this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Looks like Reddit is forcing another sub open, but there are users advocating changing the sub to be about actual steam.

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 2 years ago (7 children)

The community is posting about steam, the water vapor, in retaliation. It's a beautiful thing.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 years ago (3 children)

This is what I want to see from every subreddit that is forcibly reopened. The admins can try and force mods to 'do their jobs', but they sure as shit can't force what can be/gets posted!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

The issue is some groups of mods are terribly afraid of no longer being mods - for whatever reason - so they don't join these efforts.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I was a mod of a 3m subscriber sub…. I do NOT get why mods would give a shit about being removed. Shits really no fun.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I never moderated anything with 3M... I can only imagine the mod queue haha, but I did moderate one at 500K and I totally agree.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I modded one that was like 20-25 active at any given time and even that was a pain in the butt, I can only imagine how much harder it gets as you increase the orders of magnitude.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

@kadu Some people like power more than anything. Being a subreddit moderator just gives them that adrenaline rush of control

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I mean makes sense they might be a little cautious about what they do, cause like if they get removed the people reddit replaces them with aren't gonna let anything supporting the protests go through.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Well, right now they aren't supporting the protests so what's the difference? "Oh we don't want new mods because they won't protest, so we will stop protesting to avoid that!" the only difference is who gets to be called the mod.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Virgin making the sub about John Oliver vs the chad taking the name of the reddit too seriously

I just posted to the steam sub about how much I love steam turbines

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I think they could if they wanted to, I know that some subs actually hide your posts with automod until they get released by the mod team so it stands to reason you could do that on one of the core subs. It wouldn't be fun for the mods and would definitely cause a lot of frustration and issues with people all trying to be the first to post something but then they have to wait 8 hours for a mod to wake up and approve it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago

I love malicious compliance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This reminds me of the early days when you would goto steam.com only to realize that was not the correct website. I just checked and it seems like steam.com has been taken down but if I remember correctly it was some engineering company. I wonder if they are holding out for more cash from Gaben.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The point is the lurkers subscribed there are going to get bored of steam pictures and unsubscribe, if it happens to enough subs then a lot of the passive userbase will end up either spending less time or leave entirely. Since the vast majority of users are lurkers, it'll outweigh the number of people creating these rebellion posts and Reddit should see a net loss in traffic. At least, that's what I've gathered. Please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong or it's a stupid idea

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I'll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you'll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don't understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is "that's just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing".

By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it's not common knowledge.

If people hear "Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate", investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they're currently talking about) they'll remember "we need to be careful with changes or we'll have a reddit moment"

I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he's made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It's absurdly unlikely (not like he's releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).

But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I dunno, I think just remaining closed would have worked better. This will attract additional attention to Reddit. Also, the subreddit wasn't 'forced' back open, the mods just caved under a bit of pressure from the admins (which we don't even know is true. why on earth are they asking the steam subreddit to open back up when there are so many largers subs still private?). Smells like slacktivism to me, and mods who don't want to lose their power. Meh.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

They sent mail to every moderator of a closed subreddit I think. I wasn't specifically targetted. I doubt reddit would really care if /r/piracy opened back up, but they got the threat mail

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I doubt reddit would really care if /r/piracy opened back up

You'd think so, but didn't the head mod get demodded?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I'm not sure how they are actually anticipating this not to go negatively. If they are pushing active moderators and replacing them, that seems like a PR nightmare waiting to happen on top of all of this.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (5 children)

The people who care have left. The people who don't care stayed and they obviously won't give a shit. The only way they're going to give a fuss is when the content torpedoes, which it looks like it's already started.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Quality content creators are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content submitters are mostly gone from Reddit. Quality content commenters are mostly gone from Reddit.
So what's left?
Mods who think they have value and for some reason care about their /r , and working for free.
Ads thinly disguised as posts. Bots spamming and upvoting those fake posts.
And nobody important reading.

The quality difference on lemmy/kbin is staggering. This is the perfect time to be part of it.
It's inevitable it will start to slide once critical mass of users have been reached though. I'm curious if federated and smaller instances will keep it agile and fresh and big corp influence free.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I care and I’m quite enjoying dipping in and adding to the (remarkably John Oliver themed) chaos.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (13 children)

So done with reddit I finally took the time to figure out how federated platforms work. Just started on kbin, and I've been seeing a lot more of what I actually want to see.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I thought spez wasn't worried about reddit's bottomline with these protests?
What a weird way of showing that you're not concerned.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Standard corpo-rat tactics.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am ready and armed with Thomas the Tank Engine memes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thomas had never seen such bullshit before

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

As someone who recently started watching OG Thomas for the first time with my kid I found much humor in this.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Honestly I think all of these subs should just spam the whole spez moderated jailbait thing and have nothing but that in the front page. Even if these subs reopen, they would ruin spez's image even more.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The thing that bothers me is the number of people on the r/steam announcement commenting that the mods are doing this to hold on to power and have sold out to the admins. Speaking as someone who has previously run a community (though a much, much smaller one) there is a lot of hard work and effort that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that these kinds of internet spaces stay clean and healthy. It's easy to say "Look at the power-tripping mods", and yes those do exist, but to pretend that every mod is like that sells short the people who sacrifice of themselves for the betterment of the community. A lot of metaphorical and occasionally literal blood, sweat, and tears go into managing an online social space, which I can attest to. Does that excuse poor mod behavior? Never! However, we shouldn't cut off our own nose to spite our face. I just hope that we can stop fighting ourselves and direct our collective vitriol at the real perpetrators; spez and his cronies.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

but there are users advocating changing the sub to be about actual steam

istg if they do that, itll be one big ass troll to the reddit mod team 💀

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This will definitely leave r/lostredditors really confused

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Next step would be moving beyond pictures of steam / John Oliver and simply jamming subreddits with worthless AI content which forced-back-but-striking mods would no longer remove; the more AI crap is there, the less useful the site is for training AI models, and the whole API scam goes out the window.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

If they do that, it would be hilarious.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I never thought I could continue to enjoy reddit after what they did to Christian Selig and the other 3PA developers, but all this malicious compliance is delicious!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I’m only going on there to support stuff like this, at least until Apollo is turned off. Then I’ll mostly be here.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I thought spez wasn't worried about reddit's bottomline with these protests?
What a weird way of showing that you're not concerned.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

but there are users advocating changing the sub to be about actual steam.

Look at posts in the last 10 hours, they all are lol. Yay!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I just broke my protest since the blackout began to see if PCGaming was still closed and it still is. Nothing but respect for that team. Hope they see it through until reddit decides to go nuclear. I'll gladly create a new account to shit all over the new version.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.

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