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.
That raises the stakes significantly, fully support the decision. It will also make any migration to Lemmy more abrupt, hopefully the instances can handle it.
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.
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.
Most recently, when the founder of CashApp got murdered
Wait…what?
Yeah that’s a good point, I don’t love its politics either and I’m a fair bit to the left of most of its posters. I usually see it in the spirit of ‘you can entertain an idea without agreeing with it’ and trying to avoid staying in a place where people largely agree with me but you’re right a lot of the reactions to the murder were really grim and showed some unpleasant qualities in parts of the userbase.
On the other hand a lot of the less political content is really high quality there and on technical topics the signal/noise ratio is better than most places on the internet. I guess any site with user generated content will always be a case of ‘how much crap do I want to sift through to find a diamond?’ and a lot of the ways HN is bad can be equally applied to a lot of Reddit as well in my opinion. It’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea though and that’s fair enough.
Edit: spelling (do we do that here?)
Kbin is interesting too. I’m using it now. Nice UI and federates with Lemmy, of course
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It’s for kbin. I don’t think it would work for lemmy.
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Isn’t having a choice amazing?
Not OP, but yes, yes it is! This is what the internet should have been and can be in the future
Also using Kbin, only need to get used to how everything works, and more people need to join.
I am always 1050% serial
I definitely get the sense that spez is just going to nuke these mods until they get compliant ones in there. It’s going to end up being a bloodbath, and I think it perfectly fits with his weird fantasy of being a post-collapse tyrant.
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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.
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.
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 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!”
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!
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 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.
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.
I’m also dubious of how possible it is to replace moderators outright. These are all individual communities with at least somewhat separate tools of moderation let alone unique practices that have made the community what it is. Does videos still feel like videos with an entire different moderation team? Maybe, but I bet the niche crochet community won’t.
Yeah reddit is full of “small” communities that are actually like thousands or tens of thousands of people. Those will be the ones most impacted by this.
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.
Good on the mod team of /r/videos! It must have been a difficult decision to walk away from a 26M+ sized community but I think it’s definitely better to scuttle the ship and go down with it than capitulate at this point. This is a bold choice that’s left Reddit between a rock and a hard place.
This is huge news! Hopefully other gigantic subreddits will follow suit.
Yup this is massive and it’s not a niche subreddit. That means, most likely, more will follow. Sure, reddit will probably force it back online with new mods or whatever, but THIS is how you make a statement. Hat’s off r/videos!
Damage is done, there’s no coming back for reddit. Spez showed his true hand and how he doesn’t care and is willing to lie to us all for the sake of profit.
Opensource for the win
Federated sites for the win
We don’t need a for profit company to provide what reddit provided.
Even if they backtracked, I sorely hope no one believes them and goes back.
It’s not just about the API to me, reddit became toxic and there’s government psy ops all over it using botnets
Never underestimate people. One app, ReddReader, got the exemption that allows it to live for now and people are already getting hyped about switching to it. Time is a flat circle.
Is that due to accessibility? I can see it’s for android, but apollo was the pinnacle of the reddit app space so it’s a substandard experience, plus if the power users go and some subreddits stay dark, damage is still done.
Yeah, it’s throwing an accessibility bone to people to try and placate everybody.
Damage is done, there’s no coming back for reddit.
I don’t know what reddit’s corporate structure is, but if it’s possible to shitcan spez and give up on the IPO, that’s the only way I can see it making a comeback at this point. Other than that, yeah, the reddit we knew and loved is dead.
Holy shit, that’s pretty big. I think r/Videos is in the top 5% by size, and I was sure some Reddit admins were moderating it as well
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.
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.
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
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 essentially shut down again.
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%
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.
Burn everthing down and rebuild in the fediverse. FUCK these corporations.
This is the way
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.
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.
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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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Some people just wanna watch the world burn.
Absolutely incredible to see. Very happy that one of biggest subs called reddits bluff. Which I believe is where we are. Reddit thinks the users that actually care about 3rd party apps will move on at this point and reddit will have the everyone else switch to their apps with no more of a thought than swiping up to the next tik tok video. I’m deleting my last account on Reddit now in solidarity. Lemmy and the fediverse feels nice. I am in near complete control of my data running my own instance while still being able to interact with literally everyone I want and don’t want. My ublock isn’t blocking a single thing, no trackers, no more being a commodity. Already fine communities are springing up with thoughtful moderation, rules and inclusivity.
I am super excited about what is happening here.
As someone who used to love r/selfhosted and all the stuff posted on there I’ll have a look at hosting my own instance when I get the time to figure out how it all works.
I didn’t even think about the privacy/tracking aspect. My Pihole isn’t blocking anything and my Ublock isn’t blocking anything. This is quite refreshing to see.
I have a pihole as well… So I totally get that. Getting Lemmy going wasn’t terrible but the documentation has a lot of assumptions and lack of detail. Do the Ansible setup if you decide to do it. It did work and very easoly however now I am having to figure out additional configuration now. I tried the manually docker install method and couldn’t ever get it working but only tried a few hours.
Have any questions I’ll try to help.
Everyone knows that docker requires at least 8 hours to clean up the 20 lines of json
Lol. To be fair, docker was running fine. I was having issues with nginx proxy and ssl. Well at least, I think that’s where my issue was… Haha.
I appreciate the effort, but since this is one of the main subreddits the Reddit admins will simply purge these subreddits of their mods, install new ones, and reopen it (they’ve already done something like this before).
The real question is how well will the sub operate then? I imagine not very well since all of the experienced mods and their tools are gone.
This was my immediate reaction too. Reddit will likely replace the current moderator team of r/videos and reopen. Nonetheless I can appreciate and respect the gesture/message.
This is easy to do for one subreddit. And it’s a large one. Would easily need 10+ mods to keep it running. But if a few of these large subreddits revolt, I don’t think reddit can simply replace them all.
Not only that but I think replacing the entire mod team would cause a revolt anyways. Tensions are extremely high
I wonder if Reddit might just end up like YouTube: mostly relying on automated content moderation bots, and the human review being a big pool of low paid people who aren’t assigned to specific subs who just do quick checklist reviews.
It’s gonna be great.
I can see that happening, they’re definitely not going to pay for all the mods they’d need to replace current ones. Sounds like that would absolutely kill a lot of smaller communities, but I doubt they care.
I can’t exactly go into why this isn’t possible in the short term, but it’s extremely unlikely that reddit could effectively moderate things automatically in the near future.
I mean hell, look at youtubes comment section.
And they don’t have the money to pay moderators. As spez said, they aren’t profitable (only thing I believe him on btw). I seriously think that spez has entered a Putin-type situation where he has very few opportunities to keep his job right now.
Yeah I don’t imagine that Reddit has a deep bench of people who have the skills needed to moderate a sub with millions of users and are willing to do it for free
Tin foil hat stuff though: what if they intend to pay moderators they hold on thrall, but they need to get rid of the current ones first.
Spez just admitted they aren’t profitable. I can’t imagine they will pay new people when they could have paid the old mods
Unless he was lying about profits in some half baked attempt to look like the underdog against the big mean apps.
That would be really stupid considering they are going to IPO soon. Honestly I don’t get why you would announce with such a weird combination of pride and snark that you are unprofitable.
Wouldn’t be the first time a corporation says one thing to the public and the complete opposite to its shareholders.
Seconding this. They’ll likely install their own mods and force-reopen the sub, since it’s one of the bigger ones.
Same with r/technology, and other main subs, id assume
indefinitely != permanently
</pedantry>
It’s not pedantic. There IS a difference, and it’s relevant in this case.
The way I see it:
Indefinite = Not defined. Could be short, long, infinite or something in between.
Infinite = Clearly defined to never end.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m already feeling at home on kbin. Really liking this fediverse stuff! I don’t think I’m going to miss reddit at all.
I think the neat thing is while you’re on KBin, I’m on Lemmy and we can still interact. I just wish it was easer to understand for the non tech savvy people. It’s going to make adoption by the mainstream hard
If all of these Reddit-type services used activity pub, it wouldn’t matter where people went. Discovery might still be a challenge but interoperability wouldn’t
This is my first time seeing a kbin and a Lemmy user interact with each other. I did conceptually understand the fediverse, but this actually puts it into perspective. That’s amazing!
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In my opinion having mainstream adoption is a double edged sword. It’s nice to have that larger user base, but at the same time most subreddits went to crap when they became default subs. I’ll never forget starting out my career r/personalfinance was not a default sub and I could get very insightful specific advice from people who really seemed to understand what they were talking about. Flash forward and it became a default sub. Now it’s an echo chamber and borderline circlejerk sub. It feels like a parody of what it used to be.
So far I don’t miss that or mind the smaller feel here.
Me too! I had no idea this even existed before Reddit’s shenanigans.
Ultimately here’s what’s going to happen: These closed communities will be forcefully reopened by Reddit admins, the mods will be removed and replaced with toadies that will follow the new rules, and it will inevitably descend into exactly what Twitter is descending into: a right-wing propaganda outlet with racists, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic content dominating the forums that took a stand.
Maybe many subs will just fizzle out into irrelevance once power users moved away and NSFW got blocked. Then they can have their IPO of platform in decline
All the users posting one-liners or reposting Memes at aww,videos,soccer and other large subs are not what makes Reddit great. Its OC content going viral on large subs and the deduction of mods and some power users on small subs
I’ve seen this floated a few times, and this is a genuine question, how would Reddit do this? I don’t really understand how they could force a community open by removing mods and adding new ones - what rules are they breaking by closing the subreddit?
You’re assuming Reddit admins are bound to their own rules.
why they couldn’t do it? the subreddit is hosted in their site, and they just…can, and there is nothing we can do
They have ultimate control over the website. They can remove mods they don’t like at any time, change the settings, and ask for new mods.
I’m here from the future, it’s happening.
Thanks for grabbing the text, that’s very helpful. Good for /r/videos, way to send a strong message.
Hopefully other subreddits follow suit and help push people out to new sites. Too much is held by the big corporations, love the idea of more options and a wider source to take from rather than just a handful of micromanaged sources.
I’m really using this as an excuse to be more active again. I used to engage with Reddit ALL THE TIME in college. It was so fun to just comment back and forth and talk to people. I haven’t done that in ages, and even though I feel like I have nothing all that worthwhile to post, I’ll post anyway. Nobody is going to discuss content that isn’t there!
