Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
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I’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.
Sooooo…1000 days of baby shark? Nothing but baby shark, 1m posts a day.
When your only motive is profit, you will do whatever is easiest to achieve that end
Force their hand. Reddit needs to learn their actions have consequences. They need to experience firsthand how much higher their operating cost will be if they can no longer rely on free labor for their site to be engaging. They need to learn that their goal of moving to a more ad supported model won’t work if they don’t have ads to show people.
Also on reflection. I don’t think I once saw an ad on Reddit I found interesting or tempting. I get worthwhile ads on Instagram all the time. Maybe reddit needs to reevaluate their marketing departments insights into their userbase instead of rolling out a paid API scheme
You know, that’s a good point. Facebook may be littered with ads, but at least they are relevant to my lifestyle. My wife has purchased a fair few things she saw from Facebook ads. Reddit ads pretty much are universally uninteresting garbage.
Inspectigator: He gets us.
There’s absolutely no way they won’t find suckers willing to mod a megasub for free.
The cynical side of me says that’s because they dont collect as much personal data as FB, or aren’t as good at extrapolating invasive details from it…
That’s what everyone liked about reddit though! That you could be relatively anonymous, I mean. Of course, this had some pretty significant drawbacks too, which is why there’s so much unbridled hate speech going on there.
Oh absolutely! Them collecting less personal data (it’s reddit, so unfortunately its due to incompetence rather than altruism) is good! I agree that anonymityits a double-edged sword, though.
100% agreed on the quality of ads. I’ve even ordered a few things off Instagram ads. Reddit? Nah, always crap. And I hate that they made the ads look like normal posts. That’s when I started hating them.
That’s kinda the goal anyway, it will kill the subreddit because they will 100% pick someone who can’t mod for shit which will drive away the users.
100%. At best they get a couple days and then it’ll be “okay kids you had your fun, parties over and open up. “
If they don’t new mods will be installed.
Some of the more wussy mods have already said that if they protest longer than two days, they’ll be removed.
Those mods therefore intend to keep their position and the protest is only a show. Unless mods are willing to actually leave Reddit, they have no leverage.
agree on that 100%
With a subreddit that popular, I wonder if doing that will just turn it into another Digg/HD-DVD situation. Protest posts inundating the subreddit until it’s eseentially shut down again.
How long before reddit replaces the mods and reopens it? I give it a day or two after the 48 hour blackout
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? :(
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
I welcome our new home at kbin.
I will miss all the nice features we had with 3PA though :(
Give them time. If just a few of the Reddit 3PA developers work on federated apps, great things could happen… They might even bring userbases with them.
Seems like a natural pivot.
None of the third party apps are going to pay Reddit’s extortionate prices, they might as well change their backend to the fediverse…
Wow, nice to see a big sub going all in
Big in subs, yeah, but most of their active users barely scraped a couple hundred.
I’m honestly super surprised by this. I assumed the mods of the big subreddits were in kahoots with the admins or were Reddit loyalists or something
This was basically force the admins of reddit to remove them as mods… going to annoy a lot of people but its not going to magically cease reddits operations.
They will need replacement mods. Good mods don’t grow on trees.
Reddit literally don’t care. They gotta try and become profitable somehow and they will destroy their community to get there if they have too
Agreed, but when that happens, regular users will see that the admins will just change mods without mod or user consent. For some that might be a final straw.
The problem with removing mods is that they need to find a replacement for all that free labour.
Wow even if admins take over that subreddit, such a big subreddit will surely create a snowball of many more subreddits doing it.
I don’t see reddit ever recovering from this (They’ll not die, but things won’t be the same)
I still think the admin team will forcefully takeover and reopen the big subs, but I think that’ll be like pouring gasoline on that dumpster fire.
They can’t force free moderations with their staff. This may be the end of Reddit.
I’d kinda love to see that, it’d be huge. Could even get some of the larger sub mods to maybe open kbin or lemmy instances instead? I’d be great to have their motivation and talent in a community not dependent on reddit’s good will.
I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen too.
They’ll kick dissident mods out, install their own, and just reopen the subs like nothing happened. There’s precedent of that happening I believe (although for much more reasonable reasons, like mods going rogue for stupid or anti-free speech stuff).
And it’s going to be an absolute shitshow. I feel sad, but I also kind of love it. You reap what you sow, I guess.
Yeah the only reason I still go to Reddit is to watch the chaos. Great entertainment
Someone on the fediverse (might be here?) asked “Do you want Lemmy to succeed or do you just want reddit to burn?”
I’ve landed on “both, for independant reasons.” Its been high time reddit’s corporate greed gets checked, and what a better way to go than an icarus flight?
Pretty much!
I can confidently say both, as I’ve started my own instance of lemmy and have allowed a small amount of users to join.
I agree!
I want Reddit to fail because they overestimate their value and think that their software is why Reddit is popular (even though, let’s face it, the software was absolute garbage during the time where Reddit became popular, and is still is, albeit for different reasons).
I want the Fediverse (and not specifically Lemmy or Beehaw, although I’m in love with both at the moment) to succeed because I think that the idea behind it gives the communities that it hosts total control about what they want to do, regardless on the people that hosts them.
So it’s not really that different, as it all boils down to the same point: the importance of communities is paramount, and the tools that are given for that are important but also mere accessories. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but I think that it gets the general idea.
So incredibly well stated, and I am also in the “both” camp.
Call me paranoid, but imo, Reddit might just install ML based mods. I’ve seen quite some progress from these tools recently and they might pull it off.
What that will do to the emergent culture of each sub will be a big unknown.
The last paragraph, I feel exactly the same. I miss reddit, but I don’t think there’s going back after this. It has to go.
But here’s the thing: are you going to miss Reddit or the communities that they allowed you to partake in?
Because there’s no reason to miss the former - and you’ll miss the latter either way because a lot of people are going to just stop using Reddit after the changes come into effect anyway, so the community will certainly change.
I think that this move made most of us lose something. Which is certainly sad, but we’ll lose it either way, so might as well get rid of the platform they hurt us, right?
It’s definitely the communities. Although I definitely get lost doom scrolling lol.
Well, there’s hope for doom scrolling on the fediverse yet my friend! I did it quite successfully last night between reading bits of the AMA dumpster fire!
Haha good good. I’ve definitely been able to spend some time on here so that’s super positive.
With the APIocolypse refugees coming in daily, things are looking good for a half hour sat on the toilet, even though you finished right away, and nearly falling over when you get up because your legs are asleep…scrolling.
If they force a reopen, we should all get ready to post Never Gonna Give You Up music videos all day long.
Or a certain four-letter word starting with F followed by a famous Reddit administrator’s handle…
But yeah. My Reddit account is pretty much worthless now, so might as well express my discontent, right?
I’d love to see “fuck spez” become to reddit what the HD-DVD encryption code was to digg
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Some people just wanna watch the world burn.
Wow! I didn’t expect something like this from such a big subreddit. I expect the admins will just take it over though.
Depending on how many other subreddits do this, they won’t be able to run all of them on their own.
Sure, but from what the mods have been saying in the AMA, Reddit neither has the staff nor the expertise to take over one let alone many subreddits.
I think they’ll just outsource the content moderation work to a third-party.
And once they do that, there will be very little difference between Reddit and every other social media site. They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.
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Maybe they could ask those incredibly profitable third-party apps to chip in on moderating costs! /s
But they would have to pay for that. In light of “we want to be more profitable” this move would be quite counterproductive.
Admins may take it over, but a big default sub like that has a big moderation team, and they are all volunteers. I expect the admins won’t be able to find suitable replacements to match the level of free labour they’ve been getting
I have long suspected that many moderators are actually paid by third parties with their own interests. I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit was able to sell mod positions or entire subs outright to corporate or political actors.
China and Russia will no doubt gladly help
Exactly
Gonna be a spam fest there for a while if they replace the present mods to open the sub forcibly.
The admins will take over all the high profile subs. You know it
Mods of niche subs are harder to replace. As a finn, I’d like to see what reddit does if our native language sub went out indefinitely. Big subs have visibility though, and can make headlines.
Do they have the manpower to manage them tho?
This protest is supported by the overwhelming majority of reddit users, it’s not just mods decision, if they replaced the mods of “my” subs, I wouldn’t be happy at all about it.
If admins replace mods, all user should start spamming those subs with all the worse things they can think of, see how well they deal with it lol.
Nah, they will just nuke mods until the top mod pledges compliance. There are plenty of people out there looking to get drunk on a small amount of power.
In practice, what will happen is that a lot of right wing trolls and provocateurs are going to jump into the top mod spots on big subs.
Let them take over lol, see how well they manage actually working on their communities for a change :think_bread:
I am pretty sure they’ve been running r/soccer for a while now, to protect Reddit Inc from being taken to court by the super litigious football authorities
This is such a big win! I really hope that capacity increases on kbin. Perhaps the mods/admins can organise a donation link? I’m sure there are many of us that would be happy to donate to improve server capacity. (Provided it was secure etc etc)
Usually refuges are the ones asking for help. I love that in Rexxit, the refuges are the ones seeking to give help.
Rexxit 😂 love it
Rexxit lol. Works for “they wrecked it” and Brexit.
Good on them; destroying third-party apps is absolutely disgraceful from Reddit.
holy cow.
has anything like this happened before? this is glorious
Digg exodus, I guess. and, to a smaller extent, the 2015 Blackout.
