This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there are many communities that I feel at home in.
It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.
Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely.
It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit.
I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too.
Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.
> Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual?
Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app.
Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
> Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?
If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.
A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...
There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.
I think a large part of my grief of Reddit is the vast amount of knowledge and usefulness that's there. I use it as a hub of information far more than I use it as social media, and yes a lot of that may still be accessible (especially with archive) but the creation of that content dies today.
Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something.
But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.
> This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit.
The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated.
I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
>I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.
So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.
Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.
And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?
The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.
Read what I posted earlier [1]. tl;dr - everyone knows 2 days isn't enough time for a protest to work unless decision makers are really on the fence.
What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO.
I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff.
Meh, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I'm a mod of a several-million-subscriber subreddit (one that's likely highly popular among HN subscribers). When we asked our community if they wanted to join the protest, the answer was a very resounding "yes, but 2 days aren't going to cut it"...
So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.
So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.
It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs.
Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam.
/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.
So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful.
But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top.
As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found.
If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam.
This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking.
I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.
> but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks.
This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.
> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult
I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/<insert similar here>, this type of situation would be common.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...
If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.
> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
This is a sticking point =(
> SEO spam
Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.
I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years.
I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.
I gave up on Reddit during the corona years when pleading with people to not create a QR-code underclass got me banned, permanently, from my national subreddit.
This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either.
Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.
It's really kind of crazy to see. I just checked some of my favorite subs and out of 22 subs I checked, 20 are currently private.
I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit.
I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.
I am not going to to the site at all today, I mostly lurk in the sysadmin subreddit anyway and they have choosen not to go dark for reasons I disagree with
but regardless, I removing myself from the traffic of the site..
by the 30th I plan on archiving all my historical comments, and deleting my accounts
r/ExperiencedDevs is such a weird place to me. It’s like the secondary school for r/CSCareerQuestions. It has builtin gatekeeping due to their goal of being for “experienced devs”. I’m also not surprised they aren’t participating.
Far from a Powermod, I'm a mod of a single tiny subreddit with <1,000 subscribers and took it private this morning (0800 UTC). I didn't advertise it on this site, but we agreed it was best to join the efforts.
I have mostly for the last six years used Apollo to moderate the sub, but that will not work from July onwards, I will probably not un-private the sub.
I was watching the stream earlier. It was an exciting feeling to have 10,000 people viewing, and cheering on the chat whenever a new subreddit went dark.
I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.
The stupidest part of all of this is all Reddit's problems are self inflicted. Reddit the company produces almost nothing. Reddit the users make the site what it is. The users submit all the content, make all the comments, and moderate the site.
Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.
Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.
I remember a time when when people actually liked reddit. And would buy reddit gold with the intention of helping out host the site. Seems like Ellen Pao and the IAMA drama was the turning point that soured the users against the company.
I’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.
2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past
It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities
Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but if Reddit doesn't backtrack what's the endgame here? I've seen multiple subs indicate they intend to fully shutdown if the API changes continue, but for the popular ones what's to stop Reddit from just appointing new mods and starting the sub back up?
I feel like some of the "smaller" communities can't really have their mods replaced without some work. Programming subreddits need mods with the right programming background to make executive decisions like banning the next NFT-like scheme, for example, which a generic person going through posts and deciding if it's against the TOS couldn't do.
Exactly. You can't lead a community if you're not a proper member of that community, especially on Reddit, which still retains some of its reputation as a place where knowledgeable people are to be found.
What tools will those new moderators use? The mods of any decent size subreddit have to use third party tools because the first party ones are apparently garbage.
I think a better question is what's Reddit's endgame? Mods of huge subreddits will just capitulate and use Reddit's crappy tools to do their unpaid work? Somehow those subreddits won't be flooded with spam and trolls? People will stick around to look at ads when every other post on /r/awwww is gore because the mods won't be able to keep up? Everyone will just download the complete shit that is the official Reddit app?
Agreed, a large part of the platform will just go to shit, as no good moderation tools are available to the mods (regardless if you replace them or not).
Reddit's value lies in what its users provide and post about. This also goes for that data that Reddit (publicly) wants to protect from AI companies.
With their change, not only do they screw over its users and communities, but also mess up any valuable future conversation data.
That surreal to me too, mostly because there there are no offered alternative such as forum or even clone. (i mean open reddark and just list)
I think from reddit perspective that could be considered as jackpot: 48 hours downtime it just 0.6% ( 100-((363/365)*100)) over year, if it is keep going - update TOS (something like - huge subreddits cannot be converted to private and etc.) and just replace mods...
As for endgame I think slowly users will start leaving, but it could take years.
If the mods get replaced, that's just another thing for everyone to complain about. Reddit relies on the community to do "community things" but if they stop doing those things then what do they have?
That is exactly what many (including the people working at Reddit [1]) just don't seem to understand.
Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities.
Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase?
This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators.
Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part.
[1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users
[2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard
This is why Spez is such a tool imo. He tries to be a Zuckerberg or something. Get his IPO moment.
Not one moment does he reflect if this is the course to take. I understand why, the railroad of any tech site is to sell out, make those billions. Get some money.
Reddit’s DNA seems different enough, like you say, it is far more about community building. A model like wikipedia, to see it as an utility, would be far more in line with what it is.
Spez if I had to guess probably is just flipping tired of it all and wants to cash in asap.
Hey, reddit mod of a top subreddit here. I can give some insight into what mods are thinking.
This current 'movement' is extremely organic and decentralized. A couple power mods started rallying the troops, and the movement went viral among mods over the course of about 2 weeks. There is very little direct coordination between subreddit mods, and it is mostly people deciding on the fly to make big decisions.
TLDR, nobody is really thinking much about the concerns that you are pointing out.
Its certainly something that people have thought about, very minimally, but the current counterargument to the idea of reddit just replacing mods is twofold.
argument 1: "They can't replace all of us!"
IE, subs are all run by an army of volunteer mods and mods think that they have a lot of bargaining power here.
argument 2: "I don't care. Let all of reddit burn to the ground!"
Quite frankly, a lot of people on reddit have gotten very worked up about this situation, and do not care about the consequences. If they get replaced, or reddit drops the hammer, they are fine with the consequences and will just leave.
But, the most important thing to note is absence of the following argument.
Argument 3 that doesn't exist: "We have a coordinated plan, back plan, and backup backup plans as for what to do about this, in communication with all the other mods"
That would be the smart way to do this, but unfortunately for the mods involved in it, this isn't what is happening. For better or for worse this is a viral outrage movement with nobody in charge.
I was surprised and pleased that our users were wholeheartedly supportive of the shutdown. Still not sure if we're back in two days or will leave it closed longer.
(small sub, 18.5k, but needs active moderation not to go to shit - our topic is in the news a lot lately. thankfully the reddit tools are up to the task at our scale, but bigger would be bad)
the disconcerting thing is that Twitter and Discord are simultaneously going to shit, because enshittification is what happens when suddenly borrowing carries an interest rate and VCs get squeezed.
From the outside, this seems very much like a classic labor dispute. Management (reddit) and labor (mods) are at odds over what they see as the future of the corporation. As such, some form of mediation needs to occur between both sides for work to continue.
Again, as an outsider, I see a few problems here:
1) You're not being paid at all, so you're not really 'labor' per se.
2) You're not unionized, so you don't have a spokesperson and can't coordinate your desires.
3) Reddit can't pay you to begin with, as they have basically no money for each mod, and isn't willing to negotiate before the IPO
4) Reddit seems perfectly fine and able to just get new mods and turn the subreddits back on, spam be damned.
5) Reddit also seems like they will just let the wildfire of outrage pass (really spitballing here) and most users will likely not even remember this by the 4th of July.
I think someone with actual union experience could really help you all. If you managed to get something of a 'standard' going, with payment in stocks or some other token monetary amount, then I'd say that would be a huge boon to the internet in general and a great roadmap for other companies. A real big opportunity is hiding in this and I wish you all the best in grabbing it.
Some communities may move wholesale to one of the Reddit clones. For instance, a clone of r/traa is rapidly taking off on one of them. For communities with strong cohesion like traa, people will move as a group, and obviously any attempt by Reddit to install new mods would meet with disaster.
> appointing new mods and starting the sub back up
That's what I'd do. Most subreddit mods are easily replaceable. And in many subreddits, the people who are mods aren't necessarily the best suited for the job. They often got there through luck, bootlicking, etc. It isn't a meritocracy.
For any one sub, sure. But there is no way reddit can replace the majority of mods.
Most companies have to pay for moderators, reddit has gotten them for free for a long time. If they piss off all those free mods, it’s gonna cost them an unimaginable amount of money.
While it's true that some subreddit mods might not be the most qualified for the job, and may be in it for the ego boost or as a perception of entitlement, it's also important to remember that being a mod is not exactly a glamorous position - for many it has been a thankless janitorial role that involved dealing with spam and abuse on a continuous basis, with a very limited toolset available from Reddit to do this. The third party apps were the ones to introduce features that made the mod tasks much easier to handle efficiently. The official Reddit app got these capabilities much later.
If Reddit wants to force open protesting subreddits and find a way to recruit new mods to more than 7000 subreddits, then I assume this is within their right, it's their site after all.
Keep in mind this is 80% of the subreddits that announced would be participating in the event. There are over 3.5 million subreddits altogether, though of course most of them are dead or with a single user.
One however also has to keep in mind that on Reddit you need either a tight-knit topic specific community, or a lot of users to have an active subreddit.
Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits.
If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.
TIL. I thought reddit had already cracked down on unmoderated subreddits; that if a subreddit didn't have active mods whom the admins could command that they would shut it down.
Not sure I would consider mods unilaterally shutting down their forums and hiding information that was contributed by millions of other people a triumph for the wider community. Speaking as somebody who only ever visits Reddit when a thread appears in a search result and occasionally replies if the mods didn't implement a policy of automatically deleting posts from outsiders, now the information I need is not there, and neither is the information I contributed. Great win for the community.
There are only a handful of subs that voted against or are generally against it and it's all ironic, toxic, and shit post subs like nbacirclejerk, 4chan, etc.
Readit News
It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.
It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit.
I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too.
Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years, so they making this quite simple for me to do.
You do understand that you are posting this to hacker news right?
Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual?
Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?
Is this the beginning of the end?
Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come?
It's an interesting time.
Maybe. It's hard to get back to business as usual when your usual client just stops working. We'll see how people adapt. I'm not sure I want to install the official reddit app.
Switching apps may as well switch sites too.. I've already got Jerboa installed, trying to see if content picks up there enough for it to remain interesting. Definitely some growing pains right now.
If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.
A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...
There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.
But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.
The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated.
I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.
I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.
So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.
Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.
And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?
The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.
What it does is to set the terms of the argument. Think 2 days is manageable? How about 30? Or 180. I wonder how good that would feel as you try to close your IPO? That is the threat - that it doesn't ever come back unless it's on better terms and it risks the real golden egg of management - the IPO.
I theorized the best way for management to fight back is to engineer a way for them to claim the threat isn't real (ie, the outages today). We'll see how it impacts the metrics and whether engagement falls off a cliff.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288240
So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.
So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.
/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.
So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top.
As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found.
If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam.
This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking.
I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.
This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.
> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult
I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/<insert similar here>, this type of situation would be common.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...
If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.
> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.
This is a sticking point =(
> SEO spam
Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.
I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years.
I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.
an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
This isn't some major subreddit run by the same mod cabal either.
Reddit moderation is a poisoned chalice. It attracts the worst kind of people and pushes out the best.
I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit.
I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.
but regardless, I removing myself from the traffic of the site..
by the 30th I plan on archiving all my historical comments, and deleting my accounts
I have mostly for the last six years used Apollo to moderate the sub, but that will not work from July onwards, I will probably not un-private the sub.
I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.
Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.
Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.
1. The communities
2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past
It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities
Needless to say, they've done fuck all and the sub is very often a dump.
I think a better question is what's Reddit's endgame? Mods of huge subreddits will just capitulate and use Reddit's crappy tools to do their unpaid work? Somehow those subreddits won't be flooded with spam and trolls? People will stick around to look at ads when every other post on /r/awwww is gore because the mods won't be able to keep up? Everyone will just download the complete shit that is the official Reddit app?
Reddit's value lies in what its users provide and post about. This also goes for that data that Reddit (publicly) wants to protect from AI companies. With their change, not only do they screw over its users and communities, but also mess up any valuable future conversation data.
I think from reddit perspective that could be considered as jackpot: 48 hours downtime it just 0.6% ( 100-((363/365)*100)) over year, if it is keep going - update TOS (something like - huge subreddits cannot be converted to private and etc.) and just replace mods...
As for endgame I think slowly users will start leaving, but it could take years.
yeah. "Just".
Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities.
Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase?
This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators.
Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part.
[1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users
[2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard
Not one moment does he reflect if this is the course to take. I understand why, the railroad of any tech site is to sell out, make those billions. Get some money.
Reddit’s DNA seems different enough, like you say, it is far more about community building. A model like wikipedia, to see it as an utility, would be far more in line with what it is.
Spez if I had to guess probably is just flipping tired of it all and wants to cash in asap.
This current 'movement' is extremely organic and decentralized. A couple power mods started rallying the troops, and the movement went viral among mods over the course of about 2 weeks. There is very little direct coordination between subreddit mods, and it is mostly people deciding on the fly to make big decisions.
TLDR, nobody is really thinking much about the concerns that you are pointing out.
Its certainly something that people have thought about, very minimally, but the current counterargument to the idea of reddit just replacing mods is twofold.
argument 1: "They can't replace all of us!"
IE, subs are all run by an army of volunteer mods and mods think that they have a lot of bargaining power here.
argument 2: "I don't care. Let all of reddit burn to the ground!"
Quite frankly, a lot of people on reddit have gotten very worked up about this situation, and do not care about the consequences. If they get replaced, or reddit drops the hammer, they are fine with the consequences and will just leave.
But, the most important thing to note is absence of the following argument.
Argument 3 that doesn't exist: "We have a coordinated plan, back plan, and backup backup plans as for what to do about this, in communication with all the other mods"
That would be the smart way to do this, but unfortunately for the mods involved in it, this isn't what is happening. For better or for worse this is a viral outrage movement with nobody in charge.
(small sub, 18.5k, but needs active moderation not to go to shit - our topic is in the news a lot lately. thankfully the reddit tools are up to the task at our scale, but bigger would be bad)
the disconcerting thing is that Twitter and Discord are simultaneously going to shit, because enshittification is what happens when suddenly borrowing carries an interest rate and VCs get squeezed.
Again, as an outsider, I see a few problems here:
1) You're not being paid at all, so you're not really 'labor' per se.
2) You're not unionized, so you don't have a spokesperson and can't coordinate your desires.
3) Reddit can't pay you to begin with, as they have basically no money for each mod, and isn't willing to negotiate before the IPO
4) Reddit seems perfectly fine and able to just get new mods and turn the subreddits back on, spam be damned.
5) Reddit also seems like they will just let the wildfire of outrage pass (really spitballing here) and most users will likely not even remember this by the 4th of July.
I think someone with actual union experience could really help you all. If you managed to get something of a 'standard' going, with payment in stocks or some other token monetary amount, then I'd say that would be a huge boon to the internet in general and a great roadmap for other companies. A real big opportunity is hiding in this and I wish you all the best in grabbing it.
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That's what I'd do. Most subreddit mods are easily replaceable. And in many subreddits, the people who are mods aren't necessarily the best suited for the job. They often got there through luck, bootlicking, etc. It isn't a meritocracy.
Most companies have to pay for moderators, reddit has gotten them for free for a long time. If they piss off all those free mods, it’s gonna cost them an unimaginable amount of money.
If Reddit wants to force open protesting subreddits and find a way to recruit new mods to more than 7000 subreddits, then I assume this is within their right, it's their site after all.
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https://reddark.untone.uk/
With all of the big subreddits going "dark" my feed is dominated by all those small community subreddits that I actively subscribed to.
Honestly it's somewhat refreshing to open reddit and nothing has changed on my frontpage.
Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits.
If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.
Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.