Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.

However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed:

Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future

Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation

However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.

I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 129 points 3 years ago (14 children)

But they want users to vote out mods?

They don't want subreddits to close, but they've closed several.

Seems almost like their complaints actually don't make sense given their own actions are just an excuse...

  • source
  • hideshow 14 child comments
  • [–] 32 points 3 years ago*

    Christian Selig's receipts (Apollo's dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.

    Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators' right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago* (7 children)

    Have any of these referendums happened? I have not been able to follow all this

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Not yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to build an automated way of doing this.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago

    It seems clear to me at this point the Reddit admins are just making up whatever spur-of-the-moment idea they can come up with at any given moment. They had no idea that this shitstorm was coming and have no actual plan in place for dealing with it.

    Keep the shitstorm spinning, I guess. The creativity of Reddit users collectively exceeds that of the admins.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 79 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up

  • source
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [+] 65 points 3 years ago (6 children)
  • [–] 50 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    They gave a fight. If Reddit had just been silent, I bet most of the subs would be open now. Instead, Reddit has fought for every inch and in turn created an enemy to rally against. I was initially bummed and left to support the blackout and figured I'd just reduce my Reddit usage. With how nasty Reddit has acted though, I'm avoiding them as aggressively as possible now.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    For sure, I don't think they understand it.

    The amazing communities of Reddit can recreate somewhere else - but that means Reddit will lose it's grip on aggregating the internet.

    It's a good thing - it means that many communities will possibly go back where they should never have left (e.g. Manjaro forums is far more useful and less toxic than r/Manjaro).

    What interests me more, though, is that once something gets posted on Reddit, it's instantly searchable - and that's an issue with Fediverse.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    At this point I don't know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I think it's theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they've slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that'd get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.

    Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won't happen.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago*

    I doubt this is really from spez. It's the investors who've poured money into Reddit as they've dicked around for 15 years. But now money is expensive. Personally I think they are looking to tap into the sweet, sweet VC money being pumped into LLMs (for which Reddit's API is prime training material), which might go down worse than "hey we're going to not so discretely kill the apps you all have built and love!"

    So spez is an idiot, but replacing him wouldn't change things.

    On a side note, my god was Digg's Kevin Rose also an idiot back in the day, but he was such a far better class of idiot. He did care about the site, even if he was hilariously incapable of running it. You just don't appreciate these things until they're over.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 52 points 3 years ago (13 children)

    Again, not a surprise. Totally awful, outrageous, and immoral.

    But sadly, par for the course. The mods should allow a vote to move to the fediverse, and leave the sub permanently private in that case.

    Or if reddit won't give them the chance to vote, just do it anyways. Like the admins just do what they want, so turnabout is fair play, amirte?

  • source
  • hideshow 13 child comments
  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    If people want to move to the fediverse, they need to move to the fediverse, not wait for everyone else to move first.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Yes, but you're preaching to the choir here. The number of people who are willing to take that initiative but haven't yet is only getting smaller. So now people are thinking about how to help along the group who isn't unwilling to move, just maybe not move alone.

    Part of that is building the fediverse up, more communities, more activity, more of the stuff that made us want to go on Reddit beforehand. But the other part is seeing if there's a good way to motivate the next group migration.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 31 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.

    Which is it fuck-u-spez?

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 28 points 3 years ago

    Reddit: "Democracy is what I say it is"

  • source
  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    For scale:

    According to wikipedia the population of finland is 5.6 million.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    'deny the right' not sure the users had that in the first place

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    That's less a regulatory thing and more of a shareholder lawsuit after the fact thing. Which I think r would be even more hilarious, rich fucks suing arrogant moronic assholes like spez and his Admin lackeys

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 19 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with "No, wait, not like that!!" and the mods adapt again.... this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:

    The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.

    People are already in open revolt. It's only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)... and Reddit's journey towards enshittification will be complete.

  • source
  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Honestly, If I were the mods Id nuke the whole subreddit: delete anything of importance, especially any important asset you made for that community (say, FAQs, resources, links, banners, logos, etc.) or better than delete it, edit it out with information as to where you are migrating, leave the shit behind. When you are done leave the sub closed till they take it away from you, and best of luck to anyone that has to rebuild again from nothing.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] 13 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Users don't own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don't like how a subreddit is run, you're supposed to make your own, not take it over.

    Reddit's admins are making up the rules as they go along.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    I wonder if the next move would be to ban posts that invite people to move to reddit alternatives. Elon Musk did that with twitter, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Huffman tried to do the same. Maybe communities should use this time to organize on where to move while they still can have those kind of discussions.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    That's not true. What they said was that the users who voted make up a tiny portion of the overall userbase.

    However, you can't force them all to vote. You can only ask and accept the answer of the active ones that choose to participate.

    Reddit must be exhausted playing these ethics games. Just admit that they want to kill 3rd party apps and they're not going to tolerate malicious compliance with the rules.

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    They're really stomping you lot out, aren't they. Tyrannical.

  • source
  • [+] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
    load more comments (1 reply)
    load more comments
    view more: next ›