Think this case in particular is pretty interesting. Former default subreddit and one of the largest on the site (Top 20 at least).
I think /r/videos is where we’ll see how things actually play out with the reddit admins. I’m guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
I’m guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
100%.
I’d be surprised if /r/videos stays dark past the cutoff date of the original blackout.
The pretense of Reddit being open, fair, and ran by the users is long dead. Reddit is now closer to something like Facebook than it is to the site I joined in 2010. The only different is that Facebook pays their moderation staff.
So what you’re saying is it’s now worse than Facebook. Yikers!
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I’m enjoying the drama just a bit too much I think. There’s something quite satisfying when the ‘product’ bites back.
The apathy spez has for the users is on show every time he does anything.
Sure it’s entertaining to watch, and thanks to all the commotion I decided to give Lemmy a try, and glad I did! Now I’ve even got my own instance running. Sort of feels like setting up an old school BBS, back when MajorBBS was a thing.
The reality of the situation is that a large proton of Reddit users still aren’t even aware of what is going on. My wife mostly lurks, and had no idea of the current situation. We both primarily use the native mobile app, although I also have a paid version of Apollo.
Preaching to the choir here, but indefinite blackout is only thing worth doing
I don’t think Reddit cares if for 2 days their users drop
I hope the current mods are serious and have a fail safe process to remove all sub reporting rules, AutoMod, and other restriction.
If reddit admins resort to forced take over, let the sub reset and be open to all videos extreme, nsfw, gore, and bot post. Let’s see how well the sub is without mods.
Would be sorted out in minutes.
Everything posted/done on reddit is stored. If a mod/mod team goes rogue reddit removes the mods and hits the big “go back an hour” button, installs some new mods and most people wouldn’t even know something happenedIn fact, this has happened many times already, and most people don’t know about it. One I remember personally was r/PresidentialRaceMemes in 2020. They made some bullshit accusation about the mods making posts to increase activity (literally how Reddit itself started), removed them, and installed some tool from r/Neoliberal to ensure when the primary wrapped up they would all fall in line. They turned the place into another dull, harmless replica of r/PoliticalHumor.
Reddit makes an assessment about whether it can co-opt political communities which challenge official narratives. If they can, they will attempt a mod coup. If they can’t they’ll ban it.
Only if those new mods know what they’re doing. Reddit will run out of people who know what they’re doing very quickly. Filling mod positions with randos isn’t the same as successfully running a community.
omg, kbin and Lemmy are about to get hit with waves of new users. the poor servers
I’m wondering if more money would be likely to help withstand the surge, and if so, how much?
could we start a donation drive to try and make lemmy more successfull because of the reddit blackout?
See this is the problem with reddit. On a site like Twitter, pissing off your power users doesn’t matter much. If anything you lighten the server load some if they leave. You have plenty of users to replace them.
On reddit, pissing off the power users means losing the unpaid volunteers keeping your site running. Sure, reddit can just reopen the sub, and probably will. But who’s going to moderate it? A sub that big needs a serious mod team. What happens if several other large subs follow them? How is reddit planning to staff all these subs? Will whoever they grab know what they’re doing? If enough mod teams resigned in one go reddit would have no way to keep the site working. Even if they find new volunteers it doesn’t mean they’ll know how to moderate a huge community.
It’s one hell of a brave move. i think reddit will just re-open the subreddit and put new mods in though. sadly
They 100% will. The sad truth is that, despite all the protest threads, there’s still a lot of users who have no clue what’s going on. In nearly every thread, I’ll see comments from people saying that this is the first they’re hearing of it.
The fact is that Reddit knows that a LOT of people have no clue about any of this, that they don’t care, and that they will continue using the site on the official app and won’t notice anything has changed even though the mods of all their favorite subs are being replaced with scabs.
If a substantial number of old users and power users leave reddit, it might trigger a noticeable slowdown in traffic and a decline in quality (I’m not so sure about this as the quality had been going down the shitter for a long time anyway). Maybe that will alert people as to what’s happening.
I deleted all the content and comments I posted from my 12 year old account after the AMA spez did yesterday. I will delete the account at the end of this month if nothing changes (I doubt anything will).
Yeah, I’m tempted to delete mine, as well. 15 years on that platform, kinda hurts to think about deleting, but I really don’t feel like there’s much left for me there.
I just wonder if there’s any way to quantify the impact that deleting an account actually has on Reddit.
I posted a slightly longer comment about this downthread but unlike other websites like twitter, reddit relies on users to be moderators. This is the one site that can’t afford to lose their power users, you can replace them with scabs but the scabs probably don’t know how to moderate a community that large and if enough big community mods quit reddit will never catch up. This is one of the only sites right now where the power users being happy actually does matter more than the average user, because they’re essentially staffing the site for free.
People might find this link handy. It shows a list of the subs that have committed to the blackout and shows when they have gone private
In your posted link, are subs in green glowing font already dark? Is that what that means?
Yes, that’s what it means. If you look under the names, you’ll see “public” or “private.” The way they are going offline is to make the subreddits private. The green ones are labeled private.
Can mods on a subreddit go through and delete all posts before privateing? I know they might want to preserve some posts just in case things get better. But I think a scorched earth approach would send a much stronger message
Mods can’t delete anything. They can only remove it. When anything is removed it’s there. The only ones who can permanently ‘delete’ something are the admins. So even if a mod went through and nuked the whole sub, the admins could just restore it.
Their very first point in the Q&A section is an interesting point that I think many of the old-guard Redditors may take, especially those in moderator positions. It is well known that Reddit sub moderation is all done on a volunteer basis. If a substantial number of moderators across some of the larger subs also feel this way, Reddit could see a big decline in the quality of posts and also, possibly, a rise in rule-breaking/hateful content that would severely degrade the quality of the site. I remember seeing a handful of r/SubredditDrama posts about rogue moderators doing something akin to a ‘power trip’. I think some large sections of Reddit are in for a wild ride in the coming weeks/months.
Even if Reddit kicks these mods out and brings in their own, a lot of this moderation has been a labor of love and the replacements won’t be 1:1.
I mean the same thing is happening at Twitter, but most users are staying there because there’s nowhere to go. Bluesky is invite only and mastodon doesn’t have whatever celebs and influencers they follow (and no shade on these folks, I originally joined Twitter for a single person’s tweets).
This place is cool, but people will stay on Reddit as long as their communities do. And frankly I think most people are going to go to discord if Reddit does actually die, because most subreddits already have an associated discord channel
Twitter just needs warm bodies. Reddit relies on users to run the communities. That’s the difference. Reddit is the only big site right now where a small number of users leaving angrily can cause serious structural issues for them.
Good. This is just what Reddit deserves right now.
I wonder if many other subs will stay dark past the initial going dark protest. I just happen to exclusively use Apollo and have for years, so I support the mods in what they are doing.
To be honest, I find it a bit of an odd stance for them to take. To me, they, along with several of the other large subs, have never really seemed that interested in running their sub that well or in the interest of the community. You get into this situation where you have a big sub, millions of users, maybe a couple dozen mods, but out of those 2 dozen mods like 3 or 4 are active, and if you’re lucky, one actually cares. You then run into a situation though where you have might have one mod who cares, but that particular sub has some kind of weird mod hierarchy where they can’t even do much about it. The hoops you have to jump through to get them to deal with obvious karma farming bots, or for them to apply rule 1 without bias are far too many. I can remember a number of years ago, when they used to have the /r/videos meta sub, one of the mods directly said that they considered ‘clickbait’ titles to be a violation of Rule 5 but you’d never see them enforce it. The sub was probably fine if you came by once a month or something. But if you were one of those people who had a daily routine of say browsing reddit every morning after getting up, and /r/videos was a regular stop for you, it really didn’t take long for the sub to start to wear on you.
One thing I hope we’ll see in whatever the new hotness is, is more diversification in where discussions take place and where links and things are shared. The fact that most if it goes through maybe 2 dozen subs and a lot of mods in them are quite checked out really soured the experience.
If nothing comes out of this then Reddit is truly dead
You love to see it.
