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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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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?

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.

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.

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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