Reddit has already showed how much it cares about its users. We've tried going private, we've tried going restricted, we've tried going NSFW, we've tried spamming John Oliver posts, we've tried asking nicely in open letters, and Reddit has consistently given its community the middle finger in every single situation. And now that we've seen the admins change rules, remove mods, ban users, and break privacy laws, the plan is to just do the exact same thing they did before in the hopes that it'll work this time?
If a blackout on the platform was going to get Reddit to change its mind, that would've happened already. The time to induce change was two weeks ago, when the protests had lots of momentum. But it didn't work, and trying to make another stand now is going to be even less effective.
I still think that the best move is to leave Reddit for alternatives like /kbin, Lemmy, and Squabbles. Thankfully, some of the comments on the /r/ModCoord announcement are also saying this. Instead of desperately trying to cling to a platform that doesn't care about you, go somewhere else.
Two reasons the ongoing Reddit protests are important:
the protests keep the pressure on reddit and can lead to ongoing news coverage (which also keeps the pressure on reddit) . Otherwise, reddit will be able to spin the narrative "see? we told you it would just blow over and it did"
kbin, Lemmy, and other alternatives aren't yet at the point where they're ready for millions of redditors. For example, the modCoord post makes the important point that a lot of reddit's moderation functionality isn't accessible ... but almost none of this functionality even exists yet on kbin and Lemmy. So most people aren't going to leave yet.
Don't get me wrong, leaving now is also a good option if you can find what you want elsewhere! But not everybody's there yet.
I think a LOT of folks overlook point 2. Kbin.social was a halting mess for a few days during the Blackout, because they had to enable Cloudflare to keep the servers from imploding on themselves. There still aren’t that many kbin instances yet, and more instances is how you handle large influxes. The platform needs time to stabilize before large groups of Redditors come over.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin. Im sure this will push others to do the same. If all it takes is to slowly dwindle the reddit user by doing the same thing then im all for it.
Of course, i do see why there shouod be more creative protests to switch things up and see what else works.
To be fair, if it wasnt for the blackout it wouldnt have given me the motivation to finally move on to kbin.
Absolutely same here. Because I use Mastodon a lot, I heard about kbin when it first came out, and poked over to look at it, but decided it was a bit too empty and rough around the edges, and stuck with Reddit. Then came the Blackout, and I went ahead and made an account.
As Reddit gets more enshittified and kbin and lemmy get more polished and active, we’ll start seeing a bigger shift.
At this point any reddit protests need to sort focus on tarnishing the platforms reputation further. They've made it clear they won't course correct.
Top of mind, spamming the subs with content that looks bad for them to remove. The ideal would be dirt on spez (e.g comments he made on /r/jailbait), but it could even be something more reserved like a charity link or "why I'm leaving" memes.
July 1 is a good excuse to get another news cycle out of this, and warn potential investors skeptical of the future of the company.
Moving a community is hard, so at least some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage. Its not like Reddit is going to respect a request to close, so they would end up competing with themselves when Reddit replaces them with compliant mods.
I'm not saying they shouldn't move (they should) but it's definitely a hard road to re-establish elsewhere. Some communities will thrive, but others, well, its possible that their users will just stay put.
I agree: migrating a community is really challenging. I'm a subreddit moderator myself, and when we were initially discussing this stuff, there was a lot of doubt because of how daunting the task is. Mods from other subs see the challenges as reason to not even try. However, I think it's important that people at least make the attempt given the current state of Reddit.
Something that I think people should keep in mind is that this stuff is gradual and doesn't have to happen all at once, especially since the alternatives aren't fully polished yet. Even just establishing a small, active community outside of Reddit (like people have been doing with all these fediverse communities) is a big win.
Some of the best things we can do right now are
providing feedback and suggestions for alternatives
making sure alternatives are approachable (/m/quickstart is great)
simply being active and providing stuff to do here
some of those mods are likely thinking that moving would destroy the community they worked so hard to manage
they aren't wrong. It will massively deflate their community. That's an ineivtability of how lurkers on the internet work. They aren't there for community, they are there for easy passive browsing.
What can we do to help them transition?
"we" as in the common person? It won't be a fast track. There will need to be a steady supply of content for a certain topic, and a stream of discussion. Unfortunately the best way to help as a single person is to basically become that sweaty forever online person. The first step to the Network Effect is to generate enough content to engage with.
If "we" have developers or artists that can be one bigger step to help out. contribute to making apps and extensions to either bridge the gap or overcome current shortcomings of these federated instances. Even amongst techy communities there is a lot of confusion to how instances work. So some app to make it dead simple to browse and comment (while later allowing options for power users) is key. Sync committing to working with Lemmy/KBin is definietly a bit help.
Most of the rest is up to the instance admins. SEO, improving features, getting good moderatiors, etc. None of that is in out control, we can only give feedback
The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits.
I'm pretty content with KBin. As time goes on the content level will increase and hopefully remain at a level which makes it easy to curate my feed and reduce noise. Truth be told Reddit has been getting worse for a long time and being here reflects that. This feels a lot like what Reddit felt like 10 years ago.
I like kbin but I'm hoping to find a fast way to filter out all of the German subs. I have absolutely no issue with them, I just can't understand the content so it's useless to me. It seems to take up about half of my feed
Darn, I promoted Lemmy and KBin on Reddit, Voted for mods to continue the protest, encouraged people to request their data from Reddit, and linked my KBin in my bio before completely leaving the platform.
Side question: Why do Reddit and Twitter and all of these other social media shitshows use idiotic terminology like 'permanently suspended'? Surely the correct term is 'banned'. The word suspended in this context usually implies a temporary nature.
For the same reason employers and unemployment insurance is moving from termination, to separation. Less of an inherent negative connotation.
Unfortunately, they fail to realize that the system itself is what created the negative connotation in the first place. So it too will be replaced with yet another synonym in the future.
They wanted out anyway, Microsoft wants control and they were using Reddit just like DJI is using reddit: they were a bit forced to follow. This is a perfect opportunity to leave and make the support happen on their own platform. Other big brands will be inspired and will leave reddit too.
the way I read it was that Minecraft is a community that holds the contributions of its base in high regard, and that's why they can't associate with reddit anymore because reddit now stands for shitting on its users and destroying their work instead of cherishing it.
hence the comments about recent changes introduced by management affecting the community and how that's the reason they feel reddit is no longer an appropriate place.
This is a war of content. u/spez also holds the contribution of his users in high regard, to the point where he is undeleting it. They both want our content, I don't see how you cannot make the link.
Microsoft doesn't make any money when I play Minecraft on my PC. I paid them once, 14 years ago, for an account.
I have been receiving new content for free from them on occasion, and playing endless content from the community for mostly free. The community of content creators is what initially brought me to the game when it was in beta and it's what keeps me coming back.
And you never paid anything to reddit either, still reddit wants you to spend your attention here.
Microsoft doesn't want to bring traffic to reddit. They have everything to lose when your attention is away from their services. For example you won't bring your friends to them. You won't watch their add while you are on reddit. You don't use a Microsoft platform when you are on reddit.
This is absolutely not a neutral choice for Microsoft: they want you, your attention, your friends and your content on their network. Why do you think they bought Minecraft in the first place? It's because it brings young customers in. Microsoft did not purchase Minecraft for the code (there are minecraft clones everywhere anyway), they bought the community. They want to pump their own numbers, not the competition's. If I remember correctly they also merged the Minecraft accounts with the Microsoft account, isn't it cute?
It's a constant war for your attention time. Your login is the metric, it's everything to them.
While I'm not op, personally for as long as I could remember, I paid for reddit premium. If I'm using a website, I'm ok with putting in support. (especially as much as I used reddit).
You're not wrong, but it's an interesting point you bring up. They were willing to stay on Twitter with Musk's antics, but it seems like they aren't willing to put up with another Musk and another set of antics.
At a guess if something like here starts becoming popular with people I suspect they'll comment here for example. Kbin is growing, see what happens I guess.
I've been checking into my user page just to see if they've sent me my user data backup I requested a while ago. Other than checking for that message, I've been 100% clean and it hasn't been terribly hard. Between Kbin and Tildes, I've been getting all the commentary and aggregation that I want or need.
I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It's like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn't any better.
It's not all Google's fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn't much indexable content out there that isn't trash. It's only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.
So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next "best" thing is Quora and that's entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.
I don't think the scraping is the full reason. I was not on lemmy/kbin or any other part of the fediverse and I still got this random permaban, in fact it happened before the pricing changes were announced on May 31st.
Also, my username there is different to what I'm using on the fediverse.
Prior to being permabanned I also never used the API for anything. Only used it for the scripts to wipe my account clean (so being permabanned doesn't typically prevent one from creating the API tokens or actually using the API, it seems).
Well that rules out (most) of the malicious possibilities. What we're left with is probably either Hanlon's razer, or something you commented about spez.
If it's the latter, the four accounts I nuked are still alive.
Sadly, it wasn't the later. I never mentioned spez and didn't even know what the CEO's name or username was until the blackouts (i.e. after i got permabanned).
VPN? They have this half-baked user "reliability" rating system that they claim "identifies known alts".
Which is marketingspeak for "we log ips," I think. If they did that as poorly as everything else, it's possible they think you're the last guy to use that vpn before you.
Basically what we already know. Reddit is restoring comments that have been deleted by users possibly in violation of data privacy laws.
Louis goes a little farther by sharing the story of one particular user who tried multiple ways to delete their content including manually deleting every single comment one by one. Then to answer Reddit's response that user data is "anonomized" by disassociating it with the user account when the user deletes their account, the user points out that at least one of their posts has their full name in it, and by restoring that post against the user's wishes, they've violated California's data privacy laws.
He then goes into his typical cynical rant which I personally find entertaining but I know he rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
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