First they came for /r/pics ... now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits
Quite some years ago I'd realised that amongst the problems with using Reddit as a personal blogging space (my avatar here is a relic of that, if you'd not put the two together) was that I do not in fact have any permanent claim to that space.
Reddit's previous policies of moderator re-assignment bothered me. The policies apparently instituted September 2022 and being rolled out aggressively in recent days ... have not weakened my concerns.
And, checking in now, I find a day-old modmail to /r/dredmorbius, a subreddit which only ever was my own personal posts with comments from a few friends, and about 1,000 subscribers ... has received a notice to reclaim by /u/Modcodeofconduct, screenshot attached here.
I have not abandoned the sub. I had closed it in protest of Reddit's continued failings and war against its volunteer moderators and general community.
I will say, that while I like Lemmy (despite its bugs and all that), it severely lacks stupid GIFs and videos, from interestingasfuck, damnthatsinteresting, PublicFreakout, aww, etc.
i actually find the lack of moving stuff refreshing. All the platforms are moving to short addictive video. Reddit wasn't like this in the beginning, either.
This happened to my ~770 people subreddit r/ntfy too. They really lost their marbles, didn't they? I turned it back to "Public" out of fear that they'll delete my Reddit account. I fear even "Restricted" won't stop them. So instead, I'll manually delete or lock new posts and direct them to the Lemmy instance. I may assign another dummy mod account too and unassign myself. Maybe that'll give me a way to close the sub in the future.
Ha. I guess thinking ahead is my trade :-) I'm a Principal Engineer, and much of my job is to think about how a software architecture will look in a few months or a year from now. I often say "It's very lonely living in the future all the time", because people usually think about their current project and current task, not what's ahead of them that far out.
Manually deleting posts leads to them reinstating them (I think they set it up botstyle to reinstate posts from subs where mods have been warned). Editing your posts to directing to Lemmy instances leads you to being given a warning, your post being reinstated from earlier versions and then you're kicked off of your own sub and get a shadow ban alternatively 7 day lockout.
My personal subs that have been private for ages recieved messages saying they will inform me of "further steps" if I refuse to open them up.
One of them is /r/[myRedditUsername] that I use as a kind of scratch pad that I can access anywhere (I've since self hosted a wiki) that they are demanding I open up. Like seriously, no one would ever be interested in whatever is there.
They can get fucked. I deleted all of the posts and comments on all of my accounts and requested GDPR requests on all of them. reddit can get fucked.
I have a feeling they're cracking down on personal subreddits due to their own loophole in the upcoming change to NSFW content. If I interpreted everything correctly, Mods still get to see the full range of NSFW content, meaning seeing NSFW content even in subs that they aren't a Mod in, whereas regular Reddit users are restricted.
In any case, I find it ironic that they talk about the duty of being a Moderator with such importance, and yet Mods aren't even paid, AND... it's quite a common thing that many subs have wildly corrupt Mods. I've no joke been PERMANENTLY banned from certain subs for criticizing a movie, a recent episode in a TV show, etc, and I wasn't even a member of the sub for more than 24 hours. Like, ok, maybe I'm being a bit more harsh in my criticism than others, but when did it become a crime to have an opinion?
"your content is ours, we will do with it as we please, kindly fuck yourself"
I seriously cannot believe what a heavy hand reddit is taking. That IPO threat must be hurting A LOT of wallets right now. This is the flailing desperation of a dying animal, imo. Idk if reddit will actually "die" but I can't see any healthy and vibrant community existing after this. I just hope they don't target Lemmy instances with under-handed "subterfuge"
I cannot exclude the possibility that the recent increase in bot accounts on some instances is somewhat linked to such already engaged subterfuges. I mean, the time frame is way too coincidental.
I think it depends on us users. If we can make a community work here in the federated space well enough to draw users then reddit might really go away.
But if they manage to kill off 3rd party devs, APIs and etc quickly before these alternatives are baked enough to work for their users and these existing federated tools aren't good enough -- then they'll just maintain via the network effect.
This is the flailing desperation of a dying animal
I guarantee they did the math and the site will continue. Sure, a small percentage will leave. But they know from user metrics the vast majority of users will remain. They can find mods who will fall in line.
I'm willing to bet that they don't actually know when a sub went private, just whether or not it currently is. I also would not be surprised if the emails are automated but going out in batches to spread the workload dealing with replies.
2000 employees but none of them thought to go dig up last month's backup and run a diff on the current state. Or alternately they don't have usable backups from last month.
As shit as it is, they probably just made a tool to mass send this notice to any sub privated within the last X days. I doubt they'll follow up with action on a tiny sub.
Funny thing is as a mod you can ban and mute that u/Modcodeofconduct account lol!! They wouldnt allow me to respond to that message so I banned and muted it for the max amount of time (30 days). Taste some of your own medicine reddit!!
Anyone else suddenly getting Reddit followers? I've yet to purge my account, and my account, which has no real activity, is suddenly getting an influx of followers. wth is going on over there? lol
You know, the weird part is? I got two followers, and one of them was a guy I messaged earlier when asking if he'd post his content elsewhere. (I mentioned lemmy as an option)
Well, the profile was different - instead of being "XXX YYY", the one that followed me was "Alternate YYY", so I assumed it was an alt. He didn't message me back on the old nor this account, and when I tried to visit it said "this account name doesn't exist".
He keeps posting and is probably neutral about this whole thing, but it's just, odd why he'd use an alt right then and then delete it or have it banned (maybe he promoted lemmy or protested on it, idk, I brought up lemmy in a post title on a smaller sub but it got banned by "the mods of r/sub". My account is fine tho)
In a way, I’m glad reddit is reacting like this. Being flexible and compromising would have been better, but if they’re determined to be assholes, I’m glad they’re being assertive and unambiguous about it.
Big props to the mods who are unintentionally encouraging them to destroy themselves!
For some time I also used reddit as a personal blog and to save stuff to watch years later, then I read about the limit of 1k results per listing.
This means any api call to retrieve the posts/comments of any kind of sorting is limited to the first 1k objects.
So you can only get the latest 1k new posts, the 1k hot posts, the 1k top post of any time frame, etc.