Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
How long before reddit replaces the mods and reopens it? I give it a day or two after the 48 hour blackout
Possible, but I doubt they’ll find enough that can keep the quality. Videos isn’t the only main sub.
I wish the blackout was different.
Keep all the subs open, but suspend all but the sitewide rules.
All the subreddits would’ve been filled with off topic content, spam and advertising. It would’ve been far more annoying to the average user.
But it would have still kept those blessed ad impressions rolling in, unabated.
Lemmy is gonna be rough for a few days at least but after the growing pains we’re going to have an even greater community
It’s going to get the hug of death
correction “they” going to…
For me it’s a double sided problem. Even if reddit solves the moderation tools problem which user the api (and they will because those are the tools of the free labor they explore) there will be still the problem with the user experience. Even if subreddits reopen I will never use the official reddit app, the same way I refuse to use the official twitter app since apps like Falcon Pro, Flamingo or Talon stopped working.
Reddit CEO can bargain the deal he wants that I don’t care anymore. For me reddit is now only a repository where I will continue to search specific information. It is no more a place where I want to participate in online communities.
Yeah - the AMA with spez was the writing on the wall. No matter what/how users protest, they can only delay the inevitable changes. I deleted my 10+ year old account and cut my losses. The last thing I want in my social media is platform drama.
That was my line of thought as well, however…
Reddit will stop being a good information repo very quickly as users
who actually know what they’re talking aboutleave and the information stops being up to date. The trend of adding “reddit” to every google search will die out soon.I already edited my reddit submissions to something along the lines of “this has been deleted in protest against API…” using PowerDeleteSuite. Some of my past comments has useful information in them and people might end up there via google. I’m taking my data with me when I walk out.
You should make your past comments available in lemmy somehow.
I’ve read this from someone on reddit a few days ago, but I think it’s true: reddit-archive like read-only lemmy instances should be set up. The data is available, see the-eye.eu/redarcs
r/DataHoarder also has some more info on this with tooling in a pinned post. They didn’t private the sub, it’s only read-only so it’s still readable
Far too late for that
I closed r/skookum early, just couldn’t take the suspense anymore. New Skookum: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/33682
Hey that used to be one of my favorite subs. I’ll check out the new one.
Tsk tsk, reddit…
Man, why does everything I like have to go to hell?
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cory Doctorow is a got-dang witch. This was about Tiktok and it was written in January. Literally describing the process to a T.
Damn, that’s a loooong read. Worth it, but long.
Cory Doctorow will always be my hero.
What a great word. You’ve single handedly improved my life. Thank you.
Its a useful concept for explaining life, the universe, and everything.
That and the number 42 :P
I’d like to see the big subs each create an official mastodon account for the sole purpose of announcing trustworthy information. One the subs come back up, especially if it’s earlier than expected, how will we know if they were taken over by the admins?
Well since the admins can’t control their discords too, I would assume there would be a very quick backlash there and then spread literally everywhere
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I can see a lot of people moving to Lemmy, just because the other alternative that’s popping off (Tildes) is a far more serious discussion-driven site.
Yeah from what I’ve seen, migrating to tildes is a bit like migrating to hackernews. In theory it’s a Reddit clone, but the purpose of the site is so different from how Reddit has been used that it’s not really a substitute.
Doesn’t Tildes also need an invite? So it’s less likely to have a mass migration.
It does require an invite, although us over at Beehaw moved over from Tildes.
What motivated the move, was Tildes the place overtaken by Rationalists?
Yeah I like HN but it’s too niche for what this place and others are trying to be. I’ve used it a while but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to people outside of the tech industry or at least broader STEM interest even though other things are discussed there from time to time.
As somebody who’s generally interested in science and technology, HN also sufferers from terminal libertarian VC-brain. It’s a club for wannabe founders of unicorn tech companies who view themselves as enlightened ubermench. This doesn’t always bubble to the surface, but at times of controversy it is quite glaring. Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered they were practically calling to liquidate the homeless, even though the incident - predictably - was the result of a personal dispute with somebody he knew.
Even if the subject matter scratches an itch, the community is not for me.
indefinitely != permanently
</pedantry>
The way I see it:
Indefinite = Not defined. Could be short, long, infinite or something in between.
Infinite = Clearly defined to never end.
It’s not pedantic. There IS a difference, and it’s relevant in this case.
Well yeah but in this case, won’t reddit just replace the mods ?
Yea, probably. Especially for the bigger subreddits. But something like most of the entire website is going to experience suddenly shifting to a moderation force with little to no experience as Reddit just tries to get things online again. If we all thought moderation was a shitshow now…
I took r/edc restricted yesterday, though we are/were tiny. While I still plan to find replacement mods from within the community after reddit goes full dipshit, I’m done ring their work for free, with shit tools, next to zero support, and (worse, imo) taking a lot of flak from admins because of bullshit unrelated to moderation.
I dunno if lemmy is going to become the reddit replacement or not, but I’m done with giving reddit anything at all. Overwrote and deleted everything from my author account that had some decent amount of fiction, and my personal account that had a lot of real stories from my life. That ain’t much, but since I’ve seen my stuff being read on YouTube, and reposted by the copy/paste bots, it’s something I guess.
Man it’s just so wild to watch what’s going on over there right now. Even when subreddits come back after a couple days it may not matter if bot-assisted moderation becomes impossible over there in the long run.
If reddit backs off enough to save the accessibility and moderation issues, I hope enough people still leave to help create a strong alternate ecosystem.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
If reddit backs off enough
They might do that, but for how long? I can only see them gravitated toward doing the same thing in more subtle ways if that’s what earns them the most money.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
Lemmy exists at least since 2020, when I registered to the platform. That is 3 years ago and it hasn’t had much of activity until the Reddit drama started recently
What’s happened with Twitter and now Reddit is hopefully enough to make people realize the pitfalls of corporate-owned, centralized social media. Mastodon has really taken off with some major news outlets now posting on there. I could see the same happening with Lemmy now.
LETSGOOOOOOOOO
I honestly think more subs need to do an indefinite shut down.
If it’s only for 48 hours Reddit can just wait it out, and if not a lot of subs join in on the indefinite shut down they can just replace the mods for new ones.
However, in my opinion, the buggest change will come June 30th when 3rd party apps shut down since that’s when users will actualy stop using Reddit.
Let’s hope it’s enough users to make a change. I myself will be deleting everything and my account on June 30th. Let’s hope something changes.
Most of the people I know have already bailed out. I deleted 13 years of comments and my Reddit account. Zero intentions of returning even if they do backtrack.
14 years here checking in. Such is life, I left digg, I’ll leave Reddit.
An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there’s not a whole lot you can do.
If neither option will work then take whatever option causes your opponent the most trouble. I very much doubt they want to shake up moderation on thousands of subreddits overnight.
To some degree, you’re right, reddit probably won’t change regardless of what mods do. If they really are feeling the blackout, as you’d say they’ll probably just replace the moderators and open the community back up, rather than reverse their decision.
However, I feel like it’s reddit doing the disservice to their users, not mods who are taking action by protesting. Ultimately, and if reddit do replace the mods and try and continue as normal, then it sends a stronger message to the community that reddit doesn’t care about or respect them and it’s not a not a good place to continue being.
In the dynamic between reddit the company running the site and the users, there is limited power users have against reddit which holds a lot of power, but protesting like what’s happening now one of the main tools users have.
it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise
While true, between this and the Twitter fallout I’m hoping more people are seeing the folly of making dependencies of centralised services that they do not own and have zero sway over management decisions of.
There were many people pleading with folk to stay on Twitter because of the communities they had built or the activist work they had been achieving… but that was all built on a house of cards.
Now is the time to do the work to shift away from depending on platforms that don’t care about their users real needs & embrace a better way of being!
I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here 😂
I’ve been trying to constantly educate others about the importance of shifting to de-centralized platforms. That’s the conversation that needs to be happing. Both online and IRL.
I’m new to Lemmy but started using Mastodon 3 years ago. Been exciting to see it explode since the enshitification of Twitter and really hoping to see the same thing here.
I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here
Yeah but it amazes me how many people just don’t get it. People on reddit looking for an alternative… “let’s go to lemmy”, “nah there’s lefty weirdos”, “ok let’s go to <closed source reddit clone>”, “ok this is gonna work out great!”
I run a site for owners of a very specific model of RV, of which they only made less than 2,000, and who knows how many are still on the road (they ended production in 2000).
There’s also a Facebook group. The Facebook group is good for general conversation - hey, I’ll be in Colorado, anyone near there? - but for technical issues, it’s frustrating, because if someone does answer the question, it’s difficult to find in the future. And Facebook’s algorithms mean that the topics aren’t presented in time order or anything like that, so you can easily miss a post that has something important to you but isn’t a major discussion topic.
And then, it’s all controlled by a company, so if Facebook decides to clean up old stuff tomorrow, there’s nothing we can do. “But it’s so hard to use the forum!” because I have self registration turned off and you have to email me for an account (spammers). Meanwhile the Facebook group gets t-shirt spammers about twice a month.
It drives me nuts.
Lemmy and personal forums have a similar issue though. Just like users were previously at the whim of the large company to provide service, now they rely on you. What if you were to get board of running the forum or (however terrible) something were to happen to you?
Now the site and all of it’s content is lost for the users permanently. Lemmy instances also have this problem. They rely entirely on a single administrator, (or small group of them). In the Web1.0 days this wasn’t such a large issue, because websites were most often read-only for content consumption and web forums were small and populated by niche tech savvy people. These days however, the users create a lot of the content that is hosted and they naturally expect it to persist.
Lemmy needs some way of allowing users to port their profile and content from one instance to another, and a redundancy system where instances can partner with others to host data for redundancy purposes, or something to that effect. Maybe users pay a small hosting fee for their own content and it’s not tied to an instance? Though I’m not sure how that would work, I’m just spitballing.
There’s a lot of problems to solve, and this fediverse is a very interesting idea, but it’s not perfect and introduces a lot of questions. I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, but I’m not sure entrusting the longevity of the content to admins of a particular server is the best plan.
You’re correct, though my forum could be archived on the Internet archive (I’m not sure if it is, but it could be).
I agree with your general point though, there are still single points of failure in Lemmy.
Decentralized is the future of the internet
Decentralised is also its past.
With some luck the “web 2.0” fad of siloed services will end up being a weird blip in it’s history!
Good god I knew it wasn’t going to go well but I didn’t think they’d crash and burn it THIS bad.
The bar was on the floor and they still managed to somehow clip underneath it through the floor, end up in some backrooms-esque dimension only to trip on a banana peel and land face first in a pie.
That’s inevitably what happens when you get a call from your VC backers asking why you’re still bleeding money into a pit instead of milking the community for profit.
But we need the sacrifices else how will line go up? :(
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I’m sure they’ll force it to reopen with a new, handpicked mod team that won’t do nearly as good of a job.
I can’t think of a better way to put more gasoline on the fire. If it happens I hope the users revolt and completely shit up any sub where they pull this stunt. Let’s see how long those new mods last then, and how many advertisers they lose.
This is great to hear! Unfortunately the reddit exodus will likely splinter a bunch of niche communities, but it will definitely be for the best. I’m all down for the “de-consolidation” of the internet!
The tricky thing will be the small niche communities that are already hosted on Reddit. For example, there is a group of us dorks who are really into home automation with HomeKit. I’d hate for that small group to splinter into smaller groups that are so small that they’re no longer a good source of collective knowledge.
I don’t really have a great solve for that problem, but as someone who does experience and service design by trade, I’ve found this to be a fun puzzle to marinate on over the past few weeks.
Same! 90% of my Reddit time was simply r/homekit and r/Apple . I see that there’s now a Homekit community, !homekit@lemmy.ml it doesn’t really have content yet but we have to start somewhere right?
Ah, thanks for finding the HomeKit community!
I was thinking the exact same thing. My interests are home automation with Home assistant and media management with sonarr/radarr and associated programs. Reddit is such an incredible resource for those communities, it’s gonna be hard to replace.
There’s a home assistant group on one of the servers, I found it the other day. It doesn’t have the traffic of reddit’s of course, but it does exist. I’d link it but I don’t know how in the app.
Thanks. Just subscribed to one at homeassistant@lemmy.world
I share your concern, there are so many niche subreddits that are the most active community for the given thing. Lemmy is awesome but it doesn’t seem to have that same consolidation power just yet.
Reddit didn’t have the breadth of communities back when it had it’s initial big growth spurt from the digg migration. In time this whole thing could match it.
It sort of feels like someone should download all of reddit, pull out the actual good information, and discard the rest. That’s likely an impossible task though. It would take forever.
you too can download the json archive of Reddit from 2005 through 2022!
But agreed, a more curated version of the archive - or at least a tool to make searching the archive easy - would be super nice to have.
It’s be a shame if someone used that as the input set for generative AI, set it for “stupid”, and then used it to flooded Reddit with bots attached to high karma accounts that the owners no longer give a damn about.
Yeah that is a really tricky thing, even if those communities decide to go “we’re moving to ______”, they will inevitably be leaving behind a lot of their userbase, and be giving up a large amount of SEO and discoverability. The large number of users is what gave reddit its value, so I can only hope that groups that might disperse find a central place again. I definitely don’t envy the position this leaves moderators in rn.
My big fear is that a lot of niche communities might move to discord, which will really hurt discoverability. One of my favorite things about reddit is that if I am listening to a new band that I like, there’s a good chance I can find a subreddit named after them with plenty of fans who are happy to discuss their music.
Being locked behind a discord server is even worse, because it is very difficult to preserve the messages and posts made there.
Absolutely - discord is probably one of the worst choices to host a “discussion board” type page for those reasons. They are well on the path of enshittification too with all the bloaty unnecessary features they’ve added over the years.
The over reliance on Discord has made me give up participating in some reddit communities, too. It sucks to start a discussion only to be told by regulars That its frequently discussed in the Discord and I should look there.
No. Discord is IRC 2.0, not forums for preserving convos like reddit and lemmy.
