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.
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.
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.
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.
You should make your past comments available in lemmy somehow.
I’ve read this from someone on reddit a few days ago, but I think it’s true: reddit-archive like read-only lemmy instances should be set up. The data is available, see the-eye.eu/redarcs
r/DataHoarder also has some more info on this with tooling in a pinned post. They didn’t private the sub, it’s only read-only so it’s still readable
How long before reddit replaces the mods and reopens it? I give it a day or two after the 48 hour blackout
I wish the blackout was different.
Keep all the subs open, but suspend all but the sitewide rules.
All the subreddits would’ve been filled with off topic content, spam and advertising. It would’ve been far more annoying to the average user.
But it would have still kept those blessed ad impressions rolling in, unabated.
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
It’s going to get the hug of death
correction “they” going to…
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? :(
deleted by creator
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.
I took r/edc restricted yesterday, though we are/were tiny. While I still plan to find replacement mods from within the community after reddit goes full dipshit, I’m done ring their work for free, with shit tools, next to zero support, and (worse, imo) taking a lot of flak from admins because of bullshit unrelated to moderation.
I dunno if lemmy is going to become the reddit replacement or not, but I’m done with giving reddit anything at all. Overwrote and deleted everything from my author account that had some decent amount of fiction, and my personal account that had a lot of real stories from my life. That ain’t much, but since I’ve seen my stuff being read on YouTube, and reposted by the copy/paste bots, it’s something I guess.
Reddit:
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.
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
I commend the shutdown but if things get out of hand reddit admins will take over the popular subs. They won’t let a prime sub get shut down by mods.
I think there may not be enough competent volunteer mods to take it over. They could replace them with paid reddit employees like other big platforms but that’s gonna cost them more than the 20mil a year they apparently think 3rd party apps are costing them.
In case Reddit admins will take over those big subs. I wonder what would happen if users just flood them with spam and inappropriate content.
This is great to hear! Unfortunately the reddit exodus will likely splinter a bunch of niche communities, but it will definitely be for the best. I’m all down for the “de-consolidation” of the internet!
The tricky thing will be the small niche communities that are already hosted on Reddit. For example, there is a group of us dorks who are really into home automation with HomeKit. I’d hate for that small group to splinter into smaller groups that are so small that they’re no longer a good source of collective knowledge.
I don’t really have a great solve for that problem, but as someone who does experience and service design by trade, I’ve found this to be a fun puzzle to marinate on over the past few weeks.
Same! 90% of my Reddit time was simply r/homekit and r/Apple . I see that there’s now a Homekit community, !homekit@lemmy.ml it doesn’t really have content yet but we have to start somewhere right?
Ah, thanks for finding the HomeKit community!
indefinitely != permanently
</pedantry>
Tsk tsk, reddit…
Man, why does everything I like have to go to hell?
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cory Doctorow is a got-dang witch. This was about Tiktok and it was written in January. Literally describing the process to a T.
Damn, that’s a loooong read. Worth it, but long.
Cory Doctorow will always be my hero.
What a great word. You’ve single handedly improved my life. Thank you.
Its a useful concept for explaining life, the universe, and everything.
That and the number 42 :P
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.
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 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.
Lemmy and personal forums have a similar issue though. Just like users were previously at the whim of the large company to provide service, now they rely on you. What if you were to get board of running the forum or (however terrible) something were to happen to you?
Now the site and all of it’s content is lost for the users permanently. Lemmy instances also have this problem. They rely entirely on a single administrator, (or small group of them). In the Web1.0 days this wasn’t such a large issue, because websites were most often read-only for content consumption and web forums were small and populated by niche tech savvy people. These days however, the users create a lot of the content that is hosted and they naturally expect it to persist.
Lemmy needs some way of allowing users to port their profile and content from one instance to another, and a redundancy system where instances can partner with others to host data for redundancy purposes, or something to that effect. Maybe users pay a small hosting fee for their own content and it’s not tied to an instance? Though I’m not sure how that would work, I’m just spitballing.
There’s a lot of problems to solve, and this fediverse is a very interesting idea, but it’s not perfect and introduces a lot of questions. I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, but I’m not sure entrusting the longevity of the content to admins of a particular server is the best plan.
You’re correct, though my forum could be archived on the Internet archive (I’m not sure if it is, but it could be).
I agree with your general point though, there are still single points of failure in Lemmy.
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.
Man it’s just so wild to watch what’s going on over there right now. Even when subreddits come back after a couple days it may not matter if bot-assisted moderation becomes impossible over there in the long run.
If reddit backs off enough to save the accessibility and moderation issues, I hope enough people still leave to help create a strong alternate ecosystem.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
If alternatives like this site had existed through previous years, I don’t think Reddit could have survived a lot of its previous mistakes.
Lemmy exists at least since 2020, when I registered to the platform. That is 3 years ago and it hasn’t had much of activity until the Reddit drama started recently
What’s happened with Twitter and now Reddit is hopefully enough to make people realize the pitfalls of corporate-owned, centralized social media. Mastodon has really taken off with some major news outlets now posting on there. I could see the same happening with Lemmy now.
