14 years, 17 accounts, ~2000000 karma. Nuked everything: deleted comments and submissions, de-modded myself, unsubbed from everything, gilded various protest content using the coins I'd been given over the years, bought a cool Apollo app t-shirt, walked out and walked away. Nope, don't miss it; I'm exploring kbin and tildes, and getting my meme content from imgur. Which is ironic in a way, because the sole reason imgur was created was because reddit refused to allow native images.
Are you having regrets? It's okay to have regrets.
Kbin is a part of the Fediverse and is similar to Lemmy. I have a kbin.social account and am replying to you from kbin. (I subscribe to a lot of Lemmy communities via kbin).
Tildes is not a part of the Fediverse. It is a text-driven private forum basically created and run by one person. You need an invite from a Tildes account holder to join. It's its own little island. am on Tildes a lot and really like it.
Kbin is a different software than Lemmy, although similar.
It has only been around a few months (unlike lemmy that has years in development).
It offers what seems to me a more centralized view of the fediverse, with federation to lemmy servers and mastodon servers as well.
It has access to the microblogging feature, that is like sending a toot from mastodon.
I've found it to be a more familiar experience to Reddit, and honestly, I prefer it over lemmy.
Due to it being so new, it has many missing features lemmy might have, like mobile apps (the API is still not public, and it's being worked on).
HOWEVER, Kbin has a great community backing it up.
I'm currently posting this from the amazing Artemis beta app for Kbin, the first of its kind.
This is due to the incredible job @Hariette has done!!
The moderators were recently contacted by u/ModCodeofConduct, who had this to say:
We noticed you recently marked your community NSFW. This action is likely to confuse your community members, as people subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. This is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2.
While we recognize communities can gradually change as they grow, when your content suddenly changes from generally safe for work to sexually explicit, it harms the community members.
While we can see you haven't taken the step of approving sexually explicit content, we need to separate your community from the communities that abruptly become NSFW and post sexually explicit content, situations in which we immediately take action. Please correct the NSFW marking on your subreddit so that we can separate your community from those violating sitewide rules.
Thank you.
As subscribers to r/PICS are aware, the moderators here have worked very hard to ensure that the community adheres to every mandate and message that Reddit has surfaced. Unfortunately, we were unable to state as much to u/ModCodeofConduct, as they disabled the ability for us reply.
We do not wish Reddit to think that we have ignored their attempt at contact (which would be very rude of us), so we will be offering our response here. We apologize for locking the thread, but as Reddit has yet to answer our previous letter, we are operating under the assumption that it went unseen amongst other comments.
We appreciate your concerns regarding r/PICS being marked as NSFW, and we hope that you will be reassured by our response. In short, the shift in question was not a sudden change, nor is there any risk of users being confused… and most important of all, an abrupt reversion would itself constitute a violation of the site-wide rules that you cited.
On June 16th, 2023, r/PICS (then r/Pics) asked its subscribers to vote on the state of the subreddit, and they overwhelmingly decided to feature only “images of John Oliver looking sexy.” On June 20th, 2023, a second poll was held, and it was determined that “any and all media featuring John Oliver” would be allowed. This also precipitated a change in the subreddit’s name from “/r/Pics” to “/r/PICS,” with the latter being an acronym for “Posts Illuminating Comedian’s Sexiness.”
As we moderated r/PICS, however, we discovered that large amounts of profanity and offensive content – both of which are listed as NSFW by Reddit’s policies – were present in non-NSFW threads. This was problematic, as users expecting work-safe experiences were very likely to encounter non-work-safe material. Rather than abruptly alter our rules without first consulting the community (which would have confused users), we asked on June 26th, 2023 for subscribers to refrain from offering any NSFW content in non-NSFW threads.
We also requested a response from Reddit on that same date.
By July 3rd, 2023, the amount of profanity and offensive content in r/PICS had not declined, and Reddit had not responded to us. It was publicly announced that we had no choice but to mark the subreddit as being NSFW, so as to adhere to Reddit’s own mandates. It was also made clear that our longstanding rules – rules which should have seen r/Pics (in any form) being a NSFW community from the get-go – would be unchanged; that neither gore nor pornography would be allowed, but that tasteful nudity, profanity, and “offensive” content would continue to be acceptable. To reiterate, while we do celebrate a British comedian’s undeniable allure, we do not allow anything sexually explicit to be posted.
Our surfaced resources – our sidebar, our rules, our wiki, and our announcements – make all of this exceptionally clear, but since Reddit provides no method by which users can be required to read said resources before participating, the visible marking of r/PICS as NSFW is vital to establishing reasonable expectations. Furthermore, as Reddit assures its partners that their advertisements will not run alongside profanity or offensive content, the aforementioned marking is also in said partners’ best interests. That same assurance indicates that moderators “set their own standards for conduct and ‘appropriate’ content,” indicating that r/PICS is solely responsible for determining what is and is not offensive (and policing accordingly). A failure on our part to appropriately list r/PICS as NSFW would therefore run counter to what advertisers have been told.
We do understand that the shift may have caused some minor issues for Reddit, however, and as we have no desire to harm the platform, we are more than willing to discuss the situation with you. Please respond to our previous request for communication, and we will look forward to exploring productive paths forward. In the meantime, to ensure that r/PICS is adhering to all of Reddit’s guidelines and requests, we would be happy to revert the NSFW setting, restrict posting, and remove any and all content that could be considered “offensive” by anyone. If this compromise does not meet with your approval, please offer a publicly visible comment in response to our open letter. We understand that you are likely very busy, so we will wait until Friday, July 7th before taking any additional steps.
In the meantime, to ensure that r/PICS is adhering to all of Reddit’s guidelines and requests, we would be happy to revert the NSFW setting, restrict posting, and remove any and all content that could be considered “offensive” by anyone.
Hmm. So they are superficially giving in, they won't keep NSFW on to avoid ads money for reddit. But by going restricted, and going after all "offensive" content (could I read that to mean all John Oliver content? i.e. all content since the protests started) they stand to cause a massive drop in traffic to the sub, which should still hurt the bottom line.
This is exactly what they're gonna do. I'd love to see them implement something like what /r/politicalhumor did and set up automod to react to user comments. So for example, if anyone says "the is offensive" it deletes the post and bans the user
Note the statement to remove any and all offensive content. If they're still going the malicious compliance route, they're implying they're going to nuke the sub.
Reddit will replace the mods with those friendly to Admins/Spez and revert back to the way the sub was run prior to the blackout and malicious compliance. This is unfortunately, the only way it's going to end now.
Replace the mods with who? Reddit doesn't have an endless supply of compliant free labor they can just assign willy-nilly to whatever subs they desire. Especially now that the masks are off about what Reddit admins really think about moderators.
I'm giving the most plausible scenario. They don't need a mod from r/pics to take over; they can use anyone who is power hungry enough to do the job.
Not saying I like it, or agree with it, just giving the most plausible option for Reddit to take at this point.
Because, let's be clear about this, Reddit is winning this battle even if they won't win the war. This overall event spells the end of the site as we know it...or knew it. The malicious compliance, changing to NSFW, the broad interpretation of the rules...it doesn't matter. Reddit is going to win this, or appear to win this in the short term, even if it entirely kills their future. They'll kill a 20 million subscriber subreddit to do it if they need to.
And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?
And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.
A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can't post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.
Reddit removed the mod team for 'making the community inaccessible' - and then have left the community inaccessible due to no moderation for longer than the original mod team had it closed.
I know the irony there is damn near horse pate at this point, but that shit's still funny every time it comes up.
Just one important distinction: not a quarter of all subreddits, but a quarter of the subreddits that said they would go private for at least 2 days are still private.
Ah, Reddark is only tracking subreddits that said they were participating, the ones that listed themselves in the Modcoord threads. There are far more subreddits that exist than the 8,829 they're tracking.
Like most things that frustrate me, it seems logic has flown out the window in this situation. At least from Reddit's perspective. I cannot fathom how they could mess this up so badly. Could you imagine if they would have given 12 months notice and piped API access behind Reddit Premium of some sort? They would have raked in the money.
Yeah this is the dumbest move possible. I can only assume they're trying to scare other mods into alignment because they can't replace the moderators effectively. Well, I'll cheers to their stupidity!
And who are they going to have take over mod responsibilities (for free) in all of these communities at once? This is why mods need to call their bluff and force them to try to replace them.
Saw someone complaining about the protest in a thread where the top mod was offering up the sub to whoever wanted it. I suggested they (person complaining) go ahead and step up and ask to be a mod. They replied something like, “I don’t wanna be an E-jannie…[blah blah].”
These people assume that there’s plenty of other people who will step-up and take over. We’ll see I guess.
"We'll replace you with loyal moderators" has always been an empty threat. You don't just find people willing to take the responsibility of moderating a 100k+ user sub on the street.
And the beautiful irony is that in their mission to secure an increased IPO valuation they merely reduced it substantially. Gonna need some more popcorn as we watch them burn it to the ground
Brilliant work by that team! Either reddit has to violate its own rules (which sadly they can, by deleting all NSFW content and removing the flag), or let the mods go.
And if they let the mods go, other giant subs can do the same thing in order to safely go NSFW.
I mean ... I agree for sure but when I think of paid mods I think o f how shitty they do their jobs in facebook and snapchat and am like yea they should be paid to ru na functioning sub/site but not to just watch people be awful to one another.
It looks like the current plan is just to archive subreddits, turn off comments, and leave them public until the IPO.
Unless you happen to be r/programming of course and someone noticed the ChatGPT bots that seem to consistently be posting statements supportive of the admins. Then we got to force the subreddit to private immediately.
Unrelated segue, did you know that Sam Altman, current CEO of OpenAI, responsible for ChatGPT, was a long time reddit board member, and despite claims that he left last year, is still listed as being on the board of reddit?
Also, anyone else find it weird that in a lot of the threads talking about the protests on reddit... While the most upvoted comments usually favor the admins, if you look at the sheer number of comments speaking out on a lot of major threads and don't worry about the upvote/downvote ratio, the number of comments in favor of the protests near completely dwarfs the number of comments in favor of the admins. Just another interesting data point.
It's almost like there was a way for someone who owned the website to manipulate things in their favor and then call in a favor from someone with an interest in the company to help them do a very poor job of making it seem like it was all justified by the community.
oh. well, there's artemis that in private alpha at the moment. should be out in a few weeks i hope. Plus kbin is a PWA, so you can add it to your home screen.
Plato's cave. If all you have ever experienced is a shit app, then the shit app seems fine to most people. Others will recognize its faults but not how bad it is because they think that the only alternative is to have no app.
I got distracted by the post about the person’s boyfriend putting laundry detergent in their dishwasher. I guess that does mean RIF is better, since only one post is visible on the other one.
The funniest thing is that reddit is so shitty that they created all this caos and didn’t even meet the deadline!! 3rd party apps are still working because they fail to enforce the changes! aka they were bluffing! Reddit is a shit show omg
Third party apps that are still working are most likely going to get hit with a bill on August 1st they were not prepared for. Reddit knows which applications are using the API keys so they know where to send the bill. But the changes took effect on July 1st. The apps that shut down before the first did so because the developer killed their API key so they wouldn't occur any charges.
Then you block them. Individually at first. If there is a whole instance of them, like exploding-heads or lemmygrad, then you nuke their whole instance and move on.
what I take from this, though, is that even with the anger against Reddit, there’s no talk of leaving in the comments on that post!
you hate the site and all of their changes so much and it’s only been getting worse… why do you stay? even the content is already worse, and even worse on the subs that have the new Reddit tipping system… why stay?
Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.
Why? I mean, technologically, why couldn’t a more standard payment platform work, and then just pass around those payments among instances? PayPal is not crypto, but you can use it almost anywhere online.
PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.
Yeah it's been enabled on the crypto reddits for a while... as a result the subs overwhelmingly changed to "vaguely interesting and/or attention-grabbing but ultimately useless with a race to see who's first" posts, signal-to-noise ratio got way worse.
Put anything to a vote
Run weighted polls to make big decisions in your community, like getting input on rules changes or deciding how to distribute Points.
Unlike regular polls, these polls give a larger voice to people who have contributed more to the community. The more Community Points someone has earned, the more weight their vote carries.
This will end well...
EDIT
What they're really looking for are a bunch of whales to drive engagement.
Call me a cynic but I suspect the biggest ‘contributor’ to r/product will end up being product’s marketing department account, likewise with r/country and party-political apparatchiks. The move is elegant in a way: Reddit Inc can ruin true democratic operation of subs by turning subscribers into shareholders (which wards off repeats of mod activism) and simultaneously provide further cover to astroturfers (lots of points = Time and Effort™ = good faith actor).
Oh, absolutely this is the case. Reddit could even run bot accounts to gain a lion's share of points for any particular sub they want to control, thereby stifling any sort of protest or activism authorized by sub vote.
The article comments are linked to Reddit, if you click on "Replies" it routes you to the topic on Reddit where there are posts about leaving the platform.
I don't really understand reddit's angle here... Why would they provide zero cost API access to an app, as long as the developer of the app isn't making a profit? Are they trying to act like that was the issue they had with these third party apps? That they e profitable?
How does it make sense for them to allow an app for that reason?
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
It looks strongly like one of two things has happened - either Narwhal took the knee and has accepted absolutely abysmal terms in order to remain in existence, or Reddit has offered them a better deal in private to keep them afloat - solely to use them as a PR example case.
The only thing that seems unlikely is that they're working under strict terms of the published agreement, otherwise IMO costs to users are functionally unfeasible.
Which raises another question: are analysts and investors so stupid that they can't read between the lines? Because this looks like using a bucket to douse a five-alarm fire.
I clicked the link and thought, I'll read this and be done. RIF is also kaput. I've decided to keep it installed because all my Reddit links default to RIF and this way I won't accidentally give Reddit any traffic.
This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn't a blanket ban.
@JohnEdwa The bots should not even hit the limit, otherwise its a hint for any anti-bot detection. Just create lot of small bots staying low on threshold to be detected. Together with an AI, then the missing bot detection utility and some missing moderators, Reddit should become a bigger pile than it is already.
The perfect site for reddit admins would be endless bots posting, commenting and viewing adds while said advertisers are oblivious to the con.
The first two have been going on at some level for years. The last? Well, it will be interesting to see the official reddit app's adoption numbers in the coming months.
Reddit…it was once my respite, and now it is a desert of empty words. The admins betrayed their creed: “Remember the human”. They sold it for the Dollar Almighty. Their humanity is lost…let them succumb to that which they so infinitely prize—the towers they built out of their money.
That won't go well either, in the long run. Advertisers will catch on to how many "people" are viewing their ads without ever clicking on anything and put their funds elsewhere.
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