Reddit's response about the actions they took against the subreddits (note: r/mildly interesting DID NOT encourage nsfw content and their suspensions and removal have been revoked by a diff admin)
Reddit has no problems pushing war footage though. Real people actually dying is totally cool!
That's more a prudish American culture thing than a reddit-specific thing. We went to see the latest Guardians movie over the weekend, in which they foleyed out the line "classy hoes" from No Sleep Till Brooklyn, and showed all sorts of violence, gory deaths, and lots of pretty fucking serious child abuse. And finally dropped the first f-bomb in any MCU movie, in the line "open the fucking door," which was said not in anger, but in exasperation.
America loves its violence, but don't you dare make any reference to anything close to sexuality.
@minnieo @tchambers It sounds like Reddit got their feelings hurt when mods they thought they knew and trusted acted outside the social contract and did something they didn’t like. Hmmmm wonder what that reminds me of.
It's crazy how reddit's run like it's a 1-2 year old startup still trying to figure out how guidelines, communication, consistent rule enforcement, etc. work.
It's becoming more and more apparent the site's success was despite the company running it, not because of it.
If Reddit had just kept their mouth shut, 2 days after the blackout most subs would be back online and the others would eventually follow.
But no Spez had to open his mouth and take actions, forcing subs to open again, telling lies about the app creators.
Basically turning all of Reddit against him.
Yeah, the angry irrational reactions show that all the talk about the protests just being noise was a bluff. It might have blown over, but it hasn't exactly because it got a reaction.
I mean it's not just reddit. While investors probably don't care, the fact that he lied about easily disprovable things that did or did not happen doesn't bode well. I don't think it's going to hurt their bottom line any time soon, but that kind of spinelessness isn't exactly liked.
He's panicking. His biggest lie is that this protest doesn't matter and hasn't and won't impact Reddit financially. It already has and will continue to do so. You can tell that the people who actually post content worth viewing are here and not there, despite the smaller numbers over here.
I think its going to end up a successful move for them.
They built a platform. The users built the site over the years with minimal interaction from reddit.
They now have a platform, millions of users, and full control of what they want on that platform.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, they want the traffic but don't want the problems that come with mostly community driven content.
All the profile redesigns, ability to "follow" users, profile pics, awards, all that has been an indication of the direction over the last few years. The last few steps was to kick out the problem users and be left with those who don't really give a shit and just want to see memes on their phone while they take a shit. The people who hear about reddit and just grab the official app from the store. The people who don't care about APIs and protests and modding or accessibility tools. Just eyeballs to look at their ads.
Those people will stay. It doesn't matter if 25% of the community leaves, because the natural growth in the next few months from the eyeballs will claw it back over time.
Once they have an obedient user base who are strictly bound to what reddit want them to see, think TikTok or facebook users, that's when they will see off. And it will pay off handsomely.
But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it's just a matter of months for it to die for good.
I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.
Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There's no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that's going to kill the website.
The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.
Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That's not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.
If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There'll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won't be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.
It won't disappear, but it certainly won't be a multi-billion dollar company.
Well, whether Reddit likes it or not, mods were a department of specialists working on some unique aspects of their business.
That whole department got told to get bent, in essence fired, but they don't even have contracts in place preventing "disgruntled employee" stuff.
This is what happens.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
This is a great depiction of the reality, and I AM copying this comment to use it in the future.
Reddit is totally justified in this. The users are actively and maliciously trying to hurt Reddit. However, this is in response to many many completely unjustifiable actions from Reddit. Mostly the lies.
If they had just come out and said "we're killing the API in 6-12 months", as others before them have done, they would have seen much less pushback, but they had to lie over and over again about "not killing 3rd party apps" and "working with developers".
A dog is justified to snap at a toddler if the toddler jabs it in the eye, the toddlers parents will still want the dog put down.
The hypocritcal thing here is that Worldpolitics did this years ago and reddit didn't care.
I can't blame reddit admins on this one. I support the protest and users shifting to Lemmy. But the sudden NSFW content is clearly going to get reddit to take action. Just the obvious response in my opinion. Just like killing third party apps causes a user base to leave. 🤷♂
though that's the whole point of reddit ? if you don't like a community, just make a new one. Like people feel like r/childfree is too aggressive, so they make r/truechildfree
But admins had previously said that reddit should be for the communities, and the communities voted to allow NSFW.
Spez only likes democracy when it’s in his favor.
The unfortunate thing is that in a lot of cases, the "Big Stick" approach actually worked. Many reddit moderators that were "leading" the protests caved under threats of replacement from the admins. Maybe it's because they're addicted to the little bit of power being a moderator over a reasonably sized community gives you. Maybe they're just set in their ways and expected reddit to roll back their API changes. I can't say. The one that really pissed me off was r/selfhosted. Like, your entire thing is autonomy and a very technical microcosm of DIY culture, but the second you're faced with the possibility of just migrating to one of a million different other, self-hosted options, suddenly it becomes "too much of an inconvenience?" Totally pathetic.
The protestors aren't organized, so of course some of them will respond to different things. It's not surprising that a few have caved. I bet a few have joined the protests because they saw the big stick being used like that.
As much as Steve has already shown he's willing to lie outright (especially we characterizing his talks with the Apollo Dev) I really can't put it past Reddit to lie about the mods "encouraging" porn posts.
r/mildlyinteresting did not encourage it, and Reddit lied about that, and their removal and suspension was revoked by a different admin than the one who removed and suspended them. Here is the post, "The Reddit Admins are lying - r/MildlyInteresting did NOT allow or encourage users to post ANY sexually explicit content, see draft of now-deleted announcement":
Given how that's been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it and apologising, it kind of seems like the admins aren't really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.
EDIT: No Apology, just an explanation.
This is just a standard “clearing house” measure. Remove the dissidents, ignore the howls of complaint.. surround yourselves with “yes men” and then you are set
Set with now not having competent moderators, and all the content generating users have left.
This is like having a golden goose, and cutting off its head because the HONKs were too annoying
Gonna go great for them…
It's only because they were default subs. A while back one of the news subs (r/world news? ) got flooded with porn and basically switched to a random anime porn type of sub. That caused the population to migrate to r/anime_titties for all their news needs. Now when it happens to a special sub though it's a problem?
lol, I witnessed that historical moment, essentially r/worldnews become a wild west where any post is acceptable, and it's all 50/50 NSFW, you either get a naked lady or a butthole, while r/animetitties are the proper sub for world news..
It was /r/worldpolitics, with animetitties being the actual world politics sub. Similar to how /r/trees is for weed, and /r/marijuanaenthusiests is for people discussing actual trees
Reddit's response to everything over the last week or however long it has been:
"Fuck you, we don't care about you, we want to line our pockets, we literally think of users as dirt, we expect you to bow down and kiss our shoes"