this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn't roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won't be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.
I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins
Admin was kicking mods that didn't approve. Absolutely forced to reopen.
The thing is, Reddit doesn't allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they'd kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don't care.
The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he's not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he's completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.
Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don't have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.
I'd love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what's stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?
r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It's just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then... don't replace them? Now there hasn't been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.
I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?
Maybe it's to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of "This is what happens when you cross the admins."
I guess it's possible, but what good would that do reddit? That's millions people who aren't going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren't using any ad blockers, so they'd be losing revenue..
I'm honestly not sure. Reddit's decision making here has been so stupid I'm just guessing their motivations.
I check the sub every few days to see if they have mods yet, we'll see what hapens. :p
Is Reddit going to tell itself it's being bad?
The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny
These are large subs.
Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀
I knew it was over when my feed was plastered with various subreddits for food delivery workers
I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.
/r/truerateme is a lot funnier than shittytattoos. A chance for basement-dwelling incels to rate pretty girls who wouldn't give them the time of day 5.5.
Right, I'm pretty positive r/funny was the largest sub to participate in the original protest.
I'm scared to open /r/OnlyFans now
Give it 3 months and it's all forgotten about. New users won't know the difference.
The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.
Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won't notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they're used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it's likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won't notice or care about. I'm just glad we've got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit
The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.
Now that's a name I haven't seen in ages!
While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).
On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub's only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn't very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you're an asshole for something you did.
And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn't followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that there's benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.
Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it's devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they'd always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.
I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It's easy enough that you don't need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets "eternal September".
You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.
Also a lot of the more high quality comments seem to be migrating.
Sorry, I'm mostly bringing over my low quality comments. Sorry guys.
Dang, Lemmy cancelled I guess. Pack it up everybody, @[email protected] ruined it for everyone.
Me thinks you right. Hope stay good!
Ooh you comment write good
Long live the lemming motherland(s)
I followed mostly games and tech related stuff and they mostly rolled over quick or didn't even participate. So figured it was a lost cause from the get go. When I was subbed there was not much difference in usual activity , since I did not sub to the main subs. In a lot of cases I actually had blocked them long ago.
On the plus side those communities have had good activity on lemmy without need for the reddit mods to bother migrating.
LOL... Who would buy into their IPO now? There's a HUGE risk of this going to zero.
I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.
It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.
And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who's in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.
It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.
Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they're an optional part of people's lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it's marginally more convenient than piracy.
Considering Plexshares exist, the margin is really only taking the 30 mins to set things up while having a library 5 times as big for half the price.
Honestly, /r/all is pretty pitiful these days
I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It's astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it's not filtered by subjects you're actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.
I've noticed a change too and I've tried to keep that separate from my feelings about Reddit. It just doesn't seem all that entertaining or novel as it was a couple months back.
Perhaps when you piss off that tiny slice of your users that actually produces the content everyone else wants to see and the moderators who ensure they see that quality content, you're going to have problems.
It wasn't a perfect system for sure, but it was holding it together for quite a few years.