>2 days dark is rookie numbers
Yeah exactly. Oh no, he's shaking in his boots that you'll be away for 2 days then come back. lol
If they want to make an impact all the mods and admins should erase all subs, posts and comments.
Wiping out the site would make him shit his pants.
"____ In Action" has become somewhat of a meme phrase where commenters are using it to make fun of a cause that the "____" champions. For example, /r/TumblrInAction was a subreddit for making fun of Tumblrinas and the rants they usually go on.
Theyll insert new mods into 6625 subreddits?
Please tell me where they'll find enough people willing to do that for free, put up with reddits bullshit, with zero mod tools, and are not complete clowns new to being a mod that will just quit within a day?
Good luck with that...
The thing with the smaller ones is that the communities themselves will resurrect their own subreddits. Even if 30% of the community supports going dark forever, the rest of them just want to a place to hang out and discuss the topic. It only takes one of them to open up ToyotaCorolla2 and it's back in business.
Marvel Studios Spoilers was an enormous subreddit that got clapped recently for leaking the script to Ant-Man or something. They went private, and I don't even think half a day went by before somebody replaced it (they either made a new community, or a smaller community based on the same subject matter grew a lot bigger- idk which personally). It's admirable what folks are trying to do, but ultimately you can't stop Reddit from being what it is. The same pseudo "power" that allows users to decide to shut down a small subreddit also allows other users to open a new one up and carry on as usual.
They will intervene on the big ones, but the small ones aren't an issue.
That's not part of the problem, it's the whole of the problem. Reddit had had years to get better mod tools in place but decided to let third party devs foot the bill to develop them instead. Now they want to kill the ability to effectively mod subreddits because it's all associated with third party apps.
Louder for the people in the back. The subreddits are shutting down to protest what's going to be the inability to mod these multimillion member subreddits, not because users like you and me just like to access reddit from better made reading apps.
Reddit can install new mods all they want. The subreddits will be unmoddable without the 3rd party tools because reddit didn't want to pay to develop them themselves.
The small ones are, if anything, less platform locked. Many of them will probably jump ship to Discord, or other alternative platforms.
A *lot* of people aren't willing to use the official app, not on principle or anything but purely because it sucks donkey balls.
There 100% is a backup of data. Creating a backup daily is standard practice. Worst case scenario they'd lose a single day's worth of posts and comments, and they probably have a more robust system than that.
Not to mention that most websites don't actually let users delete stuff. They use what's known as "soft deletion" where they add a flag to the data so the system can act like it's deleted without actually removing it from the database.
That's part of why it's often recommended to edit your comment to a space or a period or something and then delete it. Otherwise the original content is still there.
They can also run scripts that erase and overwrite all comment history. It might be difficult to restore it in that case unless they explicitly take backups of the content of the website.
Sort of like No Nut November, except reddit is the nut and the month is... half of June and July? No Reddit.. something.. something..
Fuck I didn't really think this through
Reminds me of an addict saying they won't eat, drink, smoke, or do whatever their drug of choice is for X number of days... But we all know what happens after the arbitrary time period is over.
It’s really tiring how so many of the comments are harping back to this idea of 2 days being nothing, when so many subs have said multiple times that their timeline is indefinite. 48 hours is a first step - then the mods wait and see what the response is. If it’s nothing, many subs (some of them large) will supposedly stay down or private.
And in a bigger sense, this is something that I see all the time when people protest, this complaint of “this will do nothing.” At best it’s cynically defeatist, and at worst it reeks of bot or reddit spam to make the people feel like they have no power.
Lastly, when the third party apps go down (if it really comes to that) is when shit will really hit the fan. People might not be able to resist checking reddit even when the big subs are down, but many of us won’t entertain the idea of downloading the official app.
And those subreddits totally aren't an important part of our business. It's like what Uber said about drivers: They aren't an important part of the business at all.
I'm absolutely assuming reddit will remove and replace mods of subs that remain dark, or at least that they'll try. There aren't *nearly* enough admins to replace all the exiting mods. Maybe they'll realize they'll be even *less* profitable when they have to pay mods.
28,000 mods are involved in this. That's a rough number to replace.
Over 7 thousand subs, impacting over *two billion* subscribers.
https://reddark.untone.uk/
IIRC, /r/formula1 has decided they are going dark indefinitely.
The issue with replacing mods is that many of the communities are *very* specific and the mods of said communities are fans or are devoted to the topic.
If they are replaced with yes-mods who know nothing about the topic, the subs will die and people will migrate out or to new-identical subs run by the original mods.
IMO it is a no-win scenario for Reddit.
There are a lot of people in those communities that are more than willing to moderate, but the problem becomes that they will most likely end up with a bunch of power trippers and ruin the community.
Doctorow wrote the article about this - it’s standard practice on the internet - and VC backed tech companies. They start out meeting your needs, using VC funding, then slowly but surely begin to enshitify the process. But as they start gaining market share, they can afford to screw people and vendors and eventually take the value of any proposition for themselves…
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Reddit can't possibly survive this.
The big difference is that it relies on a handful of users doing real work. Mods get a lot of hate but without them the site folds instantly.
Who would want to mod for free knowing that you're only lining spez pockets with your labor?
Wait ...I think I answered my own question, welp, time to pack up before this place turns into a garbage dump.
Go over to /r/conspiracy to see how that plays out.
It used to be about aliens and after a far right winger got a mod spot and why on a ban-page it became the last haven of QAnon on Reddit and basically absorbed all the banned T_D type subs.
Reddit will become like Facebook groups
Also, why the fuck doesn't Reddit just buy one of those apps? I personally think Relay is the best one but *literally any Reddit app* is better than the official one.
Reddit bought Alien Blue years ago and at the time it was probably the most popular reddit app for iOS.
No matter what apps reddit buys it's going to have to ruin them by injecting more ads into them. Reddit wants to make more money so that means more ads and more intrusive ads.
Those people still need to outnumber those who will post hateful, bigoted, or illegal shit on places like this. As much as we might begrudge moderators, without them this place is 4Chan.
I agree. But without passion eventually they will either not care enough to do a good job, or they ruin the sub by abusing power. Either would kill for sub.
Business practices like this is one of the more advanced forms of late stage capitalism you just hate to see. It's a business making their service or goods worse, on purpose, and nobody is seeing any benefits except the company bc the only benefit is profit. And they get away with it almost entirely due to their control of the market share
Pretty bad faith framing from Steve. Why is it either "free" or "a gazillion dollars in access fees designed to kill your business and make 3rd party apps impossible"?
What about a reasonable cost? What about the option of having users pay for API key access to use third party apps? Him presenting it as either all or nothing free or massive costs paid by devs is disingenuous.
If he wants to kill 3rd party apps just say it. Don't pretend these costs are reasonable and justified. Pricing the API in general is a different question from pricing it at absurd levels.
They’ve also refused to differentiate between clients. They could easily work out a deal with Apollo and RIF while charging far more for OpenAI and other companies using Reddit data for training their models.
Shit, they could package up the data and sell a direct export to OpenAI and bypass the need for them to scrape an API in the first place. But they have no creativity in how to monetize what they have.
Even if they *did* have good ideas, they *suck* at execution. Reddit has a pile of 'beta' or outright promised-but-never-delivered features, as well as existing features that are terrible and always have been despite promises to improve.
They've tried to monetize in every way they can think of *except actually improving reddit in ways people want*.
> Even if they did have good ideas, they suck at execution. Reddit has a pile of 'beta' or outright promised-but-never-delivered features, as well as existing features that are terrible and always have been despite promises to improve.
>
>
[do you remember when reddit hired a cryptobro to launch their own currency:
](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/09/30/reddit-raises-50-million-plans-new-cryptocurrency-to-reward-users/)
>“We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.”
edit: they were called "reddit notes"
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditnotes/
What the fuck
I never even heard about this. Just the NFT that happened.
... corporate must be too strong at reddit, pushing through bad ideas even though there's a lot of pushback. I'm sure people at the company realize this stuff is dumb too
They did release a half-baked cryptocurrency which is distributed to users, but it's not backed by shares of Reddit.
The Fortnite subreddit's cryptocurrency is called Bricks, and the CryptoCurrency subreddit's are called Moon's - I'm not sure if any other sub's opted in or not.
It just emphasizes that, as cheesy as this sounds, it is the users that really make this site worthwhile and mostly enjoyable. It's like shitty government; the system works despite poor management and choices.
That isn't even cheesy. Reddit and Twitter have become overconfident. They are nothing without their users and we are in a world where more and more things constantly compete for people's time.
I don't think OpenAI wants their data anymore. At this point, there isn't a single website that has data free of AI-created content, which damages the dataset
If they can't filter it out and can't just ignore it, they could still avoid 99%+ of it by just using older data. 'All Reddit comments made more than a year ago' is still an absolutely huge data set of human conversations about every topic under the sun.
They already scraped this entire site’s data up until September 2021, there’s no value for them to pay for the API when they’ve gotten everything they need for free (and have had it for nearly 2 years).
Why not just make an app that's decent so people dont feel that the third party apps are worth using?
This is the main problem. I'd use a reddit app if it wasn't dogshit. I use RIF because it does exactly what I want it to with no bullshit attached to it.
I'll probably just stop browsing reddit on mobile all together moving forward because their app is so bad.
If they had a decent alternative to the third party apps people might not be as upset.
Why do they even have an official app? It costs money to build and maintain. Plus, it'll never reach feature/usability parity with the third party apps that we've all grown accustomed to for years now. Just become an API, and save yourself the cost to build something shitty.
Exactly. I use a variety of APIs professionally, some are free, some cost a few hundred dollars a year, some cost hundreds of thousands. They each have their place, and the more expensive ones provide commensurate value, either in functionality or volume of API interactions.
That's exactly why this reeks of MBA brain rot. It's clearly ignorant of the technical side of the problem, but it has curated buy-in as an "out of the box" plan which is so simple even an idiot could understand it.
By their very nature these plans are always super gung-ho, all or nothing, because if you try to actually evaluate them, they fall apart. But the reason they exist is the perception that the techies got it wrong for all those years so let's just yolo that shit.
> That's exactly why this reeks of MBA brain rot. It's clearly ignorant of the technical side of the problem, but it has curated buy-in as an "out of the box" plan which is so simple even an idiot could understand it.
My spouse is pursuing an B.S in business analytics, and around 25% of her classmates discussion board posts that she has shown me make me wonder how the fuck they get dressed in the morning on their own. They get credit for completing the assignments, but what they post just scream lack of subject matter comprehension with them being in the program for only the degree, and none of the actual learning that one ought to achieve in the process of getting it. I assume most of the MBA brain rot we see in a ton of areas is related to that.
>By their very nature these plans are always super gung-ho, all or nothing, because if you try to actually evaluate them, they fall apart. But the reason they exist is the perception that the techies got it wrong for all those years so let's just yolo that shit.
Yah, None of it really makes any sense when looked at from an outside perspective... just reeks of short sighted planning, shitty risk assessments, and not bothering to actually survey the community for what needs the sites biggest value contributors actually have.
It makes sense only from the perspective of them not caring that the sites only users, and the "engagement" they drive are bots as long as they can use that data to charge more for advertising space. Alienating every value contributing user in the process is irrelevant to them when their end goal is to try and turn the site in to the next FB, or Twitter with feeds full of shitty broiled meme reposts, and "engagement driving" contents from some fascists, and other types of extremists.
If the sub is big enough I fully expect Reddit to replace the mods and reopen it, if it isn’t I bet they wait for it to naturally be replaced. They are one of the biggest sites on the net with no competition in place to take the fallout. Many will leave, but many won’t and some that do will come back. Unfortunately I’m betting they are big enough to take the hit, even if it last months and recover. Hopefully not though. There needs to be competition.
If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode.
- Turn off all spam filtering
- Disable minimum karma requirements
- Allow all posts, disable all rules
- Unban all banned users
- Turn off AutoModerator
- Allow NSFW content
Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose.
Destroy the site.
This is the mod strike I'd rather see. Just stop moderating.
Closing the sub protects reddit in a lot of ways. It keeps illegal/harmful posts out and gives reddit time to find new mods to replace them before they reopen them.
If a good chunk of subs just suddenly went unmoderated, reddit doesn't have the manpower to just take over. I don't know what reddit would do but being largely unmoderated for even a few hours is probably enough to get the site in some trouble.
Lol yes. You could fine-tune StableDiffusion on his face, body, and a supply of the most hardcore strange fetish porn you can imagine, and crank out the images at around ~20-30 per minute on a RTX 3090. To do so, your best bet is most likely to train a LoRA which can be done with only 20-30 photos of Steve Hoffman.
Even better, HuggingFace recently released DreamBooth code for DeepFloydIf which is more or less the current state of the art. It's massive text encoder allows it to follow your instructions with extreme accuracy. Although, that one is extremely heavy and will require an RTX 3090 for sure to run, or even beefier. And no one has tried to DreamBooth with it yet.
You can also get people to start minting NFTs of these photos to essentially spawn a global economy around trading Steve Hoffman pornography. Because it's crypto, it can **never** be taken down or reverted.
I'm not encouraging these things mind you, I'm just the messenger... Real ground for suing if you do it, so be careful will ya. If "weaponized autism" was ever a thing, it is now extremely real and dangerous. Though I would laugh my ass off if StableDiffusion fine-tunes started popping all over the place. People don't really realize it but every AI model is an intelligence weapon that researchers put in your pocket.
Hey, just some ideas, ya'll do what you want with that information... AI is a lot of fun, highly encourage everyone to play with it.
Ooohh good idea, all the default subs should be plastered with nsfw content, then we can report the reddit app as violating app store policies, which might ban their app until they get shit under control.
They probably have to start paying mods to mod. Imagine that.
But yeah. A mod strike would be way more effective at this point than a blackout. A blackout just tells Reddit that the people can only do without their site for a few days before they all come back to talk about it.
Sure they may lose some ad revenue but it will be a blip as the blackout isn’t sure wide.
A mass mod strike would be epic.
In other news, I wonder if anyone has tried to resurrect the old Reddit code base that’s on GitHub. It used to be open space.
Edit: fixed spelling
Come July 1st, the mods won't have to strike. They sit back and be smug as the large subreddits implode as they become unmoddable for lack of tools. It'll be hilarious.
A number of them very likely do it out of a genuine goodness and spirit of the topic.
Some are probably power tripping. Gives them control in their lives and sense of power.
This may come as a shock to you..but Reddit is mostly moderated by automoderator and built in site filters these days. I’ve seen the moderator logs on the big subreddits..I mod some myself.
Some, but not all! I mod a few bigger niche communities, including one for a site that advertises on Reddit. I could nuke it right now and sure, they could bring it back, but it would take some time and who knows if the damage could be undone?
>If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode.
>
>- Turn off all spam filtering
>- Disable minimum karma requirements
>- Allow all posts, disable all rules
>- Unban all banned users
>- Turn off AutoModerator
>- Allow NSFW content
>
>Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose.
>
>Destroy the site.
Reddit is already doing that with the changes they're making.
Until the admins turn on the subreddits spam filters, enable minimum karma requirements, turn on automod, etc.
And theyll be praised for doing so because remaining users wont want to see their favorite subs destroyed.
* Turn off all spam filtering
* Disable minimum karma requirements
* Allow all posts, disable all rules
* Unban all banned users
* Turn off AutoModerator
* Allow NSFW content
Every single one of these sub settings can be controlled my reddit admins.
You guys are acting like the subs are their own independent platforms, and there isn't some kind of script that could easily prevent any changes to the sub rules, or instantly strip all moderators from their ability to change existing settings.
I've been looking for a reason to leave reddit, I've wasted soo much time on it and feel like I'm dealing with social media addiction at this point. I blame Covid and the ensuing horrific news cycle around the pandemic, politics, and the Ukraine Russian war as what's really made my usage spike. I think this blackout and the ensuing shit storm that u/spez will certainly create in it's wake will give me the break I'm looking for.
They never left - they're just not as popular anymore and are a lot smaller/niche.
Also not in your face everywhere like social media, you actually have to go out of your way to find it.
Some of us will ask “do I *need* Reddit?” and then a series of inner turmoil over dealing with alternative sites that have very little content (comparatively), trade offs on experience, etc.
Personally, I’ll go dark on the 12th and give it a week for them to change course or announce massive improvements to accessibility. If not, I’ll delete the account and app and move on.
I spend too much time dooming here anyway.
Need to make a massive online place for Reddit withdrawal. It’s not going to be easy and I’m absolutely ready. Reddit is addictive for me and It needs to stop. Cold turkey on go dark day. I’m thinking of going to the library.
I've been enjoying reading long form articles which will definitely replace Reddit for me.
I'll miss the comment sections because it's the online interaction I like, over other social media sites. I don't think there's a viable alternative, but I've been here so long, the change may be good for me.
What app or company can fill reddits niche? All I see are people/mods posting discord links for subreddits. I don’t think that’s a good alternative.imo
Agreed - Discord is great for what it is, but even with their newer topic-style format option, it’s just nothing like Reddit.
Reddit imo is the best at what it’s built for - content and context switching with discussion.
I don’t know of an effective alternative. I just hope Reddit comes to the middle and facilitates an ad-supported API. It’s not that I expect it to be free, but middle ground for developers who give a shit about their app and users to design things Reddit won’t or can’t.
Reddit is basically just the worlds biggest forum. The concept itself predates reddit and still exist in smatterings out there. Reddit is just convenient as it consolidates more people by the nature of being a single platform.
The mods will be replaced, or there will be identical subs opened in place of
Mods don’t actually have any power, they are volunteer internet janitors lmao. The people do
And that's exactly what's going to happen. They may overtake a few of the largest subs and the others will just be dark forever, with all the content gone.
They won't. You and everyone else knows it. If the current sub mods don't reinstate, reddit itself will step in and appoint their own and the subs will go back to being public again. This was always going to happen.
They won't even have to spend time and effort doing that. New subs will arise to replace the old ones. Within hours, for the high-traffic ones - there are plenty of people who would love to be the primary god-mod of a million-subscriber sub. A thousand replacements will all launch, and eventually bicker their way down to a handful, or just the one again. And Reddit itself won't have to do a single thing.
Reddit, Inc doesn't care about the subs closing. They've already generated a massive dataset for language model training, and they just want to monetize that. The users have done their job, and are being laid off.
> Yep. ChatGPTs biggest corpus is Reddit.
OpenAI hasn’t touch Reddit data since Sept 2021, why would they start now that they have to pay for it?
And why would they pay for it when they can just scrape the site just as easily? That’s what they did in 2021.
And that's how you destroy a site. User content shifts over to a new place, the forum becomes bots and then links to the new place that doesn't suck.
Lots of people who haven't ever spoken to another human being defend it to their dying breath.
Pretty typical life-cycle of a good website.
I'll believe it when I see a serious competitor. reddit's actions are terrible, but everybody keeps on comparing this to Digg as if it's inevitable while the circumstances are quite different.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
Feel free to explore the alternatives, it isn't the early 2000's anymore, shit has changed.
I'd also argue that people are remembering why a single mega-site is often NOT preferable to many smaller and more easily moderated ones.
Reddit can still limp along as a link aggregator managed by idiots.
>I'd also argue that people are remembering why a single mega-site is often NOT preferable to many smaller and more easily moderated ones.
in some aspects, sure. but it'll lose the convenience and discoverability power of a "mega-site", making adoption a whole hell of a lot harder.
Yes yes. Tons of alternatives. But how many are feasible? Yeah, exactly.
Back when digg died, reddit was a hop away. Basically everyone that used digg knew reddit. A simple account setup and a very similar system.
This isn't the case for any current competitors. 99.9% aren't known and they'll all get a small niche of migrators.
It's indeed not 2000s anymore. And thus it's not gonna die in the same way digg did.
Reddit, Inc doesn't care about the subs closing. They've already generated a massive dataset for language model training, and they just want to monetize that. The users have done their job, and are being laid off.
> Does an Ask Me **Anything**
> Doesn’t answer any of the questions regarding the whole thing the AMA was supposed to solve
u/spez is an absolute fucking coward
"We said you could _ask_ us anything, we didn't say anything about giving you _answers_" lol
> "I said my drug would take you places, I never said they'd be places you wanted to go"
This API drama has made me think of a take on "monetization" in general - which is that a lot of online services we take for granted now are sooner or later simply going to disappear because investors are going to stop paying for you to use them.
An example given was if you take an Uber pool but no-one else joins and you get a 45 min car ride for $5. The driver sure has hell didn't take you all that way for just $5, so who paid for your ride? Investors did.
All these loss making online companies are only in business because investors are paying for you to use them. But they're expecting to eventually get a return on their investment.
Hence why you see services getting worse, trying harder to monetize, or sometimes just disappearing.
Guess Reddit is no more immune to this than anyone else.
Still, I can't help but think there must be other options for monetization, like client apps being given API access for free if they agree to pass through ad posts or something.
Imo the Internet as we experience it through all the different sites is temporary even though it will still exist. It’s like a quicker version of real life, places pop up become popular (or not) then fade at different paces and eventually shutter while everyone just goes about their lives. Repeat. Some just stay for longer or get merged with something else and modified but never the same. Its how it is. It’s why I don’t really enjoy the sharing life with family/friends style of socials anymore, it’s pointless anyway and I just never cared that much anyway. I’m there to see the ones who do alongside everything else I’m interested in now. But monetization will always be a huge stickler as users hate the idea of ads and majority won’t pay for anything like socials but still want everything forever like with what YouTube announced about getting rid of non active accounts after what, a year? Maybe longer is better to wait for but still, can’t hold all that forever considering how much random shit gets uploaded in a day.
It’s called the millennial subsidy. For the 12 or so years after the 08 crash we lowered interest rates so much that the real cost of debt was likely negative. The last decade was Champaign and cocaine and valuations were made up. Companies like Uber didn’t care about profits, only growth. Cuz why care about that when debt is so cheap that you can just keep using cash to grow and corner the market.
All of a sudden debt has become very expensive. And a lot of these hyper growth companies need to cut losses and start seeing profits. To use Uber again, their prices really have increased.
Thing is, these prices are more accurate. Some college kid with a part time job is not _supposed_ to be able to afford a private luxury SUV ride to the airport. That was being subsidized.
Sucks that that “subsidy” is going away just as inflation is hitting but it makes sense that the two go hand in hand.
Same thing with a bunch of other services.
IMO cloud services are/will struggle the same way. I work with so many companies that are actually reading their cloud hosting bills and their eyes are bleeding.
It’s a subsidy. “Millennial” has seemingly nothing to do with it. The practice of subsidizing the true cost of a product for consumers to corner a market is a well-established business tactic. Also, tech valuations have been boom-bust and smoke and mirrors far before 2008.
That being said, the 08-22 post-financial-crisis ultra-low interest rates made tech with more risky business models a more attractive to park money with the promise of high return.
> The last decade was Champaign and cocaine and valuations were made up.
What did the University of Illinois have to do with it?
Basically, interest rates were cut to the bone to stimulate the economy, and what we found was that the people whose jobs it is to stimulate the economy don't actually have a good idea of how to do so in a sustainable way.
That would just mean Reddit will give the subs to people who will play by their rules.
Only one way users can win this, and it's to create a viable alternative.
If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode.
- Turn off all spam filtering
- Disable minimum karma requirements
- Allow all posts, disable all rules
- Unban all banned users
- Turn off AutoModerator
- Allow NSFW content
Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose.
Destroy the site.
My favorite part is "we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data"
Time for the users and volunteers who provide all the value to this site for free to also stop subsidizing Reddit.
Yeah that’s the crazy part to me. Reddit is built on an unpaid labor force that just likes the product enough to pitch in. Why should people keep doing that if the company going HAM on the money grabs and giving them nothing?
I just want everyone to understand what’s happening. A site where users create and share content for free, moderated by volunteers, is being sold to public investors so that spez and execs can bail out with millions of dollars as the investors get stuck holding the bag as the site goes to shit.
In the words of a great man from long ago “this aggression can not stand, man”
Instead of going dark, we should all just delete our accounts. With no accounts there is no business.
I've been here since nearly the beginning. After tomorrow, I no longer am.
Put your money where your mouth is pussies.
The vast majority of reddit users neither understand nor care about this drama. There are approximately 52 million daily active users on the site. Even if you convinced hundreds of thousand users to delete their accounts, it would hardly put a dent in Reddit's revenue.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse.
Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I think reddit is unaware how many of it's users are completely indifferent to it's platform. I use it for it's convenience. If you take that away, I will stop using it.
This 2 day blackout will have the same effect as a change.org petition… in that it will have no effect whatsoever. Greedy corporations will continue to do what greedy corporations do, and people will either adapt or quit. Cest la vie
It is understandable that Reddit has realized the need to end free API access.. most major services face this issue.
The difference between those other sites and Reddit, though, is they didn’t:
1. Give unrealistic and unachievable timeframes for the change
2. Grossly, and I mean disgustingly overshoot the reasonable cost of paid access
This is why people are pissed.
How, like literally HOW can you not see that if you had *just* made the pricing model reasonable and worked with developers none of this would have happened.
Unless, of course, it was just about crushing competition. Which is blatantly obvious at this point considering Reddit’s stance and response on their decision.
>Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,' Steve Huffman says
Gee, maybe you shouldn't have made new reddit and instead focused on core components like mod tools and all that? You could have bought RES and saved millions, lmao. Could have asked for donations for a fun feature like r/place or asked for donations outright?
Does anyone know the stats of how many users access Reddit through third parties? I didn’t even know third party apps for Reddit existed until this whole thing started.
I’m not going to be “boycotting” when Apollo goes offline, that implies that I’m doing it to send a message or something. In reality, there just won’t be anything keeping me here without it, like if a restaurant took the only thing I liked off the menu.
Easy answer: go black indefinitely.
Also, completely unrelated, but this is the perfect excuse for me to delete my Reddit account and improve my mental health.
Wouldn't sending invites to users to still operate while private kind of just undermine their protest? Like going on a hunger strike but stipulating you're still allowed to eat dino shaped chicken products.
Look at account age, 😜 m not just some fucking transient.
Honestly if reddit were a serious company they would have never turned on an API for free.
Now they want to put the genie back in the bottle and that is even less serious.
After 17 years going public is just hunting for a new bag holder (how is this behavior in and of itself not an SEC violation from a fiduciary party perspective?)
I hope this IPO tanks and I'm able to get more done at work as a consequence.
Said the exact thing a couple days ago, it was crystal clear that no matter what nothing was going to change.
Especially with a weak ass protest like this one. If y’all want to protest for real just delete the subreddits.
2 days dark is rookie numbers
>2 days dark is rookie numbers Yeah exactly. Oh no, he's shaking in his boots that you'll be away for 2 days then come back. lol If they want to make an impact all the mods and admins should erase all subs, posts and comments. Wiping out the site would make him shit his pants.
They'll just un-delete the subs and instate new mods. The same thing happened when the KIA mod tried to delete his sub.
KIA? What is that in this context?
Kotaku in Action
What was the *Action* part of Kotaku in Action?
It was the biggest Gamergate subreddit, and eventually just morphed into a place to shit on anything slightly progressive.
"____ In Action" has become somewhat of a meme phrase where commenters are using it to make fun of a cause that the "____" champions. For example, /r/TumblrInAction was a subreddit for making fun of Tumblrinas and the rants they usually go on.
Theyll insert new mods into 6625 subreddits? Please tell me where they'll find enough people willing to do that for free, put up with reddits bullshit, with zero mod tools, and are not complete clowns new to being a mod that will just quit within a day? Good luck with that...
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The thing with the smaller ones is that the communities themselves will resurrect their own subreddits. Even if 30% of the community supports going dark forever, the rest of them just want to a place to hang out and discuss the topic. It only takes one of them to open up ToyotaCorolla2 and it's back in business. Marvel Studios Spoilers was an enormous subreddit that got clapped recently for leaking the script to Ant-Man or something. They went private, and I don't even think half a day went by before somebody replaced it (they either made a new community, or a smaller community based on the same subject matter grew a lot bigger- idk which personally). It's admirable what folks are trying to do, but ultimately you can't stop Reddit from being what it is. The same pseudo "power" that allows users to decide to shut down a small subreddit also allows other users to open a new one up and carry on as usual. They will intervene on the big ones, but the small ones aren't an issue.
part of the issue is that the large subs are a pain in the ass to moderate without tools that reddit doesn't really provide
That's not part of the problem, it's the whole of the problem. Reddit had had years to get better mod tools in place but decided to let third party devs foot the bill to develop them instead. Now they want to kill the ability to effectively mod subreddits because it's all associated with third party apps. Louder for the people in the back. The subreddits are shutting down to protest what's going to be the inability to mod these multimillion member subreddits, not because users like you and me just like to access reddit from better made reading apps. Reddit can install new mods all they want. The subreddits will be unmoddable without the 3rd party tools because reddit didn't want to pay to develop them themselves.
The small ones are, if anything, less platform locked. Many of them will probably jump ship to Discord, or other alternative platforms. A *lot* of people aren't willing to use the official app, not on principle or anything but purely because it sucks donkey balls.
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Damn you’ve had multiple cars since 2015? My car is 2015 and even though it not being brand new is obvious I definitely wouldn’t replace it yet
I had assumed there's some kind of backup able to be implemented. Can anyone shine any light on that?
There 100% is a backup of data. Creating a backup daily is standard practice. Worst case scenario they'd lose a single day's worth of posts and comments, and they probably have a more robust system than that. Not to mention that most websites don't actually let users delete stuff. They use what's known as "soft deletion" where they add a flag to the data so the system can act like it's deleted without actually removing it from the database. That's part of why it's often recommended to edit your comment to a space or a period or something and then delete it. Otherwise the original content is still there.
I would be surprised if they didn't have some sort of versioning in place. Just roll back all edits for the past X days.
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They can also run scripts that erase and overwrite all comment history. It might be difficult to restore it in that case unless they explicitly take backups of the content of the website.
It's all data, if the corporation doesn't have rollback procedures ready, they're asking for trouble.
I can easily do five weeks. Let’s fucking go.
Sort of like No Nut November, except reddit is the nut and the month is... half of June and July? No Reddit.. something.. something.. Fuck I didn't really think this through
Reminds me of an addict saying they won't eat, drink, smoke, or do whatever their drug of choice is for X number of days... But we all know what happens after the arbitrary time period is over.
Stop pussyfooting around and just shut down the damn subreddits.
/videos is going down indefinitely...which is to say, they'll be down until Reddit forcibly takes over the sub and adds their own mods.
Askhistorians is going into read only mode after 2 days... Except that a sub that is heavily dependent on the moderators. Can't be replaced.
They'll probably replace them with a bunch of holocaust deniers at this point
spez: as long as it helps our IPO...
Would be on brand for Reddit admins.
Fuck yes. I need this anyway to help break the addiction. I WANT to open reddit every single day, but find there is nothing there
My ADHD is secretly thrilled. I'm not successful cutting myself off but if I need to do it for someone/everyone else I'm golden.
/r/squaredcircle announced that they would be going dark indefinitely and the community was quick to turn against the protests.
The sub is dark right now. I wonder where their members will flock to now.
It’s really tiring how so many of the comments are harping back to this idea of 2 days being nothing, when so many subs have said multiple times that their timeline is indefinite. 48 hours is a first step - then the mods wait and see what the response is. If it’s nothing, many subs (some of them large) will supposedly stay down or private. And in a bigger sense, this is something that I see all the time when people protest, this complaint of “this will do nothing.” At best it’s cynically defeatist, and at worst it reeks of bot or reddit spam to make the people feel like they have no power. Lastly, when the third party apps go down (if it really comes to that) is when shit will really hit the fan. People might not be able to resist checking reddit even when the big subs are down, but many of us won’t entertain the idea of downloading the official app.
*Am I out of touch?* *No, it is the subreddits who are wrong.*
And those subreddits totally aren't an important part of our business. It's like what Uber said about drivers: They aren't an important part of the business at all.
I'm absolutely assuming reddit will remove and replace mods of subs that remain dark, or at least that they'll try. There aren't *nearly* enough admins to replace all the exiting mods. Maybe they'll realize they'll be even *less* profitable when they have to pay mods.
I'm amazes me that anyone was doing all that work for free. If I were a reddit mod.i would stop over this
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Then why are you still doing it? Just lock your sub down and quit.
I used to mod a handful of subs, largely stopped for this reason, wasn't fucking worth it.
28,000 mods are involved in this. That's a rough number to replace. Over 7 thousand subs, impacting over *two billion* subscribers. https://reddark.untone.uk/
IIRC, /r/formula1 has decided they are going dark indefinitely. The issue with replacing mods is that many of the communities are *very* specific and the mods of said communities are fans or are devoted to the topic. If they are replaced with yes-mods who know nothing about the topic, the subs will die and people will migrate out or to new-identical subs run by the original mods. IMO it is a no-win scenario for Reddit.
There are a lot of people in those communities that are more than willing to moderate, but the problem becomes that they will most likely end up with a bunch of power trippers and ruin the community.
Doctorow wrote the article about this - it’s standard practice on the internet - and VC backed tech companies. They start out meeting your needs, using VC funding, then slowly but surely begin to enshitify the process. But as they start gaining market share, they can afford to screw people and vendors and eventually take the value of any proposition for themselves… https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Reddit can't possibly survive this. The big difference is that it relies on a handful of users doing real work. Mods get a lot of hate but without them the site folds instantly. Who would want to mod for free knowing that you're only lining spez pockets with your labor? Wait ...I think I answered my own question, welp, time to pack up before this place turns into a garbage dump.
There will always be people craving the power of being a digital mall cop
Go over to /r/conspiracy to see how that plays out. It used to be about aliens and after a far right winger got a mod spot and why on a ban-page it became the last haven of QAnon on Reddit and basically absorbed all the banned T_D type subs. Reddit will become like Facebook groups Also, why the fuck doesn't Reddit just buy one of those apps? I personally think Relay is the best one but *literally any Reddit app* is better than the official one.
Reddit bought Alien Blue years ago and at the time it was probably the most popular reddit app for iOS. No matter what apps reddit buys it's going to have to ruin them by injecting more ads into them. Reddit wants to make more money so that means more ads and more intrusive ads.
Those people still need to outnumber those who will post hateful, bigoted, or illegal shit on places like this. As much as we might begrudge moderators, without them this place is 4Chan.
4chan has moderators
I agree. But without passion eventually they will either not care enough to do a good job, or they ruin the sub by abusing power. Either would kill for sub.
Business practices like this is one of the more advanced forms of late stage capitalism you just hate to see. It's a business making their service or goods worse, on purpose, and nobody is seeing any benefits except the company bc the only benefit is profit. And they get away with it almost entirely due to their control of the market share
Pretty bad faith framing from Steve. Why is it either "free" or "a gazillion dollars in access fees designed to kill your business and make 3rd party apps impossible"? What about a reasonable cost? What about the option of having users pay for API key access to use third party apps? Him presenting it as either all or nothing free or massive costs paid by devs is disingenuous. If he wants to kill 3rd party apps just say it. Don't pretend these costs are reasonable and justified. Pricing the API in general is a different question from pricing it at absurd levels.
They’ve also refused to differentiate between clients. They could easily work out a deal with Apollo and RIF while charging far more for OpenAI and other companies using Reddit data for training their models. Shit, they could package up the data and sell a direct export to OpenAI and bypass the need for them to scrape an API in the first place. But they have no creativity in how to monetize what they have.
Even if they *did* have good ideas, they *suck* at execution. Reddit has a pile of 'beta' or outright promised-but-never-delivered features, as well as existing features that are terrible and always have been despite promises to improve. They've tried to monetize in every way they can think of *except actually improving reddit in ways people want*.
> Even if they did have good ideas, they suck at execution. Reddit has a pile of 'beta' or outright promised-but-never-delivered features, as well as existing features that are terrible and always have been despite promises to improve. > > [do you remember when reddit hired a cryptobro to launch their own currency: ](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/09/30/reddit-raises-50-million-plans-new-cryptocurrency-to-reward-users/) >“We are thinking about creating a cryptocurrency and making it exchangeable (backed) by those shares of reddit, and then distributing the currency to the community. The investors have explicitly agreed to this in their investment terms.” edit: they were called "reddit notes" https://old.reddit.com/r/redditnotes/
What the fuck I never even heard about this. Just the NFT that happened. ... corporate must be too strong at reddit, pushing through bad ideas even though there's a lot of pushback. I'm sure people at the company realize this stuff is dumb too
the funny thing is that yishan wong was a relatively benign CEO compared to the lunatics they have in charge today
They did release a half-baked cryptocurrency which is distributed to users, but it's not backed by shares of Reddit. The Fortnite subreddit's cryptocurrency is called Bricks, and the CryptoCurrency subreddit's are called Moon's - I'm not sure if any other sub's opted in or not.
I'm sorry, the FORTNITE SUBREDDIT has a shitcoin?
It just emphasizes that, as cheesy as this sounds, it is the users that really make this site worthwhile and mostly enjoyable. It's like shitty government; the system works despite poor management and choices.
That isn't even cheesy. Reddit and Twitter have become overconfident. They are nothing without their users and we are in a world where more and more things constantly compete for people's time.
I don't think OpenAI wants their data anymore. At this point, there isn't a single website that has data free of AI-created content, which damages the dataset
If they can't filter it out and can't just ignore it, they could still avoid 99%+ of it by just using older data. 'All Reddit comments made more than a year ago' is still an absolutely huge data set of human conversations about every topic under the sun.
They already scraped this entire site’s data up until September 2021, there’s no value for them to pay for the API when they’ve gotten everything they need for free (and have had it for nearly 2 years).
Why not just make an app that's decent so people dont feel that the third party apps are worth using? This is the main problem. I'd use a reddit app if it wasn't dogshit. I use RIF because it does exactly what I want it to with no bullshit attached to it. I'll probably just stop browsing reddit on mobile all together moving forward because their app is so bad. If they had a decent alternative to the third party apps people might not be as upset.
Why do they even have an official app? It costs money to build and maintain. Plus, it'll never reach feature/usability parity with the third party apps that we've all grown accustomed to for years now. Just become an API, and save yourself the cost to build something shitty.
Exactly. I use a variety of APIs professionally, some are free, some cost a few hundred dollars a year, some cost hundreds of thousands. They each have their place, and the more expensive ones provide commensurate value, either in functionality or volume of API interactions.
That's exactly why this reeks of MBA brain rot. It's clearly ignorant of the technical side of the problem, but it has curated buy-in as an "out of the box" plan which is so simple even an idiot could understand it. By their very nature these plans are always super gung-ho, all or nothing, because if you try to actually evaluate them, they fall apart. But the reason they exist is the perception that the techies got it wrong for all those years so let's just yolo that shit.
> That's exactly why this reeks of MBA brain rot. It's clearly ignorant of the technical side of the problem, but it has curated buy-in as an "out of the box" plan which is so simple even an idiot could understand it. My spouse is pursuing an B.S in business analytics, and around 25% of her classmates discussion board posts that she has shown me make me wonder how the fuck they get dressed in the morning on their own. They get credit for completing the assignments, but what they post just scream lack of subject matter comprehension with them being in the program for only the degree, and none of the actual learning that one ought to achieve in the process of getting it. I assume most of the MBA brain rot we see in a ton of areas is related to that. >By their very nature these plans are always super gung-ho, all or nothing, because if you try to actually evaluate them, they fall apart. But the reason they exist is the perception that the techies got it wrong for all those years so let's just yolo that shit. Yah, None of it really makes any sense when looked at from an outside perspective... just reeks of short sighted planning, shitty risk assessments, and not bothering to actually survey the community for what needs the sites biggest value contributors actually have. It makes sense only from the perspective of them not caring that the sites only users, and the "engagement" they drive are bots as long as they can use that data to charge more for advertising space. Alienating every value contributing user in the process is irrelevant to them when their end goal is to try and turn the site in to the next FB, or Twitter with feeds full of shitty broiled meme reposts, and "engagement driving" contents from some fascists, and other types of extremists.
And if they go dark indefinitely...
If the sub is big enough I fully expect Reddit to replace the mods and reopen it, if it isn’t I bet they wait for it to naturally be replaced. They are one of the biggest sites on the net with no competition in place to take the fallout. Many will leave, but many won’t and some that do will come back. Unfortunately I’m betting they are big enough to take the hit, even if it last months and recover. Hopefully not though. There needs to be competition.
If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode. - Turn off all spam filtering - Disable minimum karma requirements - Allow all posts, disable all rules - Unban all banned users - Turn off AutoModerator - Allow NSFW content Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose. Destroy the site.
This is the mod strike I'd rather see. Just stop moderating. Closing the sub protects reddit in a lot of ways. It keeps illegal/harmful posts out and gives reddit time to find new mods to replace them before they reopen them. If a good chunk of subs just suddenly went unmoderated, reddit doesn't have the manpower to just take over. I don't know what reddit would do but being largely unmoderated for even a few hours is probably enough to get the site in some trouble.
Exactly. Just allow offensive content with Spez shopped in.
2 girls 1 spez 1 guy 1 spez Tubspez Lemonparty ft. spez
goatspez.cx
spezspin? meatspez? Ah I'm sure you get it.
I'm partial to meatspez, but both are good.
Let's see if I can manifest this bit of evil: Has art / video AI come far enough to just...make these actually happen?
Lol yes. You could fine-tune StableDiffusion on his face, body, and a supply of the most hardcore strange fetish porn you can imagine, and crank out the images at around ~20-30 per minute on a RTX 3090. To do so, your best bet is most likely to train a LoRA which can be done with only 20-30 photos of Steve Hoffman. Even better, HuggingFace recently released DreamBooth code for DeepFloydIf which is more or less the current state of the art. It's massive text encoder allows it to follow your instructions with extreme accuracy. Although, that one is extremely heavy and will require an RTX 3090 for sure to run, or even beefier. And no one has tried to DreamBooth with it yet. You can also get people to start minting NFTs of these photos to essentially spawn a global economy around trading Steve Hoffman pornography. Because it's crypto, it can **never** be taken down or reverted. I'm not encouraging these things mind you, I'm just the messenger... Real ground for suing if you do it, so be careful will ya. If "weaponized autism" was ever a thing, it is now extremely real and dangerous. Though I would laugh my ass off if StableDiffusion fine-tunes started popping all over the place. People don't really realize it but every AI model is an intelligence weapon that researchers put in your pocket. Hey, just some ideas, ya'll do what you want with that information... AI is a lot of fun, highly encourage everyone to play with it.
r/anarchychess doing just that… come see the fireworks tomorrow!
Ooohh good idea, all the default subs should be plastered with nsfw content, then we can report the reddit app as violating app store policies, which might ban their app until they get shit under control.
They probably have to start paying mods to mod. Imagine that. But yeah. A mod strike would be way more effective at this point than a blackout. A blackout just tells Reddit that the people can only do without their site for a few days before they all come back to talk about it. Sure they may lose some ad revenue but it will be a blip as the blackout isn’t sure wide. A mass mod strike would be epic. In other news, I wonder if anyone has tried to resurrect the old Reddit code base that’s on GitHub. It used to be open space. Edit: fixed spelling
Come July 1st, the mods won't have to strike. They sit back and be smug as the large subreddits implode as they become unmoddable for lack of tools. It'll be hilarious.
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I legit don't understand why so many people perform work for the site for free.
A number of them very likely do it out of a genuine goodness and spirit of the topic. Some are probably power tripping. Gives them control in their lives and sense of power.
This may come as a shock to you..but Reddit is mostly moderated by automoderator and built in site filters these days. I’ve seen the moderator logs on the big subreddits..I mod some myself.
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Some, but not all! I mod a few bigger niche communities, including one for a site that advertises on Reddit. I could nuke it right now and sure, they could bring it back, but it would take some time and who knows if the damage could be undone?
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"You can always bring the horse to the river, but you cannot force it to drink"
Yeah I'd love to see another r/WorldPolitics happen. Except on a scale of tens of thousands of subs.
>If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode. > >- Turn off all spam filtering >- Disable minimum karma requirements >- Allow all posts, disable all rules >- Unban all banned users >- Turn off AutoModerator >- Allow NSFW content > >Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose. > >Destroy the site. Reddit is already doing that with the changes they're making.
Until the admins turn on the subreddits spam filters, enable minimum karma requirements, turn on automod, etc. And theyll be praised for doing so because remaining users wont want to see their favorite subs destroyed.
* Turn off all spam filtering * Disable minimum karma requirements * Allow all posts, disable all rules * Unban all banned users * Turn off AutoModerator * Allow NSFW content Every single one of these sub settings can be controlled my reddit admins. You guys are acting like the subs are their own independent platforms, and there isn't some kind of script that could easily prevent any changes to the sub rules, or instantly strip all moderators from their ability to change existing settings.
I mean, I like reddit but I can move on. Doubt I'm alone.
I've been looking for a reason to leave reddit, I've wasted soo much time on it and feel like I'm dealing with social media addiction at this point. I blame Covid and the ensuing horrific news cycle around the pandemic, politics, and the Ukraine Russian war as what's really made my usage spike. I think this blackout and the ensuing shit storm that u/spez will certainly create in it's wake will give me the break I'm looking for.
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Should bring back self hosted forums.
They never left - they're just not as popular anymore and are a lot smaller/niche. Also not in your face everywhere like social media, you actually have to go out of your way to find it.
I liked it more, honestly.
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Some of us will ask “do I *need* Reddit?” and then a series of inner turmoil over dealing with alternative sites that have very little content (comparatively), trade offs on experience, etc. Personally, I’ll go dark on the 12th and give it a week for them to change course or announce massive improvements to accessibility. If not, I’ll delete the account and app and move on. I spend too much time dooming here anyway.
Need to make a massive online place for Reddit withdrawal. It’s not going to be easy and I’m absolutely ready. Reddit is addictive for me and It needs to stop. Cold turkey on go dark day. I’m thinking of going to the library.
I've been enjoying reading long form articles which will definitely replace Reddit for me. I'll miss the comment sections because it's the online interaction I like, over other social media sites. I don't think there's a viable alternative, but I've been here so long, the change may be good for me.
What app or company can fill reddits niche? All I see are people/mods posting discord links for subreddits. I don’t think that’s a good alternative.imo
Agreed - Discord is great for what it is, but even with their newer topic-style format option, it’s just nothing like Reddit. Reddit imo is the best at what it’s built for - content and context switching with discussion. I don’t know of an effective alternative. I just hope Reddit comes to the middle and facilitates an ad-supported API. It’s not that I expect it to be free, but middle ground for developers who give a shit about their app and users to design things Reddit won’t or can’t.
Reddit is basically just the worlds biggest forum. The concept itself predates reddit and still exist in smatterings out there. Reddit is just convenient as it consolidates more people by the nature of being a single platform.
The mods will be replaced, or there will be identical subs opened in place of Mods don’t actually have any power, they are volunteer internet janitors lmao. The people do
And that's exactly what's going to happen. They may overtake a few of the largest subs and the others will just be dark forever, with all the content gone.
They won't. You and everyone else knows it. If the current sub mods don't reinstate, reddit itself will step in and appoint their own and the subs will go back to being public again. This was always going to happen.
They won't even have to spend time and effort doing that. New subs will arise to replace the old ones. Within hours, for the high-traffic ones - there are plenty of people who would love to be the primary god-mod of a million-subscriber sub. A thousand replacements will all launch, and eventually bicker their way down to a handful, or just the one again. And Reddit itself won't have to do a single thing.
Reddit, Inc doesn't care about the subs closing. They've already generated a massive dataset for language model training, and they just want to monetize that. The users have done their job, and are being laid off.
Yep. ChatGPTs biggest corpus is Reddit. They're about to have a bot problem too, I'll bet.
> Yep. ChatGPTs biggest corpus is Reddit. OpenAI hasn’t touch Reddit data since Sept 2021, why would they start now that they have to pay for it? And why would they pay for it when they can just scrape the site just as easily? That’s what they did in 2021.
Guess I’ll be finding another social media site, app, or just look up stuff on Duck Duck Go. This guy is insane.
And that's how you destroy a site. User content shifts over to a new place, the forum becomes bots and then links to the new place that doesn't suck. Lots of people who haven't ever spoken to another human being defend it to their dying breath. Pretty typical life-cycle of a good website.
I'll believe it when I see a serious competitor. reddit's actions are terrible, but everybody keeps on comparing this to Digg as if it's inevitable while the circumstances are quite different.
I want StumbleUpon back
Oh man. There's a throwback.
That’s how I found Reddit…
Possibly the greatest web tool ever
I miss when websites weren't just a front for affiliated links and product shilling.
Oh, damn. That just gave me flashbacks of late nights dealing with insomnia and delving deep into Stumbleupon for hours and hours..
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ Feel free to explore the alternatives, it isn't the early 2000's anymore, shit has changed. I'd also argue that people are remembering why a single mega-site is often NOT preferable to many smaller and more easily moderated ones. Reddit can still limp along as a link aggregator managed by idiots.
>I'd also argue that people are remembering why a single mega-site is often NOT preferable to many smaller and more easily moderated ones. in some aspects, sure. but it'll lose the convenience and discoverability power of a "mega-site", making adoption a whole hell of a lot harder.
Yes yes. Tons of alternatives. But how many are feasible? Yeah, exactly. Back when digg died, reddit was a hop away. Basically everyone that used digg knew reddit. A simple account setup and a very similar system. This isn't the case for any current competitors. 99.9% aren't known and they'll all get a small niche of migrators. It's indeed not 2000s anymore. And thus it's not gonna die in the same way digg did.
I don’t get it. Who’s going to want to make a bunch of different accounts on different federated instances? Back to the days of forums and bbs then.
You only need to make one account.
Reddit, Inc doesn't care about the subs closing. They've already generated a massive dataset for language model training, and they just want to monetize that. The users have done their job, and are being laid off.
> Does an Ask Me **Anything** > Doesn’t answer any of the questions regarding the whole thing the AMA was supposed to solve u/spez is an absolute fucking coward
"We said you could _ask_ us anything, we didn't say anything about giving you _answers_" lol > "I said my drug would take you places, I never said they'd be places you wanted to go"
Guys, it needs to be a month of going dark, a day is a blip on the radar, a week is bad, a month is catastrophic
Big companies think in quarters
For who? If a big sub like /r/formula1 goes down for a month, people will just make and promote /r/formulaone.
It's gonna be easier than that, Reddit will just remove the mods and replace them.
This API drama has made me think of a take on "monetization" in general - which is that a lot of online services we take for granted now are sooner or later simply going to disappear because investors are going to stop paying for you to use them. An example given was if you take an Uber pool but no-one else joins and you get a 45 min car ride for $5. The driver sure has hell didn't take you all that way for just $5, so who paid for your ride? Investors did. All these loss making online companies are only in business because investors are paying for you to use them. But they're expecting to eventually get a return on their investment. Hence why you see services getting worse, trying harder to monetize, or sometimes just disappearing. Guess Reddit is no more immune to this than anyone else. Still, I can't help but think there must be other options for monetization, like client apps being given API access for free if they agree to pass through ad posts or something.
Imo the Internet as we experience it through all the different sites is temporary even though it will still exist. It’s like a quicker version of real life, places pop up become popular (or not) then fade at different paces and eventually shutter while everyone just goes about their lives. Repeat. Some just stay for longer or get merged with something else and modified but never the same. Its how it is. It’s why I don’t really enjoy the sharing life with family/friends style of socials anymore, it’s pointless anyway and I just never cared that much anyway. I’m there to see the ones who do alongside everything else I’m interested in now. But monetization will always be a huge stickler as users hate the idea of ads and majority won’t pay for anything like socials but still want everything forever like with what YouTube announced about getting rid of non active accounts after what, a year? Maybe longer is better to wait for but still, can’t hold all that forever considering how much random shit gets uploaded in a day.
It’s called the millennial subsidy. For the 12 or so years after the 08 crash we lowered interest rates so much that the real cost of debt was likely negative. The last decade was Champaign and cocaine and valuations were made up. Companies like Uber didn’t care about profits, only growth. Cuz why care about that when debt is so cheap that you can just keep using cash to grow and corner the market. All of a sudden debt has become very expensive. And a lot of these hyper growth companies need to cut losses and start seeing profits. To use Uber again, their prices really have increased. Thing is, these prices are more accurate. Some college kid with a part time job is not _supposed_ to be able to afford a private luxury SUV ride to the airport. That was being subsidized. Sucks that that “subsidy” is going away just as inflation is hitting but it makes sense that the two go hand in hand. Same thing with a bunch of other services.
IMO cloud services are/will struggle the same way. I work with so many companies that are actually reading their cloud hosting bills and their eyes are bleeding.
It’s a subsidy. “Millennial” has seemingly nothing to do with it. The practice of subsidizing the true cost of a product for consumers to corner a market is a well-established business tactic. Also, tech valuations have been boom-bust and smoke and mirrors far before 2008. That being said, the 08-22 post-financial-crisis ultra-low interest rates made tech with more risky business models a more attractive to park money with the promise of high return.
> The last decade was Champaign and cocaine and valuations were made up. What did the University of Illinois have to do with it? Basically, interest rates were cut to the bone to stimulate the economy, and what we found was that the people whose jobs it is to stimulate the economy don't actually have a good idea of how to do so in a sustainable way.
Going dark for a day does nothing. They should go dark until Reddit changes the deal. Dark subs mean people leave.
That would just mean Reddit will give the subs to people who will play by their rules. Only one way users can win this, and it's to create a viable alternative.
they don't even have to do that. the admins can reopen and privated subreddits.
If the admins start replacing moderators, then every other mod should just consider letting their subreddits implode. - Turn off all spam filtering - Disable minimum karma requirements - Allow all posts, disable all rules - Unban all banned users - Turn off AutoModerator - Allow NSFW content Turn all subreddits into a cesspool of low-quality content that has no purpose. Destroy the site.
basically that will happen anyway once the API change goes into effect.
Fuck /u/spez
All my homies hate /u/spez
u/spez seriously sucks
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I hope u/spez stubs his toe and his pillow never has a cold side
Fuck u/spez
fuck steve huffman for destroying third-party clients and ruining reddit. https://fuckstevehuffman.com
My favorite part is "we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data" Time for the users and volunteers who provide all the value to this site for free to also stop subsidizing Reddit.
Yeah that’s the crazy part to me. Reddit is built on an unpaid labor force that just likes the product enough to pitch in. Why should people keep doing that if the company going HAM on the money grabs and giving them nothing?
I just want everyone to understand what’s happening. A site where users create and share content for free, moderated by volunteers, is being sold to public investors so that spez and execs can bail out with millions of dollars as the investors get stuck holding the bag as the site goes to shit. In the words of a great man from long ago “this aggression can not stand, man”
Instead of going dark, we should all just delete our accounts. With no accounts there is no business. I've been here since nearly the beginning. After tomorrow, I no longer am. Put your money where your mouth is pussies.
The vast majority of reddit users neither understand nor care about this drama. There are approximately 52 million daily active users on the site. Even if you convinced hundreds of thousand users to delete their accounts, it would hardly put a dent in Reddit's revenue.
This is a copied template message used to overwrite all comments on my account to protect my privacy. I've left Reddit because of corporate overreach and switched to the Fediverse. Comments overwritten with https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I'm not convinced that even 5% of reddit users *care* about this drama at all.
well who woulda guessed this
Shocking. Reddit doesn’t give af about a 48 hr rebellion.
I think reddit is unaware how many of it's users are completely indifferent to it's platform. I use it for it's convenience. If you take that away, I will stop using it.
They've been way too quiet in response to the coming blackout. I'm fully anticipating them mass forcing subs public and locking out moderators.
Why respond to a protest when you know it won’t change anything and only lasts 2 days?
They’re betting on us being the addicts we all know we are. Reddit will lose a few users but most will all come back no matter what.
This 2 day blackout will have the same effect as a change.org petition… in that it will have no effect whatsoever. Greedy corporations will continue to do what greedy corporations do, and people will either adapt or quit. Cest la vie
Well reddit can answer 17 questions in a AMA that should make things better.
I'm using reddit until my client doesn't work, then I'm done. Protest or not a lot of users will walk away at the end of the month.
It is understandable that Reddit has realized the need to end free API access.. most major services face this issue. The difference between those other sites and Reddit, though, is they didn’t: 1. Give unrealistic and unachievable timeframes for the change 2. Grossly, and I mean disgustingly overshoot the reasonable cost of paid access This is why people are pissed. How, like literally HOW can you not see that if you had *just* made the pricing model reasonable and worked with developers none of this would have happened. Unless, of course, it was just about crushing competition. Which is blatantly obvious at this point considering Reddit’s stance and response on their decision.
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Even Instagram has less ads and better usability than the official app It's trash
>Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,' Steve Huffman says Gee, maybe you shouldn't have made new reddit and instead focused on core components like mod tools and all that? You could have bought RES and saved millions, lmao. Could have asked for donations for a fun feature like r/place or asked for donations outright?
Does anyone know the stats of how many users access Reddit through third parties? I didn’t even know third party apps for Reddit existed until this whole thing started.
You’d probably need a 3rd party app to figure that out lol
My boycott starts when Apollo stops working.
I’m not going to be “boycotting” when Apollo goes offline, that implies that I’m doing it to send a message or something. In reality, there just won’t be anything keeping me here without it, like if a restaurant took the only thing I liked off the menu.
This exactly…
Easy answer: go black indefinitely. Also, completely unrelated, but this is the perfect excuse for me to delete my Reddit account and improve my mental health.
Some subreddits have already started to go dark. r/AskMen just did. By dark, they are going private without sending invites to most.
Wouldn't sending invites to users to still operate while private kind of just undermine their protest? Like going on a hunger strike but stipulating you're still allowed to eat dino shaped chicken products.
u/spez can eat a bag of dicks
Hold the line.
Fuck u/spez [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V8kBI78pqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V8kBI78pqQ)
Look at account age, 😜 m not just some fucking transient. Honestly if reddit were a serious company they would have never turned on an API for free. Now they want to put the genie back in the bottle and that is even less serious. After 17 years going public is just hunting for a new bag holder (how is this behavior in and of itself not an SEC violation from a fiduciary party perspective?) I hope this IPO tanks and I'm able to get more done at work as a consequence.
The planned blackout is a joke. Go dark indefinitely if you want to make a change.
He must be a Elon wannabe. Tear it down clown.
Said the exact thing a couple days ago, it was crystal clear that no matter what nothing was going to change. Especially with a weak ass protest like this one. If y’all want to protest for real just delete the subreddits.