this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023

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Reddit mods are organizing blackouts to protest against API changes (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.

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

Was thinking perhaps subreddits could just stop moderating and auto approve everything en masse... that would create a spam hell more beautiful than anything we would have seen before...

Unmarked NSFW stuff highly upvoted on the front page, crypto bullshit in every sub, every subreddit doing a "If this gets 2 times X votes, I post again" making the frontpage useless. It would be total anarchy and cause Reddit to implode on itself before you can say "What Snoo".

I doubt this will happen in reality because people actually care about preserving their subreddits. Anyway enough pipedreaming.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

If what they're saying is true, that might happen anyway. A lot of moderation is done using third party bots that use the API. Without those, it all has to be done manually and no one has time for that. Even then a lot of the manual moderation is done using third party tools (again, impacted by the API change).

Reddit's about to pull an implosion that'll make Twitter and Digg look like blips. I got the heck out of there and now I'm just sitting back with my popcorn and tea watching it all burn down.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's a good thing in my opinion, although it probably won't accomplish anything. But it's also a good time to abandon the sinking ship and try out new things - hey lemmy :-)

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

Glad to see so many subreddits contributing to this. Reddit IPO is the worst thing that happened to it and the original founders would have never allowed reddit to get to this point.

The thing is that people would gladly play 2-5usd/mo to keep 3rd party clients but Reddit is making super difficult on purpose. No way they are getting 5usd/mo per user from ads.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

This is the third time Ive written this out because Jerboa keeps crashing so Im using the web interface instead!

Hopefully, I'll remember the salient points I made and maybe be even more succinct!

and the original founders would have never allowed Reddit to get to this point.

Unfortunately, at least one of the original founders has allowed, quite possibly even driven this policy. Steve Huffman is still very much at the helm and what he has exposed of himself in interviews, he doesn't sound like a very nice person (re: post apocalypse, he sees himself being on top and having slaves)

It's great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted.

Remember the jailbait (and worse) subs that they allowed for so long (and were rumoured to have participated in) and when they finally did something after Anderson Cooper shone a light under that dark, seedy rock, they picked their sacrificial lamb and blamed it all on him? Remember the secret santa parallel site someone set up that Reddit then forcibly absorbed and let wilt? Remember how they dealt with Victoria who arranged all the celebrity IAMA's? Remember how they brought in Ellen Pao (with her own set of issues) to deal with horrific amount of far right and misogynist subs that were actively calling for peoples and groups deaths, and then threw her under the bus once they got what they needed? Remember how they were banning people and deleting posts when it was revealed that 5 mod accounts were basically controlling the top 100 subs? Remember how they appointed to the admins a person who was found to be grooming teens and was supportive of their father who was convicted of serious sexual assault of a child?

The list is never-ending....

The sad fact of the matter is that centralised social medias one driving factor is money. They acquire that via data points collection from engagement. They dont care what kind of engagement as long as theres plenty of it and hateful content drives engagement.

There is no sense of community among the admins and execs of Reddit. It is entirely from the users.

The original founders allowed this to happen, if they didn't drive this. Many similar times previously, and undoubtedly, many more times to come.

Maybe Reddit, just like every other centralised, corporate owned social media sites time is over?

I just dont believe its something worth fighting for, despite how commendable the actions of all those subs is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

That’s what I want too. It’s time to take more control over platforms we use (and platforms that make money off of us existing). I’m happy most blackout posts either mention lemmy as an alternative directly, or it’s in the top 5 comments.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

I support the blackouts, and I'm happy to see some of the larger subreddits starting to join, but I highly doubt this will change the API policy. The Reddit administration knew they were committing to a destructive course of action; they are not stupid, they're pursuing an aggressive, purposeful corporate monetization strategy. That said, I do hope more major subreddits speak out, and I think the 48-hour blackout will open some users' eyes to Reddit's questionable philosophy.

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

Not surprised to see /r/ProCSS in that list. It was founded in response to another of Reddit's terrible decisions. Speaking of which, I wonder if Lemmy could be made to support community-specific CSS stylesheets like old Reddit could? That'd be neat. Of course, it would need to support user-created communities first.

I also wonder if any of those subreddits will direct people to the Fediverse. Hope so.

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

@argv_minus_one Oh yeah, I remember when they promised that CSS support was coming... 7 years ago. As for redirecting people to the Fediverse, some of the apps like RedReader are openly considering it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/13ylk42/update_3_reddit_effectively_kills_off_third_party/

"Right now I'm considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction."

Personally I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if some of these app creators hosted their own Fediverse instance and sent all their users to it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Problem: millions of redditors currently use third-party Reddit apps. Abruptly sending millions of people to the Lemmy instance you just deployed is a sure-fire way to break it, and maybe bring down the whole federated network of Lemmy instances. Lemmy currently has issues scaling above a few hundred users, as Beehaw has recently discovered, let alone millions.

Problem: Lemmy is a completely different protocol, and there's less than a month left before all third-party Reddit apps become useless and everyone uninstalls them. That's an exceedingly tight timetable and an exceedingly unforgiving deadline.

That said, it's now or never; death or glory. We're not going to get another chance to bring over that many people to Lemmy all at once.

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

@argv_minus_one Is that scaling problem a software issue, or a hosting issue? There are other Fediverse platforms like Akkoma that use Elixir, so maybe they'd fair better? Could also pick several federated instances to distribute users to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Lemmy is written in async Rust. The language isn't going to create a scaling problem. Well-written async Rust applications have handled vastly heavier workloads than Lemmy without a hitch.

There are, however, some serious performance bottlenecks that need to be dealt with, and it remains to be seen whether any more bottlenecks remain undiscovered in either the protocol or the implementation. To be honest, as someone working on a Rust+Postgres application myself, this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

Hosting can of course be an issue as well. I'm under the impression that Beehaw had to go up several tiers in its hosting plan in the last few days in response to the surge in demand. I assume this was done to work around the aforementioned bottlenecks by simply throwing more hardware at the problem, but I don't know.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Very good. People have had enough.

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

Yup, old time reddit user here. Sad to see this, but excited to see where the change will lead.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight.

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