That would be a really dumb idea, so I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if it happens.

Not much stopping Reddit from ‘keeping’ the mods and replacing who runs those user accounts. …

Protests are most effective when highly coordinated. Reddit is free to change their attitude and have the website back at any time, it&#x27;s their choice to continue down this path.

What took them so long. Moderators are clearly coordinating with each other to close down reddit&#x27;s website, that s malicious intent, not just a &quot;protest&quot;. They should have rules that does not allow that behaviour. Reddit is so poorly ran

This exactly. There have been a few tech waves where nerd behaviour was the leading indicator by a few years. Search engine move from AltaVista to Google (yes, I&#x27;m old). Laptop move to Macbook Pro&#x27;s. Ignore the nerds at your peril.

I have a feeling Reddit is mostly nerds though, after this I doubt there is going to be anyone left.Recently I&#x27;ve been moving to Facebook Groups. Compared to Reddit the groups are much more niche, which is a good thing.On Reddit there is a general sub about a hobby I&#x27;m interested in with 198k subscribers, on Facebook I&#x27;ve found groups with the specific niches of that I&#x27;m interested in with 16k - 30k subscribers. The questions are much more specific, and the people there are a lot more knowledgeable. The people on there seem friendlier too.

I highly doubt it, most revenue comes from non nerds who don&#x27;t use adblockers or third party apps that don&#x27;t show ads. I would not be surprised if Reddit revenues increase with these move. It&#x27;s the same story as Facebook and Instagram, the real money is from the eyeballs of the masses, not of the niches they started out with.

HN readers are 1-2-5 years ahead what happens in the market. you can tell a lot of things that are coming down the pipe if you pay attention on HN. Once the &quot;nerds&quot; give up on reddit it will be an uphill battle to keep the site viable.

I&#x27;m getting whiplash. First Axios said they are not going to remove moderators, then someone on Reddit said they will, then someone here said they won&#x27;t, which is it?I really don&#x27;t think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that&#x27;s a narrow subset

Some of them are trying to figure something out.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RelayForReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;147152b&#x2F;update_how_the_current_api_changes_would_impact&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RelayForReddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;147152b&#x2F;upd...</a>&gt; There&#x27;s no possibility to continue the free version of Relay; a monthly subscription price of $3 (or less) might be achievable.And of that $3 the Developer says in that thread:&gt; Yes there should be a good amount in there for myself.If 3rd party apps are so beloved, then $3&#x2F;month to support a developer doing good work should not be a issue.

I&#x27;m kinda curious why none of the third party app developers considered selling Reddit requests as in-app purchases – just charge the rate Reddit charges.

No. For mismanaging their relationships.There&#x27;s the aphorism that when you&#x27;re using&#x2F;buying a thing, it&#x27;s always a relationship between you and other humans somewhere in the chain.That has to be given hygiene and deference. Hygiene in keeping things healthy and in balance and deference in not trying to calcify some lording hierarchy.If you bust either, your customers&#x2F;users&#x2F;whatever will be shopping around. There&#x27;s other ways to fail but if you look at the most liked companies, you can basically rename that a list of companies that fuck up hygiene and deference the least.See for yourself <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;corporate-brands-reputation-america" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;05&#x2F;23&#x2F;corporate-brands-reputation...</a>

Because they were only given 30 days before the API changes kicked in.

I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they&#x27;ve put themselves on the radar of Harvard Business Review for having the ball in their court and somehow phenomenally fumbling it at every opportunity

I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy).I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I&#x27;d scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn&#x27;t and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I&#x27;d copy paste those settings across subs.The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there&#x27;s only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.

Power mods are a real problem on Reddit.It&#x27;s the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this &#x27;protest&#x27;.The end result of this protest looks like it&#x27;s going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years.It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.

I don&#x27;t think it matters. As long as the members of a community have no problem with X being a mod, X should probably remain a mod for that community. If the community eventually hates X, X should be removable.Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don&#x27;t think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.

It&#x27;s often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn&#x27;t there be a limit?

&gt; Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.Alternatively, the users aren&#x27;t bothered by the moderation there and no one&#x27;s felt the need to start an alternative.

It’s exactly what happened to digg. MrBabyMan etc owned the front page so everyone who disagrees or just doesn’t care for their content left

Yep. Given that this is HN, try looking at &#x2F;r&#x2F;California. It&#x27;s basically a person fief for a single user (granted, he&#x27;s not nearly as obnoxious as many Reddit mods.) Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.

If this wasn&#x27;t connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country&#x27;s subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.

And that&#x27;s their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.

You could make the argument that it&#x27;s a reasonable API price compared to other social media sites. What I really wish is they made a distinction between people signing into Apollo to use the app and Apollo making API calls, although I suppose they&#x27;re probably trying to push people onto their app to improve ad revenue

they are protesting the high&#x2F;unreasonable API price out of nowhere

If the community decides to leave, it won&#x27;t be because of API pricing, it&#x27;ll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.

Reddit is just where a community posted up. Reddit is free-riding off the efforts of the community, it is a lopsided arrangement. Reddit is not a challenging software platform to replicate, there are already platforms ready to be migrated to.They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.

And if they didn&#x27;t do anything you&#x27;d have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.

Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I&#x27;d replace them, too.

Why shouldn&#x27;t they? The mods own nothing. One would think that lesson would be learned by now.

If you pay, your data set is just worth more (Edit: to the company), since it proves you have money and can be made to spend it.

Additionally if you pay for it you&#x27;re a customer, and it&#x27;s still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.

This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.

Reddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.

Interesting thought. If they can be fired, they were employed.

The people here thinking they got something for free is Reddit management.If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that&#x27;s employee misclassification and backpay time.

AOL moderators didn&#x27;t pay from my recollection. And they were therefor screwed the same way Reddit moderators were (My neighbour back then was an AOL moderator, forgot how they were called)

Paying for it doesn&#x27;t make it your community, either, whatever that even means.Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn&#x27;t matter.Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don&#x27;t like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.

It&#x27;s pretty common in meatspace for communities to have membership fees.I&#x27;m part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.There&#x27;s usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can&#x27;t be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.Last year&#x27;s management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it&#x27;s mostly the same people voted back in, but there&#x27;s always two or three new faces each year.

I was mostly taking about the moderators, because of the use of &quot;their&quot; in the title:&quot;Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private&quot;I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I&#x27;ve created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I&#x27;ve payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from &quot;my&quot; communities, they could not take &quot;my&quot; (our) content.[1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?IcebergSecret" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.c2.com&#x2F;?IcebergSecret</a>
[2] I create a CTO community around <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazingcto.com&#x2F;cto-newsletter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazingcto.com&#x2F;cto-newsletter&#x2F;</a>

metafilter does that. It limits the user-base to those who have command of a bank-account or credit-card and imposes a friction on new account creation by gating it with a one-time $5 fee. They never aspired to be huge but I think they&#x27;re doing fine.

&gt; What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for?Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional &#x27;IRL&#x27; clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.

Modern universities are the most extreme example of such communities.

What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for?  All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.

They aren&#x27;t getting something for free. They&#x27;re getting something in exchange for being exposed to advertising.

Goes the other way. Reddit isn&#x27;t paying the mods who run these communities. Without all this unpaid labor, the site can not function.

&gt; If you don&#x27;t pay for it, it&#x27;s not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don&#x27;t.Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.

That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn&#x27;t paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don&#x27;t really own the content and it can be taken away.A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.

The thing is though that I _do_ pay for it. I&#x27;m a long time paying subscriber to reddit and I think I should be able to use the Reddit Sync app like I have for years. But that&#x27;s not an option that&#x27;s on the table.I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I&#x27;m not. Now I&#x27;m on lemmy.

4chan has a pretty tidy solution by having 10x as many janitors as mods. The janitors recommend posts&#x2F;threads for deletion but the mods hold the ultimate power. Even better with a functional reporting system.

The problem is that people don&#x27;t even agree on what &quot;it&quot; is. Low friction of cross-board collaboration increases the spam problem. There will be low quality instances in a federated world. Other people really really just want to post about woodworking or whatever and the federation thing is not interesting at all. Nobody wants a feed without content in it anymore than staring at an empty email account, so you kind of need one of those things to jumpstart it.There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don&#x27;t, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the &quot;what would replace it&quot; thing.It&#x27;s always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don&#x27;t handle it and there&#x27;s some other problem that&#x27;s the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn&#x27;t mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended.I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that&#x27;s not necessarily ActivityPub.

Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it!You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.

Ironically, making something good for free shows me goodwill and makes me more likely to pay for it.

Wikipedia is free, Linux is free, walking by the river is free.Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?

Why does paying for it making it better? Companies can screw paying customers over too. The issue is depending on a third party like this. And the solution is not some free tech utopia either. Taking risks is part of life, and so when screwed over like this, the parties involved just need to re-assess the situation and move on. And count on being screwed over next time too.

If you don&#x27;t pay for it, it&#x27;s not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don&#x27;t. If it&#x27;s free you&#x27;re a volunteer for the company, if you pay you&#x27;re a customer.

YC is a Reddit investor, and dang hasn&#x27;t chimed in connecting the threads, and the other thread was removed from the homepage. It&#x27;s suggestive but it doesn&#x27;t prove anything. The guidelines say that HN moderates its own properties less, but that may not always be true, especially pre IPO.

Thanks for the link - I wouldn&#x27;t have seen that thread had you not brought it up. However, are you implying the original story is being manually supressed? Could it be the discussion there got too heated? There are other factors that determine ranking, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsfaq.html</a>

Oh? But is this a good metric for the algorithm?I just noticed I very seldom upvote topics, but writing a comment is correlated with reading comments which is correlated with finding the topic interesting.

Yeah, its there in the ranking algorithm. Any post which starts getting more comments than votes gets downranked.

It was on the front page earlier this evening, that&#x27;s how I found it. It probably just got pushed off because any article about Reddit right now devolves into arguing about what mods should do, why it&#x27;s futile because of how Reddit will react, etc.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;front?day=2023-06-05">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;front?day=2023-06-05</a> see top entry: more comments than points, yet stands solid at #1. Pretty sure I&#x27;ve also seen 2:1 ratios before rather than the 1:1 that this is (but I don&#x27;t remember around which date that might have occurred or how to easily ctrl+f for it while browsing past days).I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes&#x2F;flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.

What makes you so confident it&#x27;s not the algorithm?I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.

Previous thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36347711">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36347711</a>554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments =&gt; not on the front page. No, it&#x27;s not the algorithm.

Is there a long list of people willing to do unpaid labour for Reddit at the moment? Or is Reddit going to make their employees&#x2F;contractors do the moderating instead? At least then you wouldn&#x27;t have to deal with dissent.

Thanks reddit! I&#x27;m going to delete both accounts today and it is over. Also yes you have quality content, but starting today reddit will be totally blocked at dns level on my computers

Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.

Uhh, not according to mods as of two days ago...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;148ks6u&#x2F;indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;148ks6u&#x2F;indefinit...</a>

&gt; Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protestingReddit has announced they&#x27;re providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.

Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.

That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving &quot;You might like this&quot; into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not &#x2F;u&#x2F;spez too?

I can&#x27;t prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.

The mods in &#x2F;r&#x2F;anarchism are selected by voting.

&gt;that is not democraticLol like he cares about democracy.

&gt; “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”That is some hefty fucking projection from him.

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

&gt; What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it&#x27;s for the people while it&#x27;s really all about giving him power.Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else&#x27;s platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.

If the mods are the landed gentry, the regular users must be serfs, which would make spez some kind of untouchable god-emperor..?

Reddit (spez) created that &quot;landed gentry&quot;[1], and was more than happy with its existence until roughly two weeks ago. It is Reddit&#x27;s policies, procedures, and practices which created a first-come, first serve, seniority-based moderator role. Not the volunteers who stepped up and assumed that role, uncompensated by Reddit.________________________________Notes:1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they&#x27;d cultivated and created as &quot;landed gentry&quot; has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.

There&#x27;s a first time for everything. I agree with spez. That is a very on point description of Mods, and it needs to be fixed. Just because you came first to &#x2F;r&#x2F;news doesn&#x27;t mean you should rule like a king on Reddit. It is too open for abuse and politics.

I&#x27;m glad u&#x2F;spez cares so much about &quot;democracy&quot;. For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.

&gt; “and that is not democratic”Whose fault is that?Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.

I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m reading this bullshit about democracy and &quot;landed gentry&quot; from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those &quot;gentries&quot; keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a &quot;landed gentry&quot;:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcnews.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;tech-news&#x2F;reddit-protest-blacko...</a>“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it&#x27;s sticking around.

&gt;Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need.I moderate a small subreddit and don&#x27;t even know what tools they are talking about. I don&#x27;t want to say goodbye to RedReader.

What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.

Various sovereign wealth &#x2F; fund manager types like the idea of a compliant userbase under their thumb. Taming the internet is the whole point.

That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.comAs an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.

The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less?I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.The biggest IMO is that what&#x27;s happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they&#x27;ll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it&#x27;s pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn&#x27;t represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.Maybe investors won&#x27;t care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we&#x27;ve seen mostly play out with Twitter.

The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That&#x27;s why HN looks like this.A more &#x27;friendly&#x27; UI attracts people who don&#x27;t have much of note to say, will consume what they&#x27;re given, and respond to ads more.

It&#x27;s also important to remember they didn&#x27;t just &#x27;build an app for phones&#x27;They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn&#x27;t now exist, and should never have existed.

&gt;The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.It&#x27;s seemed like that for years. They&#x27;ve had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they&#x27;ve done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a &quot;new&quot; UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.It&#x27;s like they don&#x27;t have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they&#x27;re limited to doing window dressing.

Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.

To be fair, it&#x27;s all consistent with Reddit&#x27;s entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2012&#x2F;06&#x2F;reddi...</a>As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.

Mod tools isn&#x27;t the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.

No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords).The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.

&gt; ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.Its this. It starts at the top:&gt; Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he&#x27;d know that you can&#x27;t actually moderate toward popular opinion.Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn&#x27;t work because the site doesn&#x27;t handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.What a bummer. I&#x27;ve invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14aeq5j&#x2F;new_admin_post_if_a_moderator_team_unanimously&#x2F;joaae9z&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ModCoord&#x2F;comments&#x2F;14aeq5j&#x2F;new_admin...</a>

And the.. avatars with micro transactions and possibly some NFT nonsense

Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.

With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels.I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning.The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

So they&#x27;re getting rid of all their best unpaid workers?Reddit is very, very confused about what makes it a long-term success. I wonder how many free person-hours have been dedicated to curating the website. And then they just treat them like garbage.

&lt;narrator&gt; It&#x27;s not about who pays, it&#x27;s about who controls. &lt;&#x2F;narrator&gt;

Actually that makes a LOT more sense. If a person wants to use an app that connects via an API, let the user pay for it, not the app developer.

If reddit needed to generate income from api access they should have made a subscription a requirement for individual users to access the api.

The vast majority of power users are not a moderator either (although most moderators are power users).

This strategy would work if the people who disagree with the API closure is just the moderators (who provide free labour to reddit). It&#x27;s not just them though, it might be felt most strongly by the power users, but people also frequent the app because of those power users.

I am willing to bet a lot of money that reddit is not losing users out of this, it is gaining

Comments like these are really.... something.It&#x27;s basically boiling down to don&#x27;t you plebes know we can smash you like insects whenever we want? Now go enjoy your trickles of piss. People are protesting because they do understand, and they don&#x27;t like it, and they will probably leave.

Reddit has trained users and mods to think that way. They branded the site as a free-for-all, then went along with major social crusades etc etc, multiple times over the years. Ultimately, it&#x27;s reddit leadership that led moderators to think that way, and now they are paying the price for it. They need to create some red lines to make the website functional and also tolerant, even to all political views

The stickied comment stating that &quot;this contradicts standing policies&quot; is amusing. As if Reddit was somehow contractually bound to abide by random rules that they themselves made up, on their own site.It&#x27;s astonishing how many people don&#x27;t seem to understand what it means to be a user today. Especially if you&#x27;re not paying, but even if you are.

They did have some leverage but only so long as Reddit was still trying to keep up appearances. They probably did the equation and figured that bad optics for a little while outweighs possible long term gains. At that point all the mods power vanishes.

Volunteer means they are doing good for the public, these morons aren’t paid and their only motivation there is to have that sense of power over other users to feel important.

they&#x27;re unpaid volunteers. too bad.I don&#x27;t think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community.I don&#x27;t like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking &#x2F;u&#x2F;Spez

Shockers!! Funny how these mods who work for free thought they have any leverage.. now if they control the instances like a federated nodes, then maybe.

Their app and site sucks. 3rd party apps exist because of that. They can&#x27;t accept that its their fault.

&gt; Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don&#x27;t treat users like shit, the better.

The masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they&#x27;re taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

Various mods have gotten plenty of heat over the years, like being grilled by andersen on CNN

Yes, and they seem to be absolutely 100% unaccountable.

But a lot of the moderator decisions on reddit are personal in nature, not because of the rules. That has been one of the biggest issue with the reddit mods, they sit on these fiefdoms and punish anyone they disagree with. That makes for a bad, bad community. It&#x27;s like if dang and YC rate limited your account because they personally disagreed with your point of view. This kind of behavior is routine on Reddit.

A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It&#x27;s dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -&gt; person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -&gt; inbox filled with more and more whining.

&gt; Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes.The would just create a brigading problem.Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.

&gt; One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?It doesn&#x27;t bother me one bit.
If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions.Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. That way squatting is less of an issue.

&gt;Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn&#x27;t get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?Did you... read my comment? I&#x27;m clearly aware that&#x27;s a risk.It doesn&#x27;t stop the question of &quot;should these high-and-wide distribution channels be allowed to be run and controlled by people we know nothing about?&quot;.

&gt; does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?No. Reddit isn&#x27;t Facebook. The whole place is anonymous. Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn&#x27;t get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?

<pre><code> Reddit won&#x27;t create a situation where they have 
 oversight capabilities for mods... that creates 
 too much liability for them
</code></pre>
It&#x27;s definitely interesting to watch how they walk that tightrope. Because they certainly do remove mods that are inactive or problematic, like how they are threatening to remove mods that have taken their subreddits dark.

&gt;Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion&#x2F;sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?No, but there&#x27;s no way to change this situation because Reddit won&#x27;t create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.

<pre><code> does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some 
 of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous
</code></pre>
Reddit communities fork and spawn offshoots regularly. So for those who &quot;get&quot; how Reddit works it&#x27;s not an issue.However, yeah, considering the clout carried by big Reddit communities... it&#x27;s a concern. I certainly don&#x27;t think the answer is de-anonymizing those mods, though.

I dunno, maybe some kind of idea of who they&#x27;re affiliated with, etc.

What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have?The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we&#x27;re concerned with respect to their role as a mod.

Whether they work for an organization that&#x27;s pushing a view, etc.You (like many here) seem to think I want full documentation of who a Mod is, when I&#x27;m fairly certain my comment implies otherwise.

&gt; One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion&#x2F;sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?That doesn&#x27;t follow; just because people aren&#x27;t going by their real-world names doesn&#x27;t mean that they&#x27;re not accountable. For that matter, what would their real name even tell you? Okay, user someusername1 is actually John Doe and lives at 123 Main St. What exactly do you know now that makes you more comfortable with them being a mod, that you couldn&#x27;t tell by their history of moderation and interaction in the forum where they&#x27;re a mod?

One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion&#x2F;sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?I want to be clear that I&#x27;m not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderators at Reddit, it would be interesting if this discussion was more of a sticking point. I have to wonder if there&#x27;s not a world where Reddit shouldn&#x27;t implement a policy of:&gt; Look, you moderate a community above N size, we&#x2F;your members need to know who you areI&#x27;m not entirely sure where my opinion on it even stands but figured it might make for interesting discussion. It does get tricky in the face of subreddits that deal in protest&#x2F;whistleblower&#x2F;etc matter though. I don&#x27;t want to lose the anonymous aspect of the internet, especially when it&#x27;s been effectively under assault for years - but at the same time, something that powerful and&#x2F;or manipulate-able seems like it shouldn&#x27;t get a free pass.Interested to hear what others think.(I am also fully open to being wrong on e.g Reddit themselves not knowing who mods are, and invite someone to correct me if I am - but I&#x27;ve not seen anything to date that suggests otherwise)

Although I agree in principle, they&#x27;re not removing moderators for being power hungry or weird. They&#x27;re replacing moderators who are protesting the changes with moderators who are under their thumb. I would be surprised if this led to better moderating

good, many of those mods are weird and insane, better for them, and better for reddit

There&#x27;s a power-law at play here. If the top 0.5% of those who participate &#x2F; moderate &#x2F; contribute the most leave, that might end the site. Tipping points exist. Interesting times.

&quot;Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation&quot;...so is Reddit a commons shared by the community, or is it a profit-generating resource? You only get to pick one.

No, and hasn’t been close to as you describe in a long time. Reddit made these people give up some of the subreddits that were on the old defaults list. The truth is that this generation of Reddit user is long gone; see &#x2F;u&#x2F;qgyh2 or &#x2F;u&#x2F;ManWithoutModem.

It’s been a long time since I payed attention to Reddit drama, but isnt Reddit dominated by maybe a dozen or so power mods that have an enormous amount of influence in what goes on on that site?

only so long as you can find competent moderators willing to do the job for free while using shitty tools.

The subreddit exists because a user created it. I created two subreddits 12 years ago that have a few hundred thousand subscribers today. So do I not have the right to set my subreddit to private? I never told people to join them. I never advertised them. Reddit has given me the built in functions to set it to private and to ban anyone I choose.As a matter of fact, one of them has been private since this started and the other has remained open. They&#x27;re both gaming related. I let my moderators decide because ultimately, they&#x27;re the ones who have put the most work into keeping the curated. One group didn&#x27;t really feel it was necessary while the other felt like it was a slap in the face from spez to essentially say, &quot;I don&#x27;t care what you think, 12 years of hard work to grow a community or not, you&#x27;ll do what I say.&quot;And I agree with them. They didn&#x27;t moderate it for power. They did it because they love the specific console they were created for and are really proud to see their hard work pay off after years of investing their time into it. I&#x27;ve become jaded by this whole thing. Reddit no longer cares about its voluntary workforce in the slightest and I&#x27;ll be handing ownership off to them, deleting my account and that will be the end of it.So yes. In a way, it does belong to the users. But 48 hours of discomfort leading to threats of repossession after 12 years of work? They want it? They can have it.

No issue with this.  Subreddits exists for the users, not the moderators - all of which can be replaced.

It&#x27;s trivially easy to build a scraper for the new content too. And I think people really over estimate the relative amount of data reddit has compared to the literal rest of the internet. Like sure, it&#x27;s nicely categorized and ranked (somewhat), but leaving reddit out of a corpus probably won&#x27;t drastically effect your final model.

That weird &quot;conspiracy theory&quot; doesn&#x27;t make any sense. LLMs are trained off a static dump of example data, and it&#x27;s trivially easy to build a webscraper of Reddit&#x27;s historical content.

&gt;some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit&#x27;s API and the increasing popularity of LLM&#x2F;ChatGPTThose people really don&#x27;t have an idea how either of those work, nor how cause and effect work.See also the graph showing that the decrease in the number of pirates in the world&#x27;s oceans has contributed to climate change because &quot;pirates are cool&quot;.

I believe this is more than speculation. Pretty sure that someone from Reddit basically said as much in one of the transcripts or conversations shared by Apollo’s dev. Reddit feels they are getting burned by letting their data be used to train LLMs for free.That said, they were also letting people exceed their API rate limits by massive amounts, so hard for me to put the blame anywhere but with Reddit.

And then they&#x27;ll put ads in the LLM chat stream. &quot;Using texts on neurolinguistic programming and mentalism, find subliminal ways of promoting {product}&quot;.

Here&#x27;s an interesting theory about that. I can&#x27;t claim any credit for it, it&#x27;s from Jim Rutt, I heard him on the Clearer Thinking podcast (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcast.clearerthinking.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;160&#x2F;jim-rutt-large-language-models-deep-peace-and-the-meaning-crisis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcast.clearerthinking.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;160&#x2F;jim-rutt-lar...</a>).He basically argues that LLMs are going to mean that vast quantities of the content on the internet are going to become automatically-generated drivel which no-one wants to actually read. I think this is pretty plausible. So in order to consume information from the internet, it will basically be a requirement to use an AI tool which, for a given query that you might have, will go out and retrieve all the information on it from many different sources, and return them, appropriately listed and summarised. Such a tool would probably want API access to the likes of Reddit, but would also make the main value prop of the way social media works currently (getting ads in front of eyeballs) useless. So end users will probably end up having to pay for their API use so that their tools can access these sites, and as a pleasant side effect they&#x27;ll see no ads. So perhaps we&#x27;ll end up at the promised utopia where users pay a little bit for the content that they like, and don&#x27;t see ads along the way, as a result of AI. I have no idea how likely this is, but it sounds pretty good to me if it does work out like that.

The CEO is explicitly saying this change has to do with the ChatGPT&#x27;s and such.&gt;But with artificial intelligence-powered large language models like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google&#x27;s Bard, a massive corpus of conversations is being hoovered up. And in return, Reddit receives very little, he said.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;1182457366&#x2F;reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2023&#x2F;06&#x2F;15&#x2F;1182457366&#x2F;reddit-ceo-steve-h...</a>And this isn&#x27;t the first time they&#x27;ve said this.

They could simply discriminate against LLMs via their APIs terms of service. That wouldn’t get bad actors, those would simply scrape. But that would be the case with the very expensive API.

Something I want to ask before:I&#x27;ve noticed that some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit&#x27;s API and the increasing popularity of LLM&#x2F;ChatGPT, and it does seem plausible.What&#x27;s interesting is that Twitter also closed down their API access merely months ago. Are these two occurrences related, or was Twitter&#x27;s action also a response to ChatGPT&#x2F;LLM?(Also to be totally fair to them, Twitter and Reddit used to have the most comprehensive free API accesses which I enjoy. Instagram&#x2F;facebook etc. are always a nightmare to work with in term of scraping.)

I’m disappointed for the same reasons as everyone else. But there’s definitely a silver lining here. Relying on a corporation for community was never a good idea, and that Reddit’s relative insulation was nothing but an aberration. Recent events is no more than a delayed affirmation of enshittification theory. And the good news is the sooner we collectively realize that the root cause is the business model, the sooner we can fix the problem.

Apollo followed Apple design language better than the first party apps.

I will miss using Apollo, which is one of the best apps on my phone. It works well, complies with all of Apple&#x27;s HIG rules, and is supported by an enthusiastic and communicative developer.Reddit management are incompetent fools that are looking for the VC cashout of an IPO before the site goes to shit.Cory Doctorow&#x27;s concept of &quot;enshittification&quot; continues to become more and more prescient of the last few years of internet &quot;development&quot;.

True. When I search for things though, the answers I seek are on Reddit. I’ll look into the archive or Reddit backup of deleted posts sometime but for now I go by the preview search showing me a couple lines of the top answer.

I just would like to thank the CEOs of Twitter and Reddit for helping to kill my doom scrolling addiction.

Spez is the guy who wipes the street on the block where ppl happen to gather and play music, tell stories.One day he decides to take fees from the ice-cream vendor. The ice-cream is gone.Is there another relatively clean street where nobody would try to setup a shake down the crowd?Reddit execs and such are rent-seekers except in place of land we have human content.The website thingy they have running has become a commodity years ago.

New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I&#x27;m looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add &quot;old&quot; to the URL.

Someone has to be using the redesign, most I&#x27;d guess, but I don&#x27;t understand how. It&#x27;s one thing that I don&#x27;t like the look and feel, that&#x27;s pretty subjective to a point, but the problem is that it doesn&#x27;t actually work.Something as basic as reading comments is still broken, after all these years. You can not navigate the comment section. Seems like a pretty big oversight, unless you betting the farm on doom-scrolling, and I think that exactly what&#x27;s happening.Reddit management left the community to it&#x27;s own devices for years, now the ad revenue is drying up, they have an IPO around the corner (because no VC is going to throw more money into an anonymous message board). I don&#x27;t really see any easy out for Reddit, they do need money, but I&#x27;m not sure they are going about it in the right way.

The worst part for me is all the flashes and redraws as it gradually loads more and more separate resources.&quot;Hey look, here&#x27;s a paragraph to read... nope, I just realised there&#x27;s an image near the top that I think is going to be huge so I pushed that paragraph below the fold... no, wait, that image is actually tiny so here&#x27;s that paragraph again... ooooh, but now there&#x27;s a sidebar, so I&#x27;ve just resized and reflowed the paragraph that you had kind of started to read - good luck finding your place again!&quot;As for how broken the &quot;back&quot; button is, fuuuuu.....

If they remove old reddit, I&#x27;m done. The &quot;new&quot; reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.

Not that I know of. I keep poking around all the ones that pop up here, some of which are nicely made but still small, and I&#x27;ve been contemplating joining a Lemmy instance or starting one with some friends.

Lemmy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;join-lemmy.org&#x2F;</a>

Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I&#x27;ve posted thus far. I&#x27;m running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I&#x27;m not really pushing for users.Thus far, it&#x27;s definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communities I have found.

It&#x27;s going to sound dumb, but honestly?  I filled an rss reader up with some of the best sources I could think of, and am actually really enjoying just quietly taking the world in again, instead of trying to come up with my latest snarky Reddit-friendly quip.

There&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squabbles.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squabbles.io</a>It&#x27;s not federated, but the UI is okay for now than the other alternatives that I&#x27;ve seen. It&#x27;s ran by 1 dev who has quickly been adding features and listening to user feedback. It&#x27;s also nearing 16,000 users and a few users are developing some mobile apps for it.

kbin.social is really great. It’s the most active Lemmy instance and it connects with Lemmy and Mastodon so you’ve got both networks built in. The UX is, I feel, better than instances which use the Lemmy front end. The mobile site is actually functional. Sadly no app yet.Of course the networks are much smaller than Reddit, but the conversations are much more qualitative. I honestly prefer it. Less soon scrolling.

Hacker News is till great though the more I get exposed to the whole ActivityPub fediverse thing the more I wish it wasn&#x27;t disconnected. I was in a read only HN app earlier today and wanted to post a comment to HN and instantly wished I could post a link into jerboa&#x27;s search and have Hacker News available as a community.The technology is getting there. The problem is the communities need time to grow. Star Trek fans have made a real effort. The bulk of reddit content is lowest common denominator shit and those consumers want everything handed to them fully formed. They aren&#x27;t going to deal with server instability and submit bug reports and try and build new communities. They will delete Apollo and install the Reddit official app.

I liked kbin.social a lot. It&#x27;s a little rough around the edges, and doesn&#x27;t have a ton of users, but I found that that&#x27;s actually very ok. It reminds me of Reddit 10 years ago. Nowadays every thread in Reddit is either stupid memes and the same predictable jokes over and over, or some fanatical social wars stuff. Kbin looks like a place where you can actually have a conversation again, without being banned or destroyed for disagreeing even if done rationally and politely. 
I hope it survives its technical challenges.

be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit&#x27;s initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become the website with most active users&#x2F;content. You really don&#x27;t want reddit users here.

Surprisingly no one has mentioned Tildes.net yet. It&#x27;s something in between reddit and hackernews. Requires an invite to register, though they are quite easy to find.

Lemmy! I&#x27;ve been checking it out lately and people are moving popular subreddits to Lemmy&#x27;s servers. It&#x27;s a bit confusing at first but once you get it, it works like email. And it&#x27;s... fantastic!But I&#x27;ll wait for this protest to die down to see its &quot;real&quot; value. Most of the posts now are about the protest and migration from Reddit. Things are on fire now.

Any good alternative? I like hacker news for now that it still got some comments worth reading and interesting articles

Oooof I can totally see Disney buying the subreddit.

The whole reason to Google Reddit results is for independent enthusiast opinions positive and especially negative. Corporatised subs are going to kill that dead for many things. Another nail in the coffin of Reddit. Love of money truly is the root of all evil.

&gt; Next, they&#x27;ll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they&#x27;re dedicated to. Eg. r&#x2F;starwars to Disney,This happened on the r&#x2F;audible subreddit, the official audibledotcom customer service account became a mod and started deleting all the threads remotely critical of audible or amazon. The subreddit revolved and they were removed as a mod but it was a solid 5-months of nary a harsh word.If they ever kill off old.reddit I&#x27;m out, I can&#x27;t stand the cartoony new reddit design.

I mod a small sub that I started many years ago, the sub users expressed overwhelming support for the 2 day private protest.So I am interested in what numbers you are using to support your statement that users did not consent.

Most subs did a poll to see what the users think, and for all those I&#x27;ve seen there has been overwhelming support for a blackout.

Many, many subreddits held polls before deciding what to do. I know that kind of online poll is not scientific, or whatever but do you have a better idea? Not going on strike is also a moral stand that should get consent from the user base.

&gt; Next, they&#x27;ll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they&#x27;re dedicated to. Eg. r&#x2F;starwars to Disney, r&#x2F;startrek to Viacom&#x2F;Paramount, etc.This isn&#x27;t an accurate extrapolation. In fact it&#x27;s extrapolating in the opposite direction.The moderators are taking a moral stand against an API policy. But the the actual users of the subreddits never consented to this moral stand. By removing these moderators that are working against the users, reddit is giving the subreddits back to the users.

The threshold for free API usage for modding tools is being increased from 60 to 100 queries per minute<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.reddithelp.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;16693988535309" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mods.reddithelp.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;16693988535309</a>There are a very small minority that exceed that even now apparently.Seems not unreasonable to me.

Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage, obviously have false assumptions given they’re actually implementing the plan.It’s a sad thing to watch.

i PRAY for them not to recover. the trouble is, the point with giving subs to IP owners, is extremely likely. though as likely is that reddit will be just bought whole by some ass or another...i realize this sounds very harsh, but at this point: anything that drives people into federated services is a godsend

I disagree with your doomsday scenario.There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the &#x27;oppurtunity&#x27; to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.No doubt some have already contacted Reddit management saying that if they de-mod x subreddit they will jump in and guarantee the subreddit&#x27;s operation.I don&#x27;t understand the argument about the lack of free labour drying up. It won&#x27;t. There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. And Reddit management knows this. For years they have seen how moderators relish and also abuse power. That&#x27;s why there are moderator guidelines.In fact, I think it can be argued that Reddit is leveraging this moment to flush out long standing and troublesome moderators which I think is clearly being what the end game is. And Huffman&#x27;s goal.It may be silly of me to say, however, I don&#x27;t think people are giving Huffman enough credit. He knew that there would be significant blowback. He has been involved with Reddit longer and probably far more in depth than any other employee or user. I wouldn&#x27;t put it past him that he knows Reddit moderation is due for a shake up and is probably keen on getting rid of a subset. And by doing so he can not only pick and choose which users he wants in on what subreddits but more importantly can dictate the culture he wants.This whole episode if far from over. He has clearly said that the new API changes are going nowhere and I&#x27;m willing to bet that he gets what he wants (which includes a mod clean out) with the outcome being a few people quitting the site and people talking about him from now until eternity.EDIT: Spelling

Exactly. I canceled my monthly subscription and logged out. I mostly loved Reddit for long for pieces anyway, so I&#x27;m going to pay more attention to Substack and see how that emerges.

Whatever the outcome of this si, an I never used Reddit, it seems to have been an incredibly dumb idea to do all of that before the IPO...

They were done the minute mods broke their habit of moderating their subreddits. Some dedicated mods might come back, but it is really hard to return to a lost habits so the damage is done already.

&quot;The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.&quot;From the AMA by Reddit&#x27;s CEO 6 days ago[1]:Mod ToolsWe know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;145bram&#x2F;addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;reddit&#x2F;comments&#x2F;145bram&#x2F;addressing_...</a>

The same echo chamber some of those very mods operate in. Pot, kettle, black. Suck it up. You think the hot air from those servers comes by magic? Plenty of them need replacing. The king is dead. Long live the king!

&gt; Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this.No, they&#x27;ve made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care about all of this stuff is a price they&#x27;re willing to pay.It seems pretty clear that they believe the people who will leave are not crucial enough (in function and number) to make the overall communities collapse, and that the result they want to achieve is worth the losses.

Well, if I was Huffman, the question I would be asking is can I bring revenue up so much from api and other things that I can now employ a lot of mods?He might have made that call already, and it might be possible.Facebook works with paid mods after all.

&gt; But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.Nope. The value of being a reddit mod is clout. Clout does not matter to me hence I would not want to skip $$$$ for a clout of one. It matters to them hence they do it for $0.00. As they do not want to do the work, they get no clout. I applaud reddit for nuking them.

Classic corporate leader mentality, thinking they have absolute control over everything, just because their employees must do as they&#x27;re told.

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it&#x27;s all downhill from here.They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they&#x27;ve made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank.The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money.But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.This whole conflict could have been nipped in the bud, people would have grumbled a bit, but as long as Reddit got their act together in terms of tooling eventually, life would have gone on, and Reddit would have had their payday too (I doubt milking mods for spare change is the master plan here).Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.This is the end, it&#x27;s all downhill from here, I doubt they can recover.Needless to say I&#x27;ll avoid their IPO like the plague and so will many others.10 years from now something else will have come along and replaced them and we&#x27;ll all look back at this moment.

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment.It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company.FB is a boomer &amp; genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with ads and most millennials &amp; genZ seemingly using it as a glorified contacts list. It’s a shadow of what it was.

On the rare occasion I open Facebook I’m immediately trolled by paid News Corp tabloid garbage. Like every time. So definitely can confirm.

By fine you mean where they are now, still massively unprofitable?

Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I&#x27;ll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.

When you’re a company relying on outsourcing moderation work to an army of unpaid moderators, it’s probably not a good idea to drive away said moderators. Especially when your customers (advertisers) really don’t like sites that allow bad content to slip through their moderation too much.

I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It&#x27;s a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.

Smelled this one coming miles away.Next, they&#x27;ll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they&#x27;re dedicated to. Eg. r&#x2F;starwars to Disney, r&#x2F;startrek to Viacom&#x2F;Paramount, etc.Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That&#x27;s going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain.Give it a few months, it&#x27;ll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off.Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.