Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
It’s going to be a lot harder to pull off massive protests.
A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.
We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.
Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.
More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.
(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)
I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.
The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.
It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.
They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.
They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.
I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.
But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.
Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.
I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.
Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.
Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.
fuck u/spez
There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.
“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”
Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit
At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.
People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.
Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.
But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?
...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely
I soft quit Reddit last year and deleted all my profile’s comments and posts. I only kept it around because I had heard Reddit was restoring deleted posts and I wanted to make sure mine were gone for good. After several months I stopped checking.
This article made me finally pull the trigger and go in to delete my account. Surprise surprise, two pages of old comments had been restored.
This is not a smart choice, they do know that the alternative to peaceful protests like this is violent protest right? They want to challenge that or do they think it won't be done because it's "illegal", that didn't stop these guys now did it?
@KingThrillgore The second the reddit started fucking around I deleted my account. I no longer care what they do or if they even exist.
Here's the VP of Reddit's community cited in the article, Laura Nestler, preaching super engagement from a platforms most fanatical users to power content for the 90%.
She suggests, intrinsic motivators such as "autonomy".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vWUMW6Ovf6o
She was at Yelp prior, which if you want to look at a steaming pile of a wasted company, man give reddit 5-10 years.
That is due to the fact that Reddit - and I can’t stress this next part enough - sucks.
There's an irony seeing Redditors creating threads and complaining about it as if they did anything during the API-gate saga
Mods could just make a filter to remove everything new anyway. The concept of mods being unpaid volunteers means they get to fuck with reddit if they really want. They already had that issue with some subs just starting to allow porn during the first api protest. Sure reddit can just churn through to newer friendlier mods like the first time but they're not going to be able to crush all the dissent and drama from moves like that.
But actually I think reddit has a bigger problem than protests. They tweaked their algorithm recently and it is going the way of facebook now, I've been getting 0 upvote day-old posts shown to me. They're probably getting more engagement but I don't think redditors are going to put up with that level of enshittification as easily as other social media where people are locked in by friends and followers.
Lack of imagination.
Mods can still dump 10k trash messages in a sub making it unusable. (Or smart messages in the case of most subreddit who are trash anyway).
Set-up automoderator with rules reventing anyone below 5 billions karma to participate.
Ban everyone.
I'm sure there are a lot of other options.
Fuck Spez, & long live Lemmy.
I ran a subreddit for my discord server that we would sometimes post pictures to and find new members and after we stopped using reddit about 7 months later bots started reposting my own pictures and random bot accounts were reposting old comments. It was really weird for my ~2000 people sub that was under the radar and never reall popular.
They could just not moderate it tho. Reddit is a toxic workplace (for free) for mods.
Lmao now even the moderators get cancelled by Reddit.
The platform can't die quick enough, it turned into such a fucking cesspool of powertripping mods and circlejerks. And it's impossible to ever get in contact with admins because they replaced them all by bots. There are also so many bot posters that at some point it'll just be bots moderating bots, moderated by admin bots.
I wonder how much longer it will be before Reddit has to start paying people to moderate the subreddits since no one will want to do it for free anymore.
Who am I kidding, there are so many people that are already taking their payment in the HOA like authority being a mod gives them that will never happen.
I just checked and theyve banned my private subreddit for lack of moderation
Heil piss baby Spez
I loved that the VP of Content added that mods will still be able to protest when Reddit is literally is getting rid of major tools for mods to do an effective protest. Like, I get that Reddit is a company, and that it's a platform they own, and that they lose profit whenever a big subreddits get privated, but they keep giving mods middle finger after middle finger.
So rather than allow subs to remain preserved while the replace the mods in place they will push subs to shit on themselves in this latest bout of enshittification.
My protest over a year ago was effortless. I just deleted my account and stopped going there.
I mean it's safe to say it was probably the last opportunity to do a protest on that scale even before these changes. Maybe they can still do "remove any post on wellthatsucks that isn’t a vacuum" type of change.
Probably old Reddit imploding will bring a few more this way, but safe to say that most people who left Reddit because it's changed for the worse since 5-15 years ago have already left. Still, I have seen a few new users join Lemmy after TechLinked mentioned the site and a continuous trickle would be welcome.
On another note, hearing the "council of Reddit moderators" makes me imagine a cringeworthy meetup in someone's basement.
I think this will cause as many problems as it solves (from Reddit's POV), going private has always been a panic button for mods when shit hits the fan. Now those controversies will have much longer to build and have news stories written about it first. Short sighted.
I'm so glad I have a Reddit alternative now like Lemmy. Every news article I see about some corporate move Reddit makes, it seems further and further removed from the community-driven website I had hoped it would be.
Fuck spez
Oh No, anyway.
They can't have anyone but themselves breaking the site. 😂 People should figure out a good way to protest Reddit. Ddos attacks can't be fixed. 😁
I'm sure there will be ways around it. Mods can automod-delete every comment, change the rules of the sub to only allow posts of nonsense, or nit moderate at all.
The main problem is that protests don't succeed at reddit because people like moderating for free for some reason. Strangely Reddit has more leverage over mods than mods have over reddit.
like 10 seconds in automod to get right around that shit lmao.
What is reddit? Never heard of it.
Bots and locked down curated content vs. hive-minded rhetoric that circumvents anything resembling nuance at all.
Gotta admit, there aren’t many good choices here.
OBEY
As a russian I knew it will happen.
Now I wonder what Ukraine spez will start war with? EU? FTC? Fediverse? Something to keep it in permanent state of emergency. Bots? Adblockers?
