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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38179 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Just some anecdata for the Reddit blackout, unless everyone is sick of it; I went through all my own personal subscribed subreddits and looked for their stance on the blackout:

NOT joining blackout: 135 subreddits. Of these, less than 10 actually posted why. Most ignored it entirely.

STILL DECIDING: 9 subreddits. Of those with public vote totals, overwhelming majorities for blackout and majorities for indefinite duration.

YES, for 24-48 hours set duration: 39 subreddits.

YES, for AT LEAST 48 hours: 20 subreddits. Most copied and pasted a vaguely worded post that implied only 48 hours but threatened longer, so hard to say how many conversions to the next category.

YES, INDEFINITELY: 16 subreddits. Honestly I'd be scared as shit as a mod that my mod powers would be permanently taken away from me. I sense from some of these announcements a real grieving process.

Overall if all the fence sitters black out, that's a good 84/219 going dark. I don't plan on visiting reddit those two days, but even if I did, that's a 40% reduction in content (number pretty fuzzy though). Not quite critical mass to be noticeable to me or to another user if I were representative, but surely enough to degrade the experience. A lot of the bigger content subs aren't participating, so maybe more like 30%.

So, my main two takeaways. One, most moderator teams genuinely don't seem to care, at all. I think almost any truly conscientious mod would at least address the issue head on rather than ignore it. The ones who did make an actual post saying they won't participate in the blackout generally had good motivations and impressed me, (which made the lack of response elsewhere even more deafening). One case was /r/manga, they didn't want to attract attention to a copyright-skirting sub. Another few think they are the online equivalent of support subs, or "essential workers", mostly fair arguments. One was scared of the sub being banned as it almost had under previous lax moderation, as a one-man mod team without an easy replacement.

The second takeaway was looking at the general quality of the subreddits that aren't participating. There's a few with obvious admin ties/ mod plants. But the bulk of them were either very small one-issue subs, or in most cases the nonparticipants all had one thing in common: low-effort, often comedic TikTok-esque video subreddits. I enjoy them, obviously, or I wouldn't be subscribed. But only about 3 or 4 that I recall actually decided to shut down (shoutout to /r/videos, a massive sub that is going completely dark). What's the implication of this anecdata? I predict that reddit is clearly headed even more strongly toward TikTokification, if the blackout fails. Ironic, because the official app does so poorly at displaying and loading videos!

25/70 subreddits I follow will be going dark, although I might have missed some if they didn't have a message stickied while I was checking just now. None of the subreddits that aren't going dark left an actual stickied message saying they won't go dark when I checked. I didn't keep a count, but I think the subreddits that are going dark are very disproportionately the most active subreddits/the subreddits with lots of discussion going on and not just funny videos.

I agree that if Reddit doesn't reverse course, it'll be more Tiktokification. I'm sure that even if any subreddits I follow shut down permanently, someone will eventually make a replacement, and I think most regular users will follow. But I think you might very well see a lot of power users who mod and are the most important members of subreddits quitting. I see a lot of people making fun of mods and say that they'll never quit modding because it's the only power they have in life and they love abusing it, and while I'm sure that is actually true for some mods, there are a lot who only do it because they're passionate about the community. And if Reddit creates enough friction by getting rid of the best mod tools, and make the mods feel like there is 0 appreciation for their labour, a lot will just straight up quit and take a sizeable chunk of value with them. Power users are rare. A post can easily receive 10x as many views as upvotes, and 10x as many upvotes as comments, and 10x as many comments total as there are actually serious comments that add value with an original joke or analysis instead of a repetitive joke or pot shot at someone they don't like. And I would guess a similar pattern holds for there being 10x as many serious commenters as there being power users who'd make good mods. I think losing 10% of power users and making the burden heavier for the rest of the power users can legitimately make Reddit use a lot of value.

Also, I am very sympathetic to Reddit's need to make money and how difficult it is to make a free app supported by ads actually profitable. But what ultimately kills my sympathy for them in this case is their terrible communication to apps like Apollo and refusal to admit any wrong doing. Like this comment from the recent AMA: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk45rr/?context=10000 Apparently Spez thinks Apollo's dev has been saying different things publicly and privately. But Spez has no actual examples of that happening, and instead is just baselessly attacking the dev he's putting out of a job.

If I was a reddit executive, I'd have just caved and bought Apollo or another third party and made it an alternative official app. Since I think half the opposition from redditors isn't any real principled support for developers but rather anger that they're losing features they've enjoyed for years.

If I was a reddit executive, I'd have just caved and bought Apollo or another third party and made it an alternative official app. Since I think half the opposition from redditors isn't any real principled support for developers but rather anger that they're losing features they've enjoyed for years.

But isn't the whole concern that they'd have to monetize the app? Seems like that would involve putting in advertisements, inserting massive telemetry, perhaps gutting the UI, etc.

Do you really need telemetry? You are already logged in to reddit and reddit knows which posts you are opening etc.

I don't know about Apollo but RIF shows ads already in the free version.

Figuring out a monetization strategy for reddit is a separate discussion, buying out a third party app is just to avoid losing lots of users. If they paid the dev of Apollo a couple million I bet that’d have cost less than this fiasco. It wasn’t intended as blackmail like Spez thought, but that’s basically what it ended up being, and it cost Reddit a lot.

I'd mentioned over in the Friday Fun Thread that it might make sense to attempt to attract users here, if done judiciously so as to attract the right users, as this could be an unusually good opportunity to do that.

Would it make sense for anyone with a reddit account, if they have any communities that they think would contribute beneficial users, to advertise The Motte in those?

I'm out of the loop. Where can I find the best explanation of what is going on and the what the argument is for why Reddit shouldn't be doing this?

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