I just did a wholesale purge of all of my accounts - overwrote and deleted content, then deleted the accounts. Figured the "delete my shit" APIs are probably also getting effed with on July 1st. It was a good run.
The way this is playing out is kind of fascinating. I'll be really interested to see how this works out in 6-12 months. Original blackout was expected to last 2 days. This was always stupid; what incentive does Reddit have to do anything if they know when the blackout ends? A bunch of subs say "fuck it" and stay dark indefinitely Reddit is now threatening the mods to open their subs or they will be wholesale replaced Mod reaction is anywhere along the spectrum of a cowardly, "yes sir right away sir," to "fuck you do it," to some communities announcing that their subs are now John Oliver fan subs and all submissions must be of John Oliver. /r/pics, /r/aww, /r/art to name a few. With the sheer amount of free labor the moderators provide, I have a really hard time believing this comes out well for Reddit. They can absolutely weather the storm - replace some mods, open new subs to replace old ones, change who appears on the front page... But they still have a moderator problem. Even if they budgeted to pay people, there's no way the quality of moderation from paid employees would come close to the quality that comes from dedicated enthusiasts running niche subs. And they can't afford to just pay the whole moderator base.
I would love to see a number on how many moderators they would have to pay and how much it would cost them. Wasn't it during the ama that spez said they weren't profitable, so now they are going to pay more, sure makes sense.
There was an estimate that said that Reddit mods do ~$3.4m worth of work each year. Reddit's size dwarfs that actual number so they could probably figure out a way to pay mods and be profitable. I've seen a few attempts to reconcile that figure which suggest it's significantly smaller than it needs to be, but the bigger issue isn't exactly that mods should be paid. The bigger issue is that a huge chunk of Reddit's real content - that is, something other than memes or cat pictures or subs whose topics are primarily a Twitter aggregator - comes from passionate communities that are modded by people who have a personal interest and vision for the community. The reason I append half of my Google searches with `site:reddit.com` are because there are a lot of subreddits run by mods who love the topic and cultivate good discussion. They can absolutely eject the existing mods, force the communities back open, and bring in new people or even pay employees to do it, but you won't replace that voluntary, high quality labor that comes from someone invested in success of a niche community. They can't pay 10k mods to handle each community, so hiring employees to do it will result in an extreme homogenization of the site as a bunch of full time employees figure out how to be effective mods of a hundred subreddits each. Reddit will survive this in some form, it's just my opinion that this is a tipping point - in any community, usually only about 1% of the members are real content creators, they're the most vocal, and those people are the ones you can ill-afford to alienate. "spez" thinks it's fine because if all of those people leave it's just a 1% drop in ad views, but he's not accounting for the future loss in content.
Isn’t that the point? They are aiming for an IPO, so sanitizing and diluting the hell of it seems to be the objective in the ramp-up to going public. I wonder if any subreddits will pull a /r/Cringetopia and break off to try and form a knock-off version.
So far they've only: Emphasized to the world that they rely on volunteer labor who might revolt at any time Disrupted moderation to the point where communities are leaving or functionally destroying themselves Exposed the fact that they might have a large, unaccounted for cost in future paid moderation Highlighted that their CEO sucks at long-term strategy and doesn't understand how to deal with his community At this point they are just putting underlines and exclamation points around the riskier aspects of their business. The funny part is this was strategically so simple. Figure out a tiered cost model. Provide a 6 month runway for existing apps. Engage the users. Don't publicly lie and scapegoat developers with a loyal userbase. A monkey could have figured this out. 3rd party apps are already a minority of users, layering on a small cost would reduce that number even further, and with enough runway you could boil the frogs without causing an uproar. When I say paying mods will result in homogenizing the site, I don't mean that this is their goal - they emphatically do not want to pay mods. I'm saying that this is a binary choice - either people treat communities as passion projects and thus dump shocking amounts of time into those communities for free, or Reddit pays mods/solicit scabs and that's going to torpedo a lot of effort and any attachment that the serious content creators have to the site. It's my view that the latter turns them into Facebook Groups but with a dramatically less sticky network effect that makes leaving pretty easy.
Agree with everything here. I am just trying to understand what might be the leadership's thought process, but seems like it’s fairly myopic in terms of how they view content interaction on their site. I think one of the primary reasons they don't want to pay moderators, aside from shelling out millions of dollars that they otherwise feel they don't have to, is that if they pay the mods of the major subs, they risk those turning around and unionizing. It is much easier to wave away those demands when they're volunteers. I think Reddit shot itself in the foot early on allowing power mods to manage their subs like little fiefdoms. I would have been nice if Digg didn't do everything in its power to kill itself. I actually dislike Reddit, in general. I get way more out of the small, niche subs with <10k members than any of the larger ones.
Great post by the author of Apollo, the main way I consume Reddit. https://reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/
“Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.” Oof. Also: https://www.engadget.com/reddit-hac...in-threat-to-leak-80gb-of-data-114041164.html
I go back to my initial comment that the incompetence shown here has been absolutely staggering. Musk bought a platform, bled advertisers left and right, cut its value to a third of what he paid for it, and is losing the few valued employees that he hasn't fired. In a year. Reddit's CEO publicly says that's something to emulate. Apollo's creator is humiliating them in the court of public opinion. Just dragging them over cobblestones and broken glass. Pointing out obvious and repeated lies, and the whole platform is massing behind him. Over what? Shuttering a few apps this month instead of watching them bleed users for a year and close themselves. The AMA was just... *chef's kiss* Perfect. Couldn't have gone worse for them. I have no idea what anyone involved in this clown show is doing. It'd be a lot funnier if it wasn't murdering one of the last places on this SEO-ridden hellscape of the internet where you could find a centralized, categorized, searchable repository of useful information.
Yeah I think you mentioned before that you look for search results specifically from Reddit since it’s one of the few places to get an actual human response. I do the same thing. API-greed death is one helluva way to go out. First Digg shoots itself in the head with a horrific redesign and now this.
So... in a huge instance of malicious compliance, a growing number of the larger subs (including r/videos, r/shittylifeprotips, and r/interestingasfuck) have now re-opened; however, they're now allowing the subs to be flooded with porn, or just defaulting to every post being labeled as NSFW since Reddit cannot advertise/monetize with NSFW content.
bastard... I thought you'd embedded a YT video and that warning was on my end. I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin and I've had 2 YT warnings pop up over the last 6 weeks, but zero other issues. Nothing like that indicating it would be blocked after 3 videos.
@Nettdata @Binary looking for a job as a window 3.11/ms-dos admin that runs a german railway company https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...ed-admin-job-for-30-year-old-operating-system
Wild that MSFT kept supporting 3.11 for Workgroups until 2008, 15 years after NT-based Windows had been on the market.
Wonder what it pays? Definitely a niche skillset these days - I have to imagine the overlap between "people with significant MS-DOS/Windows for Workgroups experience" and "people looking for a new job" is somewhat narrow to start with, so you'd need something to entice them.
That, and i find it scary that a railway system is relying an old what i assume is a 486 or a pentium 100, running windows 3.11 to keep there stuff going.