In response to the disastrous Spez AMA, /r/Videos have announced that they will permanently shut down on 11th June, one day ahead of the planned blackout
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. [When we made our announcement last...
Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit's attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo's creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I honestly think more subs need to do an indefinite shut down.
If it's only for 48 hours Reddit can just wait it out, and if not a lot of subs join in on the indefinite shut down they can just replace the mods for new ones.
However, in my opinion, the buggest change will come June 30th when 3rd party apps shut down since that's when users will actualy stop using Reddit.
Let's hope it's enough users to make a change. I myself will be deleting everything and my account on June 30th. Let's hope something changes.
Good on the mod team of /r/videos! It must have been a difficult decision to walk away from a 26M+ sized community but I think it's definitely better to scuttle the ship and go down with it than capitulate at this point. This is a bold choice that's left Reddit between a rock and a hard place.
Absolutely incredible to see. Very happy that one of biggest subs called reddits bluff. Which I believe is where we are. Reddit thinks the users that actually care about 3rd party apps will move on at this point and reddit will have the everyone else switch to their apps with no more of a thought than swiping up to the next tik tok video. I'm deleting my last account on Reddit now in solidarity. Lemmy and the fediverse feels nice. I am in near complete control of my data running my own instance while still being able to interact with literally everyone I want and don't want. My ublock isn't blocking a single thing, no trackers, no more being a commodity. Already fine communities are springing up with thoughtful moderation, rules and inclusivity.
This is great to hear! Unfortunately the reddit exodus will likely splinter a bunch of niche communities, but it will definitely be for the best. I'm all down for the "de-consolidation" of the internet!
I appreciate the effort, but since this is one of the main subreddits the Reddit admins will simply purge these subreddits of their mods, install new ones, and reopen it (they’ve already done something like this before).
The real question is how well will the sub operate then? I imagine not very well since all of the experienced mods and their tools are gone.
For me it's a double sided problem. Even if reddit solves the moderation tools problem which user the api (and they will because those are the tools of the free labor they explore) there will be still the problem with the user experience. Even if subreddits reopen I will never use the official reddit app, the same way I refuse to use the official twitter app since apps like Falcon Pro, Flamingo or Talon stopped working.
Reddit CEO can bargain the deal he wants that I don't care anymore. For me reddit is now only a repository where I will continue to search specific information. It is no more a place where I want to participate in online communities.
I’d like to see the big subs each create an official mastodon account for the sole purpose of announcing trustworthy information. One the subs come back up, especially if it’s earlier than expected, how will we know if they were taken over by the admins?
Man it's just so wild to watch what's going on over there right now. Even when subreddits come back after a couple days it may not matter if bot-assisted becomes impossible over there in the long run.
If reddit backs off enough to save the accessibility and moderation issues, I hope enough people still leave to help create a strong alternate ecosystem.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don't think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
Good god I knew it wasn't going to go well but I didn't think they'd crash and burn it THIS bad.
The bar was on the floor and they still managed to somehow clip underneath it through the floor, end up in some backrooms-esque dimension only to trip on a banana peel and land face first in a pie.
I took r/edc restricted yesterday, though we are/were tiny. While I still plan to find replacement mods from within the community after reddit goes full dipshit, I'm done ring their work for free, with shit tools, next to zero support, and (worse, imo) taking a lot of flak from admins because of bullshit unrelated to moderation.
I dunno if lemmy is going to become the reddit replacement or not, but I'm done with giving reddit anything at all. Overwrote and deleted everything from my author account that had some decent amount of fiction, and my personal account that had a lot of real stories from my life. That ain't much, but since I've seen my stuff being read on YouTube, and reposted by the copy/paste bots, it's something I guess.
I think any and all subreddits should go this way.
Reddit is only popular because of the users. We create the content. Yes, a lot of posts on the website are external links but all discussions are generated and concluded by us, the users.
Shutting subs down for 1-2 days and going back to normal is not going to have much of an impact. It's akin to a server blip. If subs shut down indefinitely then reddit has a real problem. 'Normal' users will start to take notice, whereas they currently might not be paying much attention. These subs should go the other route. Shut down and promote alternatives (such as lemmy!) to divert traffic away from reddit.
Pigboy Spez talked about not being profitable. No shit, you dick. This is how you become even less profitable, by pissing off the entire user base.
This is such a big win! I really hope that capacity increases on kbin. Perhaps the mods/admins can organise a donation link? I'm sure there are many of us that would be happy to donate to improve server capacity. (Provided it was secure etc etc)
This was basically force the admins of reddit to remove them as mods... going to annoy a lot of people but its not going to magically cease reddits operations.
This probably the best way, it will show how impactful mods are and what happens when they leave. It's a shame reddit admins will take over the sub to force it back open.
I'm not super technical but can someone please explain why the third party apps can't just require each user to enter their own oauth token? That way all the API calls get tied to the users instead of the app and there's no cost. Am I misunderstanding something?