SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

Hey All,

Tl;Dr: Save Reddit technical expertise before it's lost to the sands of time and corporate shutdown.

Just wanted to get a discussion started on what would be, in my opinion, the greatest loss that we, as a society, would experience with the loss of Reddit. Proposed solutions welcome. And please don't take this as me supporting Reddit in any way shape or form.

For years Reddit acted as the Internet's foremost discussion board. As part of that it became host to a slew of subreddits which house niche information and technical expertise. I can't tell you how often I've struggled to find a solution to a particular problem only to stumble across it on a years old reddit thread.

That information is, frankly, invaluable. Reddit may not be tailored to providing technical advice akin to the likes of stack overflow but, nevertheless, it is home to some of the hardest to find answers. If Reddit was to disappear tomorrow, so would that information.

As such I think that information should be treated as a goldmine, and just like a goldmine, excavated. If Lemmy is to play host to the great Reddit migration then it might well play host to these valuable tidbits. Exactly how such an excavation could be done without a blanket copy of all data on Reddit I don't know. But I think it's definitely something worth discussing and promoting amid Reddits recent mishaps. Who knows what the future holds for the site? But it's downfall shouldn't lead to the loss of decades worth of troubleshooting efforts and technical expertise.

If you haven't left one already, go do it now! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.reddit.frontpage

Excerpts from the link:

Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:

• Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
• Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
• Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
• Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.

Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\

• Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
• Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
• Earn xx gold and karma each month
• Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
• NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program

Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's ~~broken browser for a single site~~ "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.

The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.

Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.

The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)

The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.

Here's the list of highlights from the article, as it's a good TL;DR:

• The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
• How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
• Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
• Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
• Why disabled users joined the Reddit blackout
• Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted
• A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working

Made an extra special shirt for an extra special reddit guy. Enjoy. I will donate any proceeds to lemm.ee.

Sorry if this is spammy - mods can delete if appropriate.

wtf is going on over there

So I’m seeing a lot of people saying their comments after deleting are coming back. I had the same issue till I remembered an app called Redact. It does install on your computer and can be used for multiple social media sites. But in the case of Reddit I had it edit every comment I ever said to “ fuck u/spez” it does add that it was done with redact in comment as well if that is an issue for anyone. But with the API changes this still works.

Hope this helps anyone trying to migrate from Reddit and not give their accounts away with out a fight .

After the blackout I deleted all my posts and comments on reddit using the PowerDeleteSuite, and since then I've come back weekly to find comments existing on my account. I've been deleting them by hand now that the API is unusable. Does reddit pull these out of a backup? Do I just now see all of my comments? What's the reason these comments keep showing up?

Copy of the post in the event it is deleted or you don't want to give ****it any traffic.

Hey again, /r/PICS!

We have another interesting development for you: /u/ModCodeofConduct still hasn't responded to our request for a public reply... but they have seen fit to threaten us:

This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.

Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week. This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team. Moderators may also be subject to additional actions, e.g., losing the ability to join mod teams in the future.

Lastly, if you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action.

Needless to say, we responded as you would expect:

Please read and publicly respond to our message addressing this.

We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW. If these policies are themselves in error, please correct their verbiage immediately. Otherwise, /r/PICS reverting to SFW would itself be in violation of those same policies.

Our team is currently discussing our actions in the meantime. Please permit us some time to reach a consensus.

Maddeningly, /u/ModCodeofConduct is telling us to go against Reddit's listed guidelines, which puts us in something of a pickle: If we follow their commands, we'll be in violation of the site-wide rules... but if adhere to said rules, they'll remove us. /r/InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated (at the time of this writing), so we can reasonably assume that our removal would effectively kill this community.

Well, we don't want /r/PICS to die, so while we figure out how best to handle the situation (which includes waiting for a public, user-visible response from /u/ModCodeofConduct), we're going to be exploring new ways of ensuring that innocent, unsuspecting users are not presented with offensive content. One possible avenue would see you – yes, you, the upstanding Redditor reading this – having the ability to tag any post that you personally found offensive.

If you have any other ideas, please share them in the comments!

Sorry for the confusion, /r/PICS! We'll get back to you with more soon!

I try to be a good an honest person, even on the internet where no one will know I'm a dog. I try to take people at face value when possible-- we all need to form our own opinions.

But I'll be good fucking goddamned if every reddit post someone tries to be nice on is either met with blatantly superficial kindness in return, or an ass ton of downvotes.... for some fucking reason only known to the hivemind.

I much prefer to be here-- here and Mastodon. In both places I've gotten to have conversations with real fucking people about real fucking things that I really fucking care about.

I love being able to educate people on things-- and have it be taken in stride as opposed to being viewed as speaking down or assuming someone is 'stupid.' I love the actual back and forth that comes of it.

The Fediverse really does give us the experience we had in the early days of the internet-- where if your opinion was dogshit, real life people would tell you and give you the reason why, without being a condescending jackass right back.

Anyway, love you Lemmy. Stay vibin.

I'm sharing this old article because it's useful to contrast the situation back then (protests against hate speech) and now (protests due to the APIcalypse).

Here are a few highlights:

• Back then, the admins were already eager to shift their discourse back and forth, depending on the convenience. Reddit was always about free speech, then it never was.
• Former CEO Yishan Wong's "[shutting down subreddits] won't become a regular occurrence"
• If you try to follow the link sourcing the quote above, you'll notice that most Reddit blog official communications towards users are gone. Instead you'll find a blog clearly geared towards investors, vulture capital, and corporate.

Any other old piece of news that you guys feel like sharing, that can be contextualised to show Reddit going downhill?

I moderate a very polite community of about 1500 users. There are 2 other mods.

I'm not confident Reddit is the right place for it anymore. I just reached out to my fellow mods to see how they're feeling. We didn't participate in the blackout because

1. the most we've modded is marking something as a spoiler after someone posted and
2. I was reeling from IRL surprise badness (which seems mostly resolved)

Does anyone have advice on migrating a subreddit over to Lemmy?

Archive link for the mod statement. From the statement itself:

Anyway, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Gore and pornography are still not allowed in /r/PICS.
• Remain civil toward one another.
• Do not violate the site-wide rules.
• This link directs back to this comment.
• It is normal to experience special feelings while looking at John Oliver.

... On Saturday, the r/IAmA moderators announced that they will no longer perform these duties:

Active solicitation of celebrities or high-profile figures to do AMAs. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high-profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).

Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.

Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.

Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.

Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.

Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts The subreddit, which has 22.5 million subscribers as of this writing, will still exist, but its moderators contend that most of what makes it special will be undermined.

"Moving forward, we'll be allowing most AMA topics, leaving proof and requests for verification up to the community, and limiting ourselves to removing rule-breaking material alone. This doesn't mean we're allowing fake AMAs explicitly, but it does mean you'll need to pay more attention," the moderators said.

The mods will also continue to do bare minimum tasks like keeping spam out and rule enforcement, they said. Like many other Reddit moderators Ars has spoken to, some will step away from their duties, and they'll reportedly be replaced "as needed." ...

It seems that activity in Reddit was considerably slower around the 1st of July, by roughly 1.5k comments per minute. (For reference: the platform usually has between 8k and 3k comments per minute.)

I wonder if there's some way to measure their quality too, as I predict that it dropped harder than the amount.

Excerpt from the text:

However, effective immediately, we plan to discontinue the following activities that we performed, as volunteer moderators, that took up a huge amount of our time and effort, both from a communication and coordination standpoint and from an IT/secure operations standpoint:

1. Active solicitation of celebrities or high profile figures to do AMAs.
2. Email and modmail coordination with celebrities and high profile figures and their PR teams to facilitate, educate, and operate AMAs. (We will still be available to answer questions about posting, though response time may vary).
3. Running and maintaining a website for scheduling of AMAs with pre-verification and proof, as well as social media promotion.
4. Maintaining a current up-to-date sidebar calendar of scheduled AMAs, with schedule reminders for users.
5. Sister subreddits with categorized cross-posts for easy following.
6. Moderator confidential verification for AMAs.
7. Running various bots, including automatic flairing of live posts

This is gold!

And don't let the door hit you on the way out! Fuck those reddit clowns running the show.