Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers.<p>- regular people get a break from their echo chambers<p>- VOLUNTEER mods get a break<p>- journalists get their news article<p>The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users data via comments and posts. I said this in another post but the existing CEO needs to get replaced. Maybe throw in a few other C—level executives to serve as additional blood sacrifices.<p>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.

Reddit already gave their strategy away earlier today when Hoffman wrote:<p>&gt; We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.[^1]<p>It&#x27;s encouraging to see that some subreddits are responding to the fact that the company is just planning to ignore users.<p>[^1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;23759559&#x2F;reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;23759559&#x2F;reddit-internal-...</a>

I bit the bullet yesterday and just called it quits.<p>I was there for a very long time (before it was even “launched” officially).<p>So I do it with a heavy heart, but I don&#x27;t think there’s any way of going back for them now. Its been a downward trend for literally years at this point.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;JhsPQnI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;gallery&#x2F;JhsPQnI</a>

This is what is needed to put pressure on Reddit. A two day protest then returning to normal is a blip in the grand scheme of things. But if they do not change their API pricing, stance on third party apps, etc, then a prolonged blackout could lead to an eventual exodus.<p>I hope the communities I used to engage in partake in this prolonged blackout.

... until they just take over the moderation of their largest communities and this whole thing ends. I mean what&#x27;s so magical about the moderation of something like r&#x2F;videos other than the mods being free labor for Reddit?

They&#x27;re getting away with this because there really is no serious competitor for reddit.<p>When people actually start migrating away from reddit and post&#x2F;comment volume is significantly down, you&#x27;ll see reddit suddenly be a lot more willing to engage with the community.

All the Freebies on the Internet of the past 20 years be it email, search, chat, news&#x2F;content, video, streaming, social etc have been funded by Ads.<p>The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad&#x2F;Attention Economy.<p>Theses changes, what&#x27;s happening at twitter, the tech layoffs, govt regulations and fines, are all signs using Freebies for Attention Capture are not going to endlessly scale.

This may prompt Reddit to push ahead on their threat to take over key subs that stay dark by replacing the moderators with their own. Of course, Reddit can&#x27;t afford to scale that to very many popular subs as modding those is extremely labor intensive.<p>Worse for Reddit, dumping long-time community moderators en masse would be crossing a Rubicon that could tip Reddit into a death spiral of low-effort moderation reducing content quality and engagement which will feed back on itself. The mods going dark for longer may in fact be hoping to goad Reddit into responding with such self-destructive stupidity.

Reddit would be infinitely better without any subreddits bigger than about 100k subscribers.

So this means spez is just gonna suspend and institute his own mods, right?<p>Blackout isn&#x27;t enough, don&#x27;t let them scab the VOLUNTEER mods - don&#x27;t cross the picket line - better yet, delete your account after using a tool to scrub your account&#x27;s history. Delete isn&#x27;t enough, you need to replace it with junk.<p>If you&#x27;re going to lurk, make sure you&#x27;re blocking first party ads.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;scullionw&#x2F;reddit-scrubber">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;scullionw&#x2F;reddit-scrubber</a>

Expect more sealed off content. Thanks to ai scrapers more companies will want to close their apis or charge a fee. Heck even openai, the main leech want to prevent others from “training” their bots against their ai that has been trained on other people’s work, bandwidth and ip. Mods closing subreddits are just a symptom.

To the people who&#x27;ve been in this situation, what would you do in Huffman&#x27;s shoes? From my fairly naïve perspective it looks like he&#x27;s doing a pretty poor job managing this crisis but am I overestimating the trouble he&#x27;s in?<p>At some point he&#x27;ll either be forced to back down or replace the mods of the big subs with people willing to cross the picket line, I don&#x27;t see why he doesn&#x27;t just pull the plaster off now either way rather than drag this out bleeding credibility all the while?

I&#x27;ve been off of reddit for 2 days now, and am willing to stay off idefinitely. TBH I&#x27;m probably happier and more productive without it. I just need to find something to read in the bathroom instead...

That awkward moment when you (Spez) calls a bluff only to realize it was no bluff.

I deleted Apollo and blocked all reddit in general.<p>It was a nice discovery tool and formula1 subreddit was great (memes and all) but I think spez really screwed it up.

I&#x27;ve never been a big reddit user but I increased my usage as Twitter devolved into what it is now, but now I&#x27;m going to have to find something else. I&#x27;ll most likely start paying for Apple News for general&#x2F;current event stuff, stick with HN for tech, but I no longer have a &quot;turn off your brain and just decompress with some funny&#x2F;random crap&quot; outlet.<p>Bummer, I&#x27;m sure it was floated, and probably shot down for some stupid non-sensical reason, but I would have insta-paid something in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a year for a personal access token that I could plug into an app like Apollo and continue using Reddit via API.

How does &#x2F; will Reddit make money? Selling ads? Harvesting data? Monthly subscriptions? Some combination of all three? I have difficulty imagining why anybody would pay a fee to join a bbs no matter how fancy it is. Might be just me as a cheap old codger. Now, they can use ai to generate posts and dispense with moderators and even posters I guess.

14 or 15 year Reddit user, mostly as a lurker -- I strongly support this. Reddit is a community, and a community is its people.

This is what the protest should have been from the start. The biggest mistake that any of the participating subs made was setting an end date. u&#x2F;spez and the rest of the reddit admin need to be sweating, wondering when their site will return to normal.

I really wonder if it would be better to go the other way.<p>Mods take a break, and just let the bots shit allover the content.<p>It takes like 20mn of un-moderated internet before it&#x27;s all ads and spam... Reddit is basically reddit because of the carefully curated posts.

Great opportunity for people to create derivative subreddits without oppressive mods.

I tried to sign up for lemmy. I quit trying and lost interest at like click&#x2F;step 7 or 8.

This will be good for reddit. Maybe they will manage to get rid of that group of moderators, and new subs will replace them. Reddit will find new mods and the renovation will be good for their audience<p>But first they have to make it easy for users to find alternative subreddits. Currently it s not even possible, their search sucks

To make this work, the protest needs one additional ingredient: create a Reddit clone and move the subreddits there while the blackout lasts. This will increase the pressure 10x. By a Reddit clone I mean something pixel-perfect (except the branding) because users hate changes.

I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode. Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don&#x27;t think any for-profit company makes such promises. If you play in someone&#x27;s walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rules as they see fit. I am not sure why reddit decided to nix the 3rd party apps but my gut feeling is, this is a financially motivated move. And if it is so, can you blame them? I wish someone could explain me why everyone is in an huge uproar today.

Reddit is free to tweak their monitization any way they like. I am curious how this will turn out, when we look back on this a year from now.<p>This is an opportunity for new moderators to start new subreddits. Conversely Reddit management may back down.

How do I look up product reviews now? It used to be possible to look up product + Reddit. Without Reddit is just the Google swamp

So is Reddit content being (usefully) archived anywhere, and if so, where?<p>By &quot;useful&quot; I mean in an easily searchable &#x2F; navigable &#x2F; quickly rendering form (not via the Wayback Machine).

Probably a very _very_ controversial and unpopular opinion - though I welcome any insight or opinions from others.<p>Reddit is fully within their rights to seize the subreddits from their unpaid moderators and I would expect them to if they&#x27;re gearing up for an IPO. They&#x27;re fully within their rights to change how people access their website, how people interact with it, and limit who has access to the data on the website.<p>When I clicked on a reddit result on Google to find some information, only to find it has been closed down in protest after trying to find something on Google, I was frustrated - not at Reddit, but the unpaid moderators who believe they have some sort of self-ordained right to manipulate a company (granted, I guess they do have some power as Reddit is relying on these unpaid moderators to do Reddits job.)<p>I highly, highly doubt that Reddit will change their tune - they might lower the API costs, they might capitulate in some capacity in some regards to accessibility, but they&#x27;ll still work towards an IPO and will harm their website as a result.<p>Their CEO is a scumbag and both their paid and unpaid moderators&#x2F;admins have strong biases in any subreddits that aren&#x27;t niche hobbies and meant for wider audiences. Great for those who wish to follow the echo chambers, but not so great for others who don&#x27;t _really_ have alternatives.<p>I&#x27;ll be happy if Reddit disappears off the planet, but I fear what will replace it will be even more restrictive - the internet needs decentralization of social media and communication.

Uh. I’m not really following this. But are people moving to other services?<p>If you’re just going dark Reddit will know you’ll eventually cave in.<p>Blackouts feel like you’re saying “we love you so please change”.<p>I’d be happy to see people use other services. I’d appreciate the decentralisation.

Good, who wants to use Reddit without RIF anyways.

While it would be an unpopular move, it would be pretty trivial for Reddit just to force reactive some or even all of these subreddits.<p>I wonder if the average Reddit user would be upset enough over the action to stop using the site?

I know it&#x27;s probably not for everyone, but I started using Mastodon last week in response to this, and I&#x27;ve had a very positive experience with it. I&#x27;m never going back to Reddit.

The only really weird to me about doing this is to do it without having an alternative first.<p>I mean it&#x27;s 2023, it&#x27;s not like it takes years to make a web service.<p>Quitting twitter was easy. Reddit not so much.

The mods have virtually no control over the situation. Reddit can change their passwords and just have employee moderators from now on.<p>If I was running Reddit, this is what I would be planning right now.

on a side note: the current ceo steven huffman founded reddit together with aaron swartz ... sad irony.

Guess people will just flock to &#x2F;r&#x2F;awww and other clones

Reddit showed up for info a lot that after all these years I subscribed as an old bastard op from the 90&#x27;s. Now I regret it months later with this. Let them migrate I say.

Strip current moderation of subreddit ownership if they stay private, easy solution. Most users don&#x27;t care about moderators or niche API issues.

Does this actually affect subscribers to sub-reddits?<p>If this is extended indefinitely I would expect competing sub-reddits to form.

Perhaps spez thinks he can replace all the free labor Reddit gets for posts and mods with an AI? The larger subs clearly have a large enough corpus to have a defined voice.<p>The next step after that would be an AI to generate the replies, worn out jokes, and repost complaints.

What&#x27;s next? Degrading the front page experience like a few years ago over I forgot what drama. I think ultimately this will blow over but I&#x27;m curious how far motivated actors can break&#x2F;cripple the platform, at least in terms of valuation.

Like the death if digg fark etc. people will move on. I hope it’s to a fediverse solution.

Apparently they&#x27;re demoting head jannies and removing powerjannies from the big subs.<p>I called this in another comment. Spez won&#x27;t let this continue - and he gets the nice second-order result of not having to deal with people like Merari

ELI5: Why can&#x27;t reddit just unblackout whatever subs they want?

I wonder if this will become similar to what happened with digg.com

Reddit will be in some trouble when Google traffic begins to drop.

Anybody, just give something to read or look at that is not reddit,but had new mildly interesting content often. I&#x27;ll remove Reddit and never look back...

This is what will force Reddits hand to either backtrack or remove those mods and place their own. Which the ladder would no doubt be worse.

What’s stopping Reddit from enabling all the subs?

Good.

the irony of it all is borderline unbelievable. reddit&#x27;s justification for this is that they don&#x27;t want to continue providing profit for smaller corporations for free. this from reddit, a website that could not possibly make a profit without the work moderators do <i>for free</i>

can someone explain why Reddit staff doesn&#x27;t just forcibly reopen these subs and perma-ban their moderators?

I’m all for this but what’s to keep Reddit from manning the subreddits themselves??

Good, I do hope they remain closed indefinitely. Nothing is stopping people from creating a &#x2F;nba2 sub-reddit or something in order to get rid of this power-hungry mods. It was hilarious how the &#x2F;nba users congregated on &#x2F;denvernuggets&#x2F; in order to make a game thread last night.

Won&#x27;t users simply move to other subreddits or found more?

Why don&#x27;t they simply ban the mods and reopen the subreddits?

I deleted my decade old account. Can digg come back?

&#x2F;r&#x2F;therewasanattempt is still rattling its sword of racism against whites. They can&#x27;t afford to take time off.

That&#x27;s great news. I&#x27;m always cheering for the little guy. I love capitalism but I also love people flexing on people that try to abuse their customers.

Is there some alternative reddits? I don’t care about this stupid protest and I’m sure many users as well.