They are also banning anyone that mentions it lmaoooo
Reddit will claim it never happened, but here's a picture of a different website.
Yeah someone on here said they were going to do this, just commandeer the subs and reopen them and replace the mods.
They threatened it last time a blackout of this size happened, but this is the first time they actually went through with it.
Frankly reddit was fucked from the start, all mods hate the admins because when I was a mod, they just gave us new rules to follow and enforce without any discussion and wrote them in the most obscure way. And if you don't enforce those rules, you can get your account banned (as a mod) and your subreddit banned too.
Then you also get a lot of hate mail when you ban someone or even if you don't do anything because there's always some salty lib who has a problem with the way you do things.
Mods also didn't have a way to contact admins for information on new rules, ask questions or receive information early. We discovered the rules the same time as the users did, by checking r/reddit or whatever (good luck if you unsubscribed from it). And we were expected to start enforcing them.
When mods finally started speaking up about it is when they realised they ALL had bad experiences with the admins, like admins being shocked that mods actually received hate mail lol
Fuck yeah. This is the response I was hoping for. It's going to be obnoxious to lose control of r/modernart and r/snackexchange, but the website needs to burn and that requires instability. If the quality of the subreddits degrades and the users hate the scab mods they see as being responsible for that, mods that have to work with worse versions of the tools we currently have, that's a feedback loop of instability. I have only found like three people in the past five years who have been willing to actively moderate r/snackexchange for more than a couple weeks and they put in a lot of work to keep the subreddit functioning in spite of reddit.
Every subreddit should become r/Antiwork.
Yeah, this is the beginning of the end for Reddit. They don't even realise yet, but this is all the admin team has left to do anyway.
Reddit is in contradiction with its moderators, and its moderators are in contradiction with its users. It's an unstable system that simply can't survive forever.
Mods get orders from the admins (who don't use the platform) about rules to follow, and then the mods have to enforce those on the users who see the mods as cops, essentially. But the admins and the users are not in contradiction because they never interact. However, mods perform free labour for Reddit so that the admins, who represent Reddit Inc, can get that ad money.
Now they're bringing in their own mods, but they are not solving the contradiction. I guarantee you that in a few months down the line these new mods are going to be asking to be formally employed by reddit, and then either get sacked and replaced with whoever will want to take the job afterwards. Or a handful of them will be employed and then required to moderate most subreddits. Overworked, they will disable the creation of new subreddits and you'll have to use just the few remaining approved ones.
Reddit is done either way, it only has a few years left at most. After that either it shuts down, or it will become so small that it'll be an insignificant website.
I can easily see it spiraling into something like that too. When a subreddit gets above like 10k users, that's a whole-ass customer service-ass job without set working hours. Above 100k, the mod team is pseudo-professionalised and it's insufferable. 1m+, let alone the 10-50m user subreddits, must have a massive mod queue requiring constant attention and bringing unending harassment. Swapping out the mods is a bandaid solution to one symptom of the problem while heightening all of its contradictions. Those mods are going to be seen as Spez's pinkertons at the exact moment he makes the website worse for the userbase. One of those three groups is bound to break under pressure.
Problem is he can swap them out once, twice, maybe thrice if we're being generous, but after that I don't think he'll find people to take the job willingly. He might start naming new mods without asking them, and they'll promptly tell him to fuck off and will not moderate anything. Once the scab mods realise they can organise together (like how they got the admins to finally do some baby steps towards reconciliating with them) and they can demand money for this, because they're already doing this job for reddit, then it's over for spez.
I assume the new mods are getting paid, either by reddit or the security state
I'm not sure the scab mods will rebel. They are after all taking the job in the midst of a large scale protest. Clearly they care more about the "power" they wield than the cause of preserving API access. I will say that they may be overwhelmed and will almost certainly do a worse job given that they no longer have access to the custom mod tools that required the free API.
I don’t think he’ll find people to take the job willingly
When the subs are big, the number of professionalized power users and the market incentives for control of the sub are equally big. We're nowhere near a day in which there's not some serious incentive to moderate /r/politics, for instance. Nevermind /r/pics, /r/worldnews, or /r/movies. The sheer volume of HailCorporate alone on those sites...
Once the scab mods realise they can organise together
How many of these mods are in any position to organize? And how many are just professional social media accounts controlled by marketing teams?
You think the schlub intern at Conde Naste is interested in forming a solidarity coalition with the schlub interns at Ford Modeling Agency and the Washington Post?
Mods get orders from the admins (who don’t use the platform) about rules to follow, and then the mods have to enforce those on the users who see the mods as cops, essentially.
so what you're saying is that society can't last forever
Reddit is in contradiction with its moderators, and its moderators are in contradiction with its users. It’s an unstable system that simply can’t survive forever.
I mean... maybe? The subs that didn't close down seem to be as active as ever. And so much of Reddit is faux-participation anyway, what with the amount of bot activity that's been there practically since day one.
If every single active user were to walk away from Reddit for a year, I wonder how much of the site would even change?
snack exchange
Perhaps I’m too paranoid, but is it wise to be buying consumables from reddit sellers :alex-aware:
I originally made it to challenge that "they're poisoning the Halloween candy" myth. In almost a decade there's never been a poisoning. Instead it's scams and to a much lesser extent doxxing. Maybe 5% of trades result in one person not sending a box. Once I had a case where this woman temporarily couldn't afford postage so her partner looked through her account history, found posts about wanting to leave her abusive husband, and blackmailed her for snacks after finding that husband's email address and threatening to forward the posts. Spent the night on the phone with the Viennese police trying to explain that I'm from the internet and this person I don't know is threatening suicide because she'll be killed if she goes home because an Austrian guy wants bad chocolate.
This is why I have 50 different accounts for every social site. 45 of them to shitpost, 4 of them to ask various IRL questions, and 1 account to conduct financial transactions
1 account for everything, 1 account for roleplaying as my dog's new agency so the illusion isn't broken by me referencing something in a different post. :screm-cool:
The corgi is a Maoist-Third Worldist and calls me a lib and tells me to read theory.
A fair number of my r/DPRS posts are self-effacing as the only member of the working class in Sashatown. He threatens me with secret police. It's absurd I have to live under these authoritarian conditions but that's tankies for you.
The best opsec is to have 50 different people using one account :very-smart:
Spent the night on the phone with the Viennese police trying to explain that I’m from the internet and this person I don’t know is threatening suicide because she’ll be killed if she goes home because an Austrian guy wants bad chocolate.
Pretty sure this is an Original Sentence.
The mod position is intoxicatingly powerful. And Reddit is overflowing with bloated egos and yes-men.
But I wonder if these positions are even going to "scab mods" so much as they're being handed out to internal Reddit admins or low-rent contractors. Not like the website can't just farm this shit out to the Philippines like its any other thankless maintenance tier job.
wouldn't it be funny if someone from here applied to be the main mod and got it?
I am going to pretend to be a shitstain scab mod and ask for control of /r/chapotraphouse.
:sickomogus:
Apparently they used an existing mechanism where a lower-ranked mod can request to take over a subreddit if the higher-ranked mods are inactive or hostile or whatever. Which has never been used quite this way before, and has never moved this fast before, but is officially a thing they do.
Thought it was worth pointing out, since the people with actual power twisting existing rules to fit new needs is the beating heart of liberalism.
twisting existing rules to fit new needs is the beating heart of liberalism.
Wonder if they are gonna learn from this :agony-acid:
:so-true: The free market is so free and not authoritarian like those evil commies
They are also banning anyone that mentions it
Based on past Reddit meltdowns, this has the potential to ignite this shit even worse- nothing gets them pissed more than muh censorship :sicko-yes:
The websites that redditors are migrating too don't even have a public API, but that's none of my business. :kermit-pain:
On the other hand chapo.chat and Lemmy are actually usable on a phone browser.
Also they don't have ads. People use the 3rd party apps for no ads.
It does have an API. There are already apps including an official Android one. The web frontend probably also uses it. Plus it's ActivityPub
Lemmy instances or something else? Lemmy's API is well enough documented: https://join-lemmy.org/api/ (wrappers in other languages exist)
There's LemmyBB even, my preferred flavor.
