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.
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I can see a lot of people moving to Lemmy, just because the other alternative that’s popping off (Tildes) is a far more serious discussion-driven site.
Yeah from what I’ve seen, migrating to tildes is a bit like migrating to hackernews. In theory it’s a Reddit clone, but the purpose of the site is so different from how Reddit has been used that it’s not really a substitute.
Doesn’t Tildes also need an invite? So it’s less likely to have a mass migration.
It does require an invite, although us over at Beehaw moved over from Tildes.
Yeah I like HN but it’s too niche for what this place and others are trying to be. I’ve used it a while but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to people outside of the tech industry or at least broader STEM interest even though other things are discussed there from time to time.
As somebody who’s generally interested in science and technology, HN also sufferers from terminal libertarian VC-brain. It’s a club for wannabe founders of unicorn tech companies who view themselves as enlightened ubermench. This doesn’t always bubble to the surface, but at times of controversy it is quite glaring. Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered they were practically calling to liquidate the homeless, even though the incident - predictably - was the result of a personal dispute with somebody he knew.
Even if the subject matter scratches an itch, the community is not for me.
Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered
Wait…what?
Yeah that’s a good point, I don’t love its politics either and I’m a fair bit to the left of most of its posters. I usually see it in the spirit of ‘you can entertain an idea without agreeing with it’ and trying to avoid staying in a place where people largely agree with me but you’re right a lot of the reactions to the murder were really grim and showed some unpleasant qualities in parts of the userbase.
On the other hand a lot of the less political content is really high quality there and on technical topics the signal/noise ratio is better than most places on the internet. I guess any site with user generated content will always be a case of ‘how much crap do I want to sift through to find a diamond?’ and a lot of the ways HN is bad can be equally applied to a lot of Reddit as well in my opinion. It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea though and that’s fair enough.
Edit: spelling (do we do that here?)
I am always 1050% serial
I definitely get the sense that spez is just going to nuke these mods until they get compliant ones in there. It’s going to end up being a bloodbath, and I think it perfectly fits with his weird fantasy of being a post-collapse tyrant.
Burn everthing down and rebuild in the fediverse. FUCK these corporations.
This is the way
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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.
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?
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.
This was my immediate reaction too. Reddit will likely replace the current moderator team of r/videos and reopen. Nonetheless I can appreciate and respect the gesture/message.
This is easy to do for one subreddit. And it’s a large one. Would easily need 10+ mods to keep it running. But if a few of these large subreddits revolt, I don’t think reddit can simply replace them all.
Not only that but I think replacing the entire mod team would cause a revolt anyways. Tensions are extremely high
I wonder if Reddit might just end up like YouTube: mostly relying on automated content moderation bots, and the human review being a big pool of low paid people who aren’t assigned to specific subs who just do quick checklist reviews.
It’s gonna be great.
Yeah I don’t imagine that Reddit has a deep bench of people who have the skills needed to moderate a sub with millions of users and are willing to do it for free
Tin foil hat stuff though: what if they intend to pay moderators they hold on thrall, but they need to get rid of the current ones first.
Spez just admitted they aren’t profitable. I can’t imagine they will pay new people when they could have paid the old mods
Unless he was lying about profits in some half baked attempt to look like the underdog against the big mean apps.
That would be really stupid considering they are going to IPO soon. Honestly I don’t get why you would announce with such a weird combination of pride and snark that you are unprofitable.
Wouldn’t be the first time a corporation says one thing to the public and the complete opposite to its shareholders.
Seconding this. They’ll likely install their own mods and force-reopen the sub, since it’s one of the bigger ones.
Same with r/technology, and other main subs, id assume
Thanks for grabbing the text, that’s very helpful. Good for /r/videos, way to send a strong message.
I commend the shutdown but if things get out of hand reddit admins will take over the popular subs. They won’t let a prime sub get shut down by mods.
I think there may not be enough competent volunteer mods to take it over. They could replace them with paid reddit employees like other big platforms but that’s gonna cost them more than the 20mil a year they apparently think 3rd party apps are costing them.
At this point in time, reddit cares about numbers, not competency. It doesn’t matter If a sub (or the entire site) degrades over time, as long as IPO numbers are maximized so they can cash in.
How soon is the IPO? New mods on the biggest subreddits would make those subs horrible for a long time while they figure out how to moderate it properly. Even when mods do their regular work, regular folks can get very heated about mod behaviour. Can you imagine that happening across all major subreddits, all at once?
It doesn’t have a hard date yet and they will likely wait till the economy is generally better, likely when the nasdaq hits a new high so they can float for the highest price per share
Totally. They already aren’t turning a profit. In their minds they have to protect the advertising revenue at all cost.
Tsk tsk, reddit…
Man, why does everything I like have to go to hell?
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.
That was my line of thought as well, however…
Reddit will stop being a good information repo very quickly as users
who actually know what they’re talking aboutleave and the information stops being up to date. The trend of adding “reddit” to every google search will die out soon.I already edited my reddit submissions to something along the lines of “this has been deleted in protest against API…” using PowerDeleteSuite. Some of my past comments has useful information in them and people might end up there via google. I’m taking my data with me when I walk out.
You should make your past comments available in lemmy somehow.
I’ve read this from someone on reddit a few days ago, but I think it’s true: reddit-archive like read-only lemmy instances should be set up. The data is available, see the-eye.eu/redarcs
r/DataHoarder also has some more info on this with tooling in a pinned post. They didn’t private the sub, it’s only read-only so it’s still readable
Yeah - the AMA with spez was the writing on the wall. No matter what/how users protest, they can only delay the inevitable changes. I deleted my 10+ year old account and cut my losses. The last thing I want in my social media is platform drama.
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 moderation 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.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
Lemmy exists at least since 2020, when I registered to the platform. That is 3 years ago and it hasn’t had much of activity until the Reddit drama started recently
What’s happened with Twitter and now Reddit is hopefully enough to make people realize the pitfalls of corporate-owned, centralized social media. Mastodon has really taken off with some major news outlets now posting on there. I could see the same happening with Lemmy now.
Reddit:
What other subs are going private inefinitely?
Here’s a dashboard:
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.
That’s inevitably what happens when you get a call from your VC backers asking why you’re still bleeding money into a pit instead of milking the community for profit.
But we need the sacrifices else how will line go up? :(
Excellent! They’re probably the biggest one so far, I imagine. The idea of this catching on has got to have the reddit admins sweating…
