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Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.
Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.
Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:
Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.
In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.
Thinking about this some more, I came to an interesting realization:
Up to now, everything that Reddit did around this issue seemed boneheadedly stupid in pretty much every way. This might be the first psychologically smart thing they've done in this whole scandal.
Okay, I can see that they have an interest in and a right to make a fair amount of money off of their APIs and data. But why in the world do they have to jack the prices so high that third party apps are mostly unviable, and do it at such short notice that the few who thought they might be able to make it work can't get things arranged in time? I can't see how that benefits anyone. And why have they been sitting on their asses so long, ignoring all of the extra features and capabilities provided by third-party mobile apps and mod tools? It's like they don't even have a clue what those features are, how much difference each one makes, or how hard they would all be to implement themselves. Any dope could have come up with a fairer solution that lets the apps stay alive and still gets Reddit a cut of the money. It's framed as the stupid and thoughtless Reddit admins against the power users, who just want to contribute content and commentary basically for free.
I'm not super inclined by my side of the culture war to care about the Reddit PowerMod clique. But the issue was framed in such a way to paint it primarily as an attack against the more everyday Reddit powerusers, the people who post and comment a lot and usually prefer third-party mobile apps, and also taking out the disabled who depend on them, just for kicks I guess. So I felt like I at least weakly supported the blackout, though I didn't care enough to actually take any significant action based on it.
Now, with this new statement, Reddit has successfully re-framed the issue in my mind and, going by the sentiment I see around the internet, in the minds of many other users. Now it's the reasonable Reddit admins against a whiny and petulant clique of PowerMods who run all of the major subs with iron fists and revel in their tiny little empires. They're whining that their jobs might get a little bit harder, they think they're so great and awesome that they can't be replaced on a whim, and I feel happy to see them get proven wrong. The majority of Reddit users don't really care what app they have to use to access Reddit, many probably weren't even aware of these third-party apps at all, and they're starting to get pissed that their favorite places are being shuttered because the mods are throwing a tantrum as they see it.
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I nuked my entire 9 year account last week. Wiped all my posts, nearly 5,000, and deleted. Reddit really lost the plot. Shame.
There are reports that Reddit is un-deleting comments that people have deleted. You might want to check if that actually worked or not.
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Interesting. I'll do that. Even with the software I used the gold ones stayed, but I manually wiped those as well just out of spite.
edit： Yes a few are still there though [deleted] shows as author. Odd that tge search engine for my username (same as here) nevertheless turned up the posts.
No recourse, as my acct which could redelete them is gone. Thanks for telling me, though.
Its likely too late but https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite is a great tool. I wipe my reddit posts and close my accounts there every 6 months or so. This tool doesn't just delete them, though it can, it actually edits them first. I've mine set to edit the post to a single period (.) then delete it, so if they are restored it restores the (.)
Brilliant. Yes, that is the best way if one is intent on deletion. I was unaware it could be done en masse. I have an alt or two that I may decide to also wipe, so I will keep this in mind, thank you. There were a lot of little pieces of me floating around on reddit, and although it doesn't pain me as much as I might have thought it would to wipe those pieces from history, I do feel it's somehow a shame. But my disillusionment with reddit has now as much to do with its active userbase as the results of its admin decisions.
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Reddit moderators are kind of like Reddit employees only instead of getting paid with money, they get paid with power. Another difference is the top moderators mostly weren't hired. They just showed up and started working and then hired their friends.
The power they get is not an amount that Reddit determined they needed to give up in order to get them as employees. It's not the market wage. The moderators just lucked into their positions. Consequently, they're overpaid, and now they're trying to strike when their employer can replace them with the click of a button and they weren't their first choice as employees anyway. For every striking moderator, there are thousands of potential scabs who would leap at the opportunity, and there's also nothing like any kind of labour law that could protect them in anyway.
I'd guess some moderators, at least, would have noble aims of service and making things better/keeping things running in mind, motivating them more than the feeling of being in power?
For a real community, like here, there will be people who love the forum and want to maintain it.
A place like /r/pics, on the other hand, is not a community, it's a dumping ground. Anyone selfless enough to do the thankless work like curating it out of pure civic mindedness would have glommed onto a worthier cause instead.
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In the real world, the house nearly always wins. The scrappy upstarts gets brutally beaten down and possibly destroyed. Hollywood has destroyed so many lives by feeding people false fantasies during their childhoods (often with parents helping to pile on) as people later become confronted with life as it is rather than an idealised version that never existed.
This reddit drama is just a microcosm of that. It's also a gentle reminder that much of our actual lives are essentially hyperauthoritarian with basically zero democracy. A lot of anarchist theorists have noted this in the past when analysing our modern liberal capitalist systems, but it's nice to get another confirmation with this entire saga. Ultimately the only voices that actually matter can be counted on a single hand. That is true in almost all large organisms, ranging from large communities, corporations to even nation-states.
If Reddit's userbase actually for the most part supported the protests then I think Spez would probably have to fold. But I think that the userbase does not. Most Redditors either do not care about the protests or they hate the mods more than they hate Reddit the company. The protesting mods tried to launch a revolution in a community where most people do not support them and so they got crushed. This does not necessarily mean that there is no democracy there, it just means that the people do not want the blackouts.
The new /r/nba and /r/nfl threads about the re-openings are mostly made up of people who are expressing not just disagreement with the mods, but who are actively mocking and deriding the mods. Given what mods are usually like, this is not surprising. Some would argue that the people who support the mods are just not participating in those threads, but I doubt that this is a significant factor. Many of the mods themselves could not stop themselves from participating in Reddit during the blackouts. I doubt that their supporters are much different.
I would've really supported the mods ten years ago. But having gotten the ire of a powermod and seeing how unfair I was treated; Now I'm just laughing at their tantrums.
Why would I go to bat for someone who smugly shut me down for a small disagreement?
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It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
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One highly upvoted comment in that /r/NFL thread really summed it up for me:
From my perspective, this is much broader than Reddit mods, and it's as much about how pointless and performative their protest was as it was about the power. This is also why I regard the 2020 BLM riots as a policy choice rather than an unstoppable force of genuine sentiment.
If you don't like reddit, why would you take actions that ultimately give more power to mods that like reddit and less to mods that don't like it? An anti-reddit mod falling on his sword seems like it'd only be better for reddit in the long run.
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I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.
Removing protestors is easy, doing it peacefully is harder. But it's not impossible, you can make it look like they struck the first blow, provoke them into doing so or you can make the use of force celebrated.
That may be but it still seems much harder than removing someone from a moderator position on a site you own. Plus there is very different leverage, mods want to stay on the mod list, and protestors just want to cause a vague enough disturbance that their cause gets headlines. Arresting them doesn't prevent protestors from achieving their goal, where mods you have total leverage over. This whole thing is just 'all things I don't like are the same' type thinking.
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I disagree. BLM was massively goosed by the media. With little attention given to it, it would have fizzled. I think we overestimate how "organic" these movements are.
I don't see how Reddit mods taking their subs public again once Reddit demonstrates a capacity to replace them is evidence for or against the organic-ness of BLM.
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From the decision maker’s point of view the difficulty is the same, just telling someone else to do it. It’s the outcomes that are less certain with physical removal.
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The more I think of it and evolve my position on this whole reddit debacle: One of the greatest ironies of this whole situation is that, if you peel away the layers of this situation reddit has encouraged people to latch on causes and browbeating anyone who try to excercise independendent thought. Well they got a bunch of people who latch on to causes without thinking. Spez is all like "I <3 passive nihilists!" and being all surprised when they act like "passive nihilists".
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I feel like Kissinger about the Iran/Irak war. It's a shame they can't both lose.
At least we're getting a nice demonstration of the high-low vs middle mechanism.
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I guess moving theMotte off Reddit has proven itself more and more to be a good decision
Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision?
Personally I question whether I could bring myself to use Reddit (and by extension /r/themotte) if the official interface were the only option. I suspect the axe will fall on https://old.reddit.com next. So you'd be deprived of my company for whatever that's worth.
But yeah, as far as I can tell, censorship was the first, second, third, fourth, and only reason we left. This cringe compilation tier revolution and insta-capitulation by reddit mods is amusing but ultimately irrelevant to us.
If the API crackdown is really about LLM training data (which it probably is), old.reddit is almost guaranteed to be either eliminated completely or cut down to nu-reddit levels of functionality (only showing 3 comments at a time) because it is so easily scrapeable in current form.
I expect this to happen as soon as the hype around the API lockdown dissipates.
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It's not about the subreddits going private, it's the thorough demonstration of power that the admins have shown. The admins have always had the ability to remove moderators at will and instate their own loyalists, and they're using it to break up the protest.
TheMotte went off of Reddit for the very same reason that the admins are very willing to wield their power to achieve their own interests.
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Last time I asked a similar question and the highly upvoted response was that we no longer have to deal with Reddit doing “questionable things”, which seems like a carte blanche to sneer at Reddit for any reason whatsoever.
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Didn't something recently happen with the mods of /r/Battletech being replaced, and people rejoicing over there because it was The Wrong Sort of people getting kicked out?
That had nothing to do with the admins. The short version of that controversy was:
A group of BattleTech fans wrote a Pride Month themed fanzine about LGBT characters in BattleTech. The mod of /r/BattleTech didn't allow links to this fanzine, feeling that it breached the sub's rules against politics. There was a revolt among users, and Catalyst Game Labs, BattleTech's current publisher, said that they disagreed with this decision and supported the fanzine. They made a new 'official' sub, /r/OfficialBattleTech. At this point the mod of /r/BattleTech reversed his decision and posted a grovelling apology, and /r/BattleTech resumed as the central sub.
(Some long-running BattleTech authors also made comments, though they seem frankly bizarre - the Warrior trilogy criticises racism, sort of, it's still a story in which the heroic English/French/German states fight a moustache-twirling Fu Manchu stereotype, but there was one sympathetic Chinese character and there was a whole subplot about how samurai are cool, but that's a different issue to the present drama. 'Woke' is a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly Stackpole himself has also been criticised as a conservative.)
This is a particularly interesting incident, I think, because BattleTech has historically been a pretty right-wing property, fitting squarely into the right-leaning milSF genre. Previous BattleTech-adjacent controversies have often been in this direction - for instance, a few years back there was some drama because MechWarrior Online allowed people to have Confederate flag decals in game, but banned someone for spamming "trans rights" at the start of every game. More infamously, one of BattleTech's flagship authors for a while was Blaine Lee Pardoe, a solid, Trump-voting conservative. It's not worth rehearsing tired personal drama (he claimed someone stalked him), but he was eventually let go and now he writes bizarre alternate history/revenge fic about a Second American Civil War. So this is an interesting example of how what was probably a relatively conservative-leaning game and community has still been really subject to the hegemony of Pride Month.
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards. I also find the politics of it bizarre - the Clans appear to be presented positively in it, despite being militarist eugenicist space fascists. So to me the whole thing comes off as something closer to 'rainbow fascism' than anything progressive. This is arguably consistent with the tone - the most recent BattleTech story arc, the IlClan arc, is basically pro-fascist (as in, genuinely in favour of fascism as a political ideology), but somehow they seem to have gotten away with it.
If this violates the leave-the-internet-at-the-door rule, please say so and I'll happily delete. I'm posting in spite of it because it seems relevant, but it's n=1 so no sweat if the rule comes first.
So I just got banned from my favorite Battletech discord server for very politely disagreeing (in fact, for saying no more than that I respectfully disagreed) with very severe new anti-anti-lgbt rules that even made having anything joke-like in your global pronoun field a bannable offense. Following this I was told that it was not acceptable to call for the annihilation of groups of people and that I shouldn't be a shithead, but that it was of course permissible to politely state one's opinion. I invoked that principle and stated that the language involved in the matter seemed excessively dramatic and directed at strawmen besides. I was called a troll and banned within seconds.
I'm getting similar vibes here that I got when I politely declined vaccination and suddenly half my family turned on me as if I were planning murder. People I presumed to be reasonable overtuning their reactions to benign disagreement. Other places just don't play by Motte rules.
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How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?
It's not published. It's a fan work - you can download it here, if you like. That is a real quote from it.
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Nuking the third-party apps and killing pushshift are both overall surplus-destroying moves, especially since Reddit's search function does not work and their mobile app sucks (and mostly in ways that are orthogonal to extracting money from users!). I'm not entirely sure how the admins benefit from making the API prices this artificially high to kill apps? If you're worried about ads, why not just introduce an ad SDK for third-party mobile apps or require them to give you 50% of their in app purchase revenue or something. Also not sure that banning pushshift and requiring paid API access will stop scraping for LLMs, because normal web scraping of HTML the way archive.org, google, and everyone else does still works.
I've been using RedReader for years and they came out saying that they would function as before even with the API changes. What's nice about RR is that you don't even need an account to browse subreddits and it's ad-free.
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is there any place to keep track of mod scabbing stories?
Kiwi Farms thread (requires Tor, Brave, etc.)
I tried loading that link in a Brave Tor window and got an error message.
The free internet is about to be beyond the reach of normal non-tech people like me.
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Real shame he's been keeping it onion only. Though I do sympathize and don't really blame him for it.
He says he'll have time in a few weeks or so to get it back up on clearnet.
The main issue is that a certain transgender woman (along with an assistant) has been calling up the wives of ISP executives and harassing them to deny him service, in an attempt to scrub the internet clean of both of their histories of "consent accidents". Dealing with insane people like that requires an entirely new strategy.
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That reminds me that I already have Tor installed on my phone, I appreciate the link.
While you're here, do you know any other interesting sites only found via Tor? I don't mean Darknet markets, but websites that were deplatformed from the clear web for various reasons, much like our beloved New Zealand farmer's forum.
Z-Library, a repository for ebooks with a flagrant disregard for copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
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I personally do not use Tor except for Kiwi Farms.
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Ideological zealots ready to sign up for the modgrinder. Hold fast sisters!
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The language used in this media piece is just * Chef's Kiss *.
I think many users will be against the quisling mods who usurp power. I don't think it will be enough for most people to abandon the site, but there will be a small exodus continuing the site's slow decline.
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I'm personally bearish on the possibility of either Reddit reconsidering their policy or a successful exodus to fairer lands.
I joined Reddit after the whole Digg affair, but I presume that it was nowhere near as entrenched as Reddit is today. Network effects are killer, as all the Twitter competitors found out to their chagrin.
Reddit really does have plenty of room for enshittification before it collapses, though it's trying it's hardest.
The social media landscape/ the internet as a whole is significantly more consolidated these days, I can count on the toes of an uncontrolled diabetic the number of communities that successfully spun off from Reddit (Drama, The Motte, Chapo?). It takes an unusually cohesive and dedicated userbase to pull off, the typical normie browsing sports subs is there pretty much entirely because it's the most popular venue, and they're unlikely to abandon ship till it reaches critical mass.
At any rate, I'm grateful that the Motte made it through mostly unscathed in its own transition, and I wonder if we were ever big enough for others to take note.
Reddit has no network effects. A community is community. The communities that are dedicated to sourdough pizza can thrive separately from the rough anal ones. So they can jump. It probably leaves the subscribers on /r/brutalanalwhileeatingpizza in a cold place. But there will probably be only a 100 of them.
Why do you think reddit killed off all the old forums, then?
For me the upvote/downvote mechanism did a lot better job of surfacing the most interesting things to read (posts and comments) that previous systems like Slashdot's moderation system.
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I think it was just the convenience of being able to browse many forums on one site and join them with one click, instead of the tedious process of registering a name and password, and responding to a confirmation email, separately for every forum. At least that's what it was for me.
Right, that's just a network effect.
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Depends which forums. I am still member of a couple which are as active and interesting as ever, although they have a fairly distinct profile. "Normie" forums probably died thanks to reddit.
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?
I can clearly see network effects. Reddit is an agglomeration of communities on one convenient platform, I don't think the number of people laser focused on any one single sub or community is significant. Most people browse a diverse arrangement of subs, such that leaving Reddit as a whole for the sake of any single one would be a massive pain.
While I'm alright with The Motte being it's own thing, it itself lost a small amount of value and Reddit more when the two divorced, due to friction and loss of users.
People want switching between communities to be as easy as clicking on a drop down list, not the balkanization into forums that once was the norm.
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Reddit is far from being in danger, but I think this move could be the start of a death spiral. The only reason people tolerate that this company essentially monopolized internet forums is the UX and tooling that's accrued over the years and network effects.
Remove the former and you're left with an extremely shitty website and app that only has "people use it" going for it.
And that's a premium target for competition. Especially for something as simple as a text forum where setting a competitor is extremely easy (compared to say, video hosting).
The network effects are bigger than Digg's ever were, but if that's all you have going for you you're a dead man waking. Someone will Facebook you eventually.
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TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.
Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network, OpieAndAnthony -> onaforums. Probably others, too.
There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date. General-purpose break-offs fail, but if people are in a habit of visiting specifically the community instead of just seeing it pop up occasionally on their front page, they will follow it to a new location. Honestly, fully unsuccessful community break-offs are rarer than successful ones at this point. The reddit diaspora is large and growing.
Took a look at all of these. They look to be pale shadows of their former lives as subreddits. The Motte has taken a hit but at least still gets comparable weekly comment numbers to a year ago. I don't think you can cite any of these other four as success stories.
The Motte's peak was a lot lower than Donald/WatchPeopleDie, though
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I doubt starting a general discussion community ever works. It seems to me that basically all the ones that exist started out as a discussion community for some specific thing, which then starts its own general channel for people into thing X to talk about anything.
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C*mtown too, for some definition of successful. There’s actually more than I thought, looking at this small list here.
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WhereAreAllTheGoodMen.
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