I want to highlight a situation that happened on a less well-known website that is all too similar to what's going on with Reddit at the moment.

The website Habitica is a retro RPG-themed website for self-improvement and habit formation. As users tick boxes off their to-do lists, their character gains experience, gold, and items. Social features are a major part of the site, with "guilds" which are larger public or private groups built around topics like health, career, or education, and "parties" small, private groups which complete in-game quests together. I've been an active user of the site for years, and it has been a great help in tracking and completing goals in my life like language learning. It's also worth noting that like Imgur and Discord, Habitica was born on Reddit.

Another major aspect of Habitica was its positive and welcoming atmosphere. Habitica's moderators went above and beyond to delete mean-spirited and trolling comments around the clock. Unbeknownst to myself and others, these moderators were volunteers who gave up hours out of their day for years to keep the site running smoothly, particularly when the site admins were off the clock (Habitica's mods operate site-wide; its parallel to Reddit's mods are called "guild leaders"). Not only were mods not paid, one also developed a very helpful 3rd party tool for managing guilds and "challenges".

One weekend a few months ago the mod team discovered an exploit which could have cost the company thousands of dollars in premium paid memberships. The mods caught this quickly and worked overtime to prevent this exploit from being publicized until admins came into work on Monday to fix it. After suggesting mods should be thanked for all their hard work, a long time mod turned paid admin was unceremoniously fired. In response, the moderators unanimously decided to go on strike. They, too, were let go. Thereafter any discussion of what has happened has been removed from public guilds, leaving many users in the dark about the whole situation. Since that time Habitica has been a shell of its former self. Behind the mask of positivity and community, was hiding yet another Silicon Valley private venture which only cares about the bottom line.

More details can be found here:

• https://old.reddit.com/r/habitica/comments/zdr2la/the_staff_is_taking_moderation_inhouse_and_so_are/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/habitica/comments/zgci3v/here_is_a_summary_of_the_strike_written_by_dewines/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/habitica/comments/10q8lk6/so_this_is_how_staff_are_talking_in_aspiring/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1260794

Hello /r/london.

We're back - for now.

I've decided to write something of my own rather than repost another copy of the official messaging and I hope you'll excuse me for it. Funnily enough, I've had a lot more free time than usual over the last couple of days.

I think there is a lot of anger and rhetoric going around at the moment, and while the anger is absolutely justified, it's getting hard to understand what's actually happening due to the fog of war. Background

In May, without warning, and contrary to many public statements made previously by current and former CEOs, Reddit Inc announced broad API policy changes that will price out most commercial third-party apps from continuing to operate.

Already, Apollo and Reddit is Fun have announced they will shutter on July 31st as these changes take effect. Other apps will likely end up joining them.

Reddit has done this for a very simple reason: as a loss making company, they need to a path to profit to successfully launch their IPO this year. One way to do this is to drive people to their official app because that's where they can monetise their users the best through buying premium, awards, showing more adverts, and whatever bullshit they're doing with NFTs. In particular, it's no coincidence that Reddit Inc launched new ad options just this weekend - I'm sure these new forms of ads are in no small part responsible for wanting eyes on their apps only.

Another issue is the rise of the large language models (ChatGPT etc.) which are clearly using social media posts as a large part of their training corpus. So, the social media companies have suddenly decided this is a valuable asset and they should charge for it. Something u/spez

(the Reddit CEO) and Elon (over at Twitter) are no doubt looking to cash in on.

It's not completely unreasonable for a company to want people to use its official apps. It's not completely unreasonable to charge for an API. What is unreasonable is Reddit's timing, pricing, lack of feature parity, and u/spez

's frankly insulting attitude to the community on which his company and its revenue relies. The Timing

Reddit Inc announced these changes in May, to be enforced from July 31st. This is far too short a timescale for apps like Apollo to entirely rewrite their backend to ensure compliance and cost controls with the new API policies. Many of these apps are one-person operations, many of them are part time projects. They cannot get this done on the timescale Reddit proposed.

Feels real like a rug pull man. The Pricing

Christian Selig of Apollo calculated he would have to pay Reddit $20 million a year just to keep Apollo running, which would mean Apollo would have to vastly increase their per user subscription cost. It's also very clear that Reddit's API does not cost them this much to run for themselves, as otherwise the company's total yearly revenue would be losses in the billions.

While they may be losing out on some ad revenue, there's nothing to say they couldn't right this by having an agreement with third party app developers that they must show Reddit's ads. Simples.

But no, they're not doing this. Lack of feature parity

The official Reddit app lacks many useful features for moderators, but most frustratingly, lacks good accessibility, which is a huge problem for users of /r/blind and others with disabilities.

Reddit have partly relented and allowed two accessibility-focussed apps to continue to use the API for free - RedReader on Android and Dystopia on iOS, but under a non-commercial agreement that Reddit can pull with 30 days notice.

This is not a long-term sustainable model.

They have also made exceptions for mod tools but they miss the point that many moderators work on mobile only, and the moderation tools in the official mobile app are not good in comparison with third party offerings that will now shut down.

No matter what you might think of mods, we are volunteers, who put time in for free to manage communities. Each mod is trying to do what they think is a good job in their spare time, for the benefit of their subreddit. Taking away our tools is not helpful, and many mods will likely quit the site or reduce the number of actions they're able to take as a result of these changes.

Boo-hoo, you might say, but without moderation, the subs would be chock full of hate speech, bots and spam (well, more-so than it is now, we do what we can). The only reward we've ever received from our work is to see the online communities we volunteer in thrive and grow, and the occasional t-shirt. u/spez

Spez, supposedly the professional CEO of a large social media company with over 2000 employees, has shown an abysmal attitude towards us throughout the discontent this situation has caused.

Among other things:

Dismissive answers in his AMA about the API changes
Severe mischaracterisation of his interactions with Apollo
Leaked memo shows he believes the blackout is meaningless
Complete refusal to compromise

When Spez returned to Reddit, we were promised a step change in user relations after the Ellen Pao debacle. I suppose ultimately, money talks, and he's been told by his board he needs to take these steps to support the IPO.

If anything it reinforces the point that these kinds of companies do not work for you: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product The blackout

We participated with many other subs in the blackout this week. Some large subs are continuing to stay locked down, but but we have to balance that /r/London is a community resource, not just a fun/meme/shitposting sub that people can do without for a while.

So we're reopening for now, and letting the large subs take the heat as many of them are staying shut permanently.

It's not over though. There's talk of further actions called for, and we may well participate.

Ultimately though, this may not be a fight we can win on Reddit. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this is the reminder that we can't trust social media companies to act in good faith towards their users.

I remember the Digg v4 debacle and the great migration to Reddit - nothing says it can't happen again. . Maybe it's time to find a new frontpage of our Internet. Perhaps it's time to start dipping our toes into alternatives.

Here are some:

https://kbin.social/
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://squabbles.io/
https://tildes.net/

I am not a soothsayer and can't tell you which platform might emerge is "next Reddit", but if we've learned anything from the fall of MySpace, Digg, and Twitter, and the precarious situation of Meta, it's that the next Reddit will come. Perhaps this time we'll learn some lessons about choosing a federated platform or a non-profit to run whatever comes next. Your thoughts

We'd like to hear your views on whether we should. Not running a poll this time, as they tend to get brigaded by people who aren't on the sub, so instead please just voice your thoughts in the comments.

Should we:

stay open?
keep our eye on things and participate in further blackouts if/when they occur?
participate in the indefinite blackout?

Honestly want to hear your opinions.

https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/110543786598049739

The continuation of a protest continues.

I guess Reddit has learned nothing. At least I have learned a lot in the last few days.

June 15th will drop by, and everyone will notice what most people here already know: that Reddit is hopeless, and it's showing its middle finger to the community.

Based on that, I was thinking about releasing an infographic, telling people what's going on, and asking them to replace their Reddit content with gibberish. And I'm wondering if more people want to join this.

What do you guys think about this? Would anyone here be willing to contribute?

The infographic would list no authorship. It would be, for all intents and purposes, public domain. The only thing that you'd get in return is the warm feeling that you made internet better, by helping to kill Reddit.

The format is up to debate, but I was thinking about:

It's a picture so it's easier to share; split into sections that can be read in any order that you want (or you can ignore a few of them).

In special, I'd like help of people who write stuff well. I'm pedantic, verbose, an L3 speaker prone to "then who was phone?" grammar, and I genuinely think that plenty people could do better than I can in this aspect.

I also believe that a collective effort from a bunch of people will be probably better than just a single person doing it alone.

Have you left reddit forever? Have you deleted your account and posts? Just curious

Credit @[email protected] on Mastodon

It is read-only, no new submissions allowed, but it is no longer private.

As the title, suggest, jerboa feels really out of place coming from RiF, any recommendations to get a similar experience?

TL;DW - two days of protest is not enough, and he encourages people to migrate to other platforms, without suggesting which one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/629220

👀

it just passed midnight in EST, and some of the largest subreddits (e.g. r/funny) have just gone dark. goodbye, reddit!

A long time ago, I played an MMORPG that was scheduled to shut down the beta world. That feeling, in the last moments, of everything around you seeming just as before, but knowing that this could be the last time ever you're seeing that world. That community.
I'm getting the same feeling looking at reddit right now.

Sure, the blackout might fizzle. The admins might be forced to recant, most subreddits might return. Even if they don't, reddit could survive in some form.

... or a digg apocalypse is repeated, and we're all presently witnessing the last moments before the bombs fall and nothing will ever be as it used to be.
A strange feeling, standing on the precipice of Internet history.

https://imgur.com/a/h4Rmz0Q

EDIT: Original reddit thread

Full link here. Please use an ad blocker to access that shithole. I'll copypaste the relevant excerpt:

“

Admins have promised minimal disruption; however, over the years they’ve made a number of promises to support moderators that they did not, or could not follow up on, and at times even reneged on:

• In 2015, in response to widespread protests on the sub, the admins promised they would build tools and improve communication with mods.
• In 2019 the admins promised that chat would always be an opt-in feature. However, a year later an unmoderated chat feature was made a default feature on most subs
• In 2020, in response to moderators protesting racism on Reddit, admin promised to support mods in combating hate
• In 2021, again, in response to protests, Reddit’s admin promised a feature to report malicious interference by subreddits promoting Covid denial.

”