48 hours will not even ding reddit. Do it for a month and it will count, assuming reddit doesn't simply re-enable the subreddits. But obviously the mods here are walking a fine line between pissing off their users and getting reddit to bend over.<p>With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut <i>everything</i> down for a week (I don't blame them, but that's a failure mode we had not considered). This caused us to go dark completely without an easy way to reach the users to tell them what was going on.<p>When power came back traffic was where it was before within 20 minutes, and the next day we even had a surge in traffic that we didn't ever pass again. If you really want to see an effect I would suggest a period somewhere between two weeks and a month backed up by a threat to do it for three months if they don't recant. That would have some serious teeth in it and threatens to completely derail any IPO plans they might have.<p>Anything less and you're just showing that it is reddit that is the boss, not you. A good rule for a community is that if it isn't your domain, database and server it isn't really your community.
It's a shame because of all the social media platforms, reddit is one of the best. There isn't so much grandstanding (I couldn't tell you a single username on reddit), and the ability to rapidly create special-interest subreddits means that discussion revolves around the topic, on the whole.<p>I left facebook because it became a place where people I knew spent their time curating a false virtual identity of themselves and seemed to become a place to establish social status rather than any meaningful conversation. I've avoided instagram for the same reason. Twitter seemed a good platform for open discussion, but now it looks like a pit of misery.<p>Mastodon is pleasant and friendly, but I find it hard to talk about the topics I am interested in. Like twitter it is more person-focused. What would be nice is if there is a way to cut across it easily in a more topic-focused way. Hashtags are present, but they don't have the feel of a forum. For positive or negative, there isn't any 'algorithm' on mastodon other than reverse chronology, and I think that does miss out on highlighting interesting topics and replies. Also there is no moderation or guidelines for hashtags, a feature which helped guide people to the right discussions in reddit.
Pissing off the people doing thankless free labor to keep your subreddits moderated and site functional seems like a poor choice. This is going to be quite an event when it kicks off Monday.
I own the DocuSign subreddit. We are going dark permanently… until Reddit decides to reassign it to reps from the company. This is part and parcel of the hollowing out of the platform.
I wish subreddits going dark would provide some alternative platform, already seeded with a sample of their content.<p>I’m unfamiliar with most of these subreddits and in some cases I’m curious what they’re about.<p>As a bonus, this could be an organic attempt at moving to a different place.
I tallied (roughly) the number of subscriber accounts, across all these reddits. It's around 1 billion. Obviously, it's not conservative as many will have subscribed to multiple. But, I see MAU (monthly active users) is about 1b. So, this is huge.<p>EDIT: Seems the source for MAU I found was way high, making this potentially even bigger. Every other source I've found is 400-500m range for MAU on reddit (as another pointed out).
I've never before seen a codebase that has a package-lock.json, but no package.json<p><a href="https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/">https://github.com/Tanza3D/reddark/</a>
I'm just appalled that these people continue to provide free labour to Reddit and that Reddit encourages this arrangement.<p>The "dang" model where the moderators get paid a salary for their work seems the only reasonable and fair way to go.<p>Having mods work for free is effectively a form of psychological abuse, taking advantage of people's social media addiction for corporate benefit.
If someone got so confused like me, even following the links of the OP page,<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/142kct8/eli5_why_are_subreddits_going_dark/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/142kct8/...</a><p>(PD: The archive.org waiting queue for to submit old.reddit looks collapsed. Was this organization warned before promoting a massive submit? )
All this will result in is Reddit secretly taking over these subreddits, take out the mods and give them to "trustworthy" people. They will first ask nicely, and if you don't bend over, they will do so anyways.<p>I know it because it happened to me.
Maybe it's the chaotic neutral talking here but I reckon mods going on strike for two days while leaving the subs public would show just how important they are to Reddit Inc. and why their unpaid work still has a cost to the company.
Reddit banned my 17-year-old account as I was reporting all the scammy/crypto ads as misinformation. I didn't comment or post anything that would be considered a TOS / Policy violation, but they still banned my account under that. I asked for a review from the admin, and they replied that their decision is final and that I should look at the Content Policy and not violate it but never giving me the exact reason / policy violation.<p>Why invest your time/effort into any ecosystem which doesn't have a proper redressal mechanism?<p>I am not contributing to reddit anymore, I think as with all entities/companies/empires they are past their prime and they are on the down. I remember when a lot of users jumped ship from Digg to Reddit, I wish another entity comes along which is better than reddit.
It would be cool with a toggle to show subreddits going dark indefinitely and/or already dark, to see who isn't just following the general blackout.
This is another gigantic nothing. Equivalent to ants standing together to protect their ant hill from destruction against the might of pest control and the land owner.<p>While Reddit is a dumpster fire, it is still a business and you never owned the 'subreddit' and it is not yours either and its API is subject to price rises. This sort of risk should not be underestimated and it was only a matter of time that the API was going to be paid. Like Twitter, it has now happened to Reddit.<p>Going dark for 1 day will do nothing to Reddit and it will be just business as usual.
The first digital strike? Interested to see what's going to happen.
At this point is probably be useful having mastodon like reddit. If I'm not wrong, archive.org keeps a dump of all reddit discussions until 2023.
I post on a handful of niche reddits (science/tech, not porn, like the average redditor), and the user experience is abysmal. Besides the upvoting/downvoting nonsense and imperious mods, half the time my posts get caught in the spam filter (despite my account being 5+ years old), and I have to check incognito mode to see if they showed up, and message the mods.<p>At the very least, it's nice to know that rather than a lukewarm welcome, any would-be Eternal Septemberists will be met with "kys leddit spacing, phoneposting, ******" should they try 4chan as an alternative.
Reddark is happening on June 12 and so is the largest NATO defense drill in history.<p>Coincidence? Actually I think so, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little unnerving. :)
A nice idea, but my opinion is that we need to openly boycott all of Advance Media's holdings and investments. Don't go off Reddit for a few days and watch something owned by Warner Discovery, or read Epicurious for recipes to cook while you "wait". Hit every rev stream they have. This isn't just about Reddit's IPO, this has to be about permanently breaking the back of a media conglomerate.
I think instead of going dark they should just leave their subreddits un-moderated. The amount of junk content that would fill the site might be enough for advertisers to pull money, which is ultimately what this is about.<p>Going dark is the equivalent of thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting.
Remove mods from the biggest subs, replace them with paid employees. Just for a while, until this blows over and new volunteers show up.<p>Or, since you just need one mod in every sub to keep the others in line, replace the top mod. With a script.
I don't get it, isn't this the website that's hosting this, as is shown in the source?<p>> origin: "<a href="https://reddark.untone.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://reddark.untone.uk/</a>",
Would be cooler if it looked like this: <a href="https://finviz.com/map.ashx" rel="nofollow">https://finviz.com/map.ashx</a>
why doesn't reddit just let users host nodes to serve the subreddits? make it distributed, like bittorrent. that would take a lot of load off of the reddit servers.
Hmmmm. None of my subscribed subs are participating. Interesting to note subs that participated are the noisier (lower snr) subs, which probably serves the bulk of their users and would hurt Reddit’s visitor numbers the most.
Imagine there was a free or quasi-free API for Facebook. Facebook would lose large amounts of money on content because they can no longer monetize it with ads.