this was feasible, how much would it cost and how long would it take to successfully roll out?

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

#78

Post by bastijn »

activiation wrote: post #22
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #3

Does this actually affect subscribers to sub-reddits? If this is extended indefinitely I would expect competing sub-reddits to form.

I unsubscrided from a few subs that weren't doing the blackout

I'm reading new ones that aren't doing the blackout. Need for content didn't change.

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

#79

Post by themagician »

ranger207 wrote: post #65
themagician wrote: post #32

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

There's two problems with this: first, the new mods have a good chance of being just as bad as the old mods. Second, the new subs will not be able to use the good subreddit names and will be harder to find. The latter is core problem: discoverability. If it was possible to just found a new sub and have it show up just as clearly when you search for subs related to a particular topic, then if the mods turn out to be t…

You’re right about the first part.

For the second part—they should free up the names of mods protesting. Fun chaos, unpredictable outcome. I support.

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

#80

Post by wvenable »

thewataccount wrote: post #59
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…

I support the blackouts but > 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. They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.

The assumption is that those communities would just go back to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure that's a good assumption.
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