cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19466667
Money, Mods, and Mayhem
The Turning Point
In 2024, Reddit is a far cry from its scrappy startup roots. With over 430 million monthly active users and more than 100,000 active communities, it’s a social media giant. But with great power comes great responsibility, and Reddit is learning this lesson the hard way.
The turning point came in June 2023 when Reddit announced changes to its API pricing. For the uninitiated, API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically the secret sauce that allows third-party apps to interact with Reddit. The new pricing model threatened to kill off popular third-party apps like Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig didn’t mince words: “Reddit’s API changes are not just unfair, they’re unsustainable for third-party apps.”
Over 8,000 subreddits went dark in protest.
The blackout should have reminded Reddit’s overlords of a crucial fact: Reddit’s success was built on the backs of its users. The platform had cultivated a sense of ownership among its community, and now that community was biting back.
One moderator summed it up perfectly: “We’re the ones who keep this site running, and we’re being ignored.”
What trips me out is that somehow they still have the video of the dude that somehow survived after blowing his own face off with a shotgun. It’s fucked up, sad and sickening.
Honestly I would have just put him out of his misery if I had found him like that. And no, I will not be linking that video here or anywhere for that matter, it’s pure nightmare fuel.
then what’s the point of crying about it
The point is that once they went public, they said they were gonna be removing certain horrible communities, and the particular community that particular video is on would have been like at the top of the list if I was in charge of Reddit.
But honestly I don’t give a flying fuck.
I remember when they kicked mods off their platform when the subreddits went private on the API retaliation. Now quite a few are on here. Meanwhile, some of those subreddits are still having issues moderating.
Personally I think mods should be rotated once in a while by the community instead of giving power to them indefinitely on communities. But reddit really messed up there. Some mods are mods of hundreds of subreddits which is silly and unsustainable.
It’s such a mess. I mean spez is an ass, but some of those career mods were just as bad. Moderating hundreds of subs because they enjoy the power. And you can tell that was the case when they’d harass random people because they did some little thing that upset them.
Yep. If they were periodically replaced, then the communities might have a better mod (or at least a less burnt out one).
Could moderation be handled democratically with votes and such? Create a system with central authority and you’ll just get people trying to be the central authority.
You end up with the problem of Who Watches The Watchmen all the way down in infinite layers. We don’t really have an inherently trusted party here that could arbitrate a vote. Unless you try to do something funky with blockchain, but I couldn’t tell you about that, that isn’t one of my spell schools.
Reddit was cool. Reddit management had Head Up Ass Syndrome, though. Reminds me of some other social sites too lol.
I’m still running Sync for Reddit using a patch from Vanced. I don’t know why I even bother. That site has gone so far downhill from 10-15 years ago. People used to get flamed for not reading an article or using improper grammar. Comments were, more often than note, well thought out and articulate. Now, the site is a cesspool or memes and idiocracy.
You want flaming for improper grammar, you have 2 flagrant violations in this post which absolutely does not detract from your message. You better continue going about your day not being bothered by this at all. Geez!
(I’m sure I made mistakes here too, go ahead)
It’s not fun when you give me permission!!
It gives me great joy to be reading this via Boost.
Will Reddit seize this opportunity? Or will it continue down its current path of self-destruction?
HAHAhahahaha
And Spez’s response?
“OMG! STOP GOING DARK OR I AND MY LEGION OF SLIME ADMINS WILL REMOVE YOU FROM POWAH!”
And so he did which is why some subreddits came back from being dark. Some subreddits submitted to their own fates. Other subreddits reluctantly came back, proving the protest was just a mere farce that amounted to a nothingburger.
And what did Spez do after the whole fiasco? Why, he punched Reddit into now being Public. Completing what people had long speculated that he’d do.
And what did Spez do after that? He’s now rolling out the concept that Subreddits will be monetized.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing from these incidents and expects it to get better, with that stupid shit eating grin on his face because he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts.
he huffs and breathes in all of Musk’s farts
This is comedic gold. But the bad part? I envisioned it. Thanks a lot.
What do you think he would learn? He got like $190 million dollars in compensation last year, broke the protest, and only lost a small fraction of users. He doesn’t view the site with the same love that we did. It’s just a business to him, and he’s just a soulless executive.
Spez has ultimately learned nothing
He’s learned he can do this shit and make money. It may not be a perpetual money machine. But he now has enough and will milk it for all that’s left. That’s what he’s learned.
Oh the irony getting removed by a mod here. Although its probably in the mod logs somewhere with an actual reason :)
actually it’s not … An admin banned OP (troll account). Seems that no record of comment exists. Kinda a bug in the Lemmy software where logs of banned accounts aren’t stored, or at least I don’t know how to see them.
And he’s getting rich off of it too. I mean, that’s his whole gain, right? Money! He’s given his soul for money. The whole community hates him, but at least he’s gotten rich now. I’m sure reddit’s annual founders parties must be a hoot.
What does he care if a bunch of people that he thinks are losers hate him? He’s sitting on his private yacht, anchored just off his private country club, and eating lobster in the hot tub. He’s a major world player now. He doesn’t give a fuck what reddit users think of him.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists, Reddit users seem to have a knack for taking it up dry than doing anything about their problems.
I guess that is truly Reddit’s nature.
Well, it’s dort of an anti-survivorship bias. Those that still sick around seem to not care even if it gets as bad as the other Corpo sites.
For a group of so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists
Those were the early days of Reddit. They’re long gone now that everyone has joined. Those so-called intellectuals and rowdy revolutionists have now abandoned Reddit. It’s mostly just the sheep left there now.
It’s the same story with Twitter.
I’m a sheep and I left reddit. Bah.
Has anyone told them? I think they might not know that.
ok…
but does this mean I could get my account back in the next few months/next year?😭😭😭
How can the demise of reddit be hastened ? Its bloated corpse clogs up the pipes of the internet still.
I heard that 99% of the internet traffic is marketing bots fucking each other
The remaining 1% is those humans still plugged into the matrix, they won’t be able to escape until the pipes get unclogged of all the Web 2.0 big tech floatsam still swimming around.
Reddit certainly had issues prior to the 2023 API change, but that really was a pivotal moment for sure. Overnight we lost apps we loved and people who made the platform what it is abandoned it or worse - were forced out. Good content creators fled, resulting in a lot less quality content.
And we all know how the mods Reddit appointed handled things. Now, I’m not saying they’re ALL nazi’s, but there’s folks running the show who would fit in perfectly with the ‘just following orders’ mindset…
The platform needs to die, the stock needs to tank and the people involved need to be drummed out of the business entirely.
For a site that says it doesn’t care about reddit, there sure are alot of posts about it.
not if I eat it first!
Fuck reddit …fuck the mods who abuse their power. Fuck the bots. Fuck the corporate greed bs. The admins have always been cool to me until I was perma ban. But kind of seem like nice folks.
Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.
On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:
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On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)
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As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)
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Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”
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Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.
Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.
I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.
If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.
I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.
Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.
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Thank you for all your posts here
Best thing to ever happen on reddit is the guy that posted on askreddit how to set the site language back to English because he accidentally set it to Spanish… and everyone posted their replies only in Spanish.
That was peak reddit.
Holy smokes. Beautiful
I got rickrolled by Firefox built in translation.
“Test Post, Please Ignore,” and that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera were high points for me.
that guy who took increasingly elaborate pictures of himself taking the previous picture of his camera
This one: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/hey_reddit_what_tattoos_do_you_have/c0tpyls/
Make sure to click
[+][deleted] 14 years ago (156 children)to get even more.
holy fucking shit that’s awesome
I remember Reddit helping to make a kid do his homework.
Thank you! God the official site is so bad.
yw :)
they’ll be fine. as evidenced by twitter, there is absolutely no amount of enshittification that will make some people leave
That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.
Hasn’t Twitter lost ~30 million active users, about 10%, since Musk bought it? Plus there’s probably going to be a couple million more gone from the Brazil ban.
I’m also willing to bet a ton of the remainder are bot or alt accounts for people too.
My girlfriend doesn’t use Twitter but the platforms she does use she has multiple accounts on and I bet a lot of people do that too.
Musk himself said there are way more bots than he thought when he was trying to weasel out of buying the site. That was before AI that could solve recaptchas, and respond like a human. Imagine how many bots there are now.
Reminds me of the handful of big subs on reddit who had no new posts for days when they banned bots lul.
i guess you dont remember digg https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/
That only works when there’s competition. There’s like 5 sites left on the Internet. It’s been centralized and monopolized.
Fuck, I remember Yahoo.
It was never cool but in the stone age it was hip for about 30 minutes.
Let me tell you tales of the mythical Geocities…
I wish my old angelfire site was still around…
Neocities is now, old man!
I missed digg. I was on fark before reddit and somehow fark is still around and hasn’t changed at all
Slashdot is still kicking around too. Remember the Slashdot effect?
Yeah I remember when cmdrtaco was in charge. It was great back then. Now it’s full of anti woke stuff.
Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.
Weirdly enough, I never cared for Yahoo. Back in the late 90s, their homepage was a cluttered mess
Always but for a few minutes there it was the only niftily human-curated view of “The Internet”.
Interesting, I never used digg and didn’t know about it’s history. It seems like they could have easily fought back bots with captchas, email verification, phone verification and so on.
Phone verification? In 2010? Only 20% of US citizens had a smartphone in 2010. That kind of verification was extremely rare at the time. Privacy was still very much a thing, sites that requested personal data like that was regarded with suspicion.
I mean phone number verification like steam does. It’s only one of many possibilities when you are a major company.
Digg era is very different than today. Peak user for Digg is 30million, while Reddit and Twitter is 330million and 368million respectively, almost 10 times the different. As demonstrated by Twitter, even in its worst form they only lose like 30million user. Reddit won’t go anywhere, the vibe though, will.
I keep seeing YouTubers who host their own subreddits still mentioning Reddit a lot in their videos. Yeah, some people probably don’t even care what happened.
A big streamer I watch is sorta in that camp. He mentions his subreddit all the time and it’s an active part of stream/communication with chat, he bitches at reddit and it’s broader base all the time but I see no signs of moving away from it.
