Quote from the post:

Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.

The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.

In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.

So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.

  • I honestly think more subs need to do an indefinite shut down.

    If it’s only for 48 hours Reddit can just wait it out, and if not a lot of subs join in on the indefinite shut down they can just replace the mods for new ones.

    However, in my opinion, the buggest change will come June 30th when 3rd party apps shut down since that’s when users will actualy stop using Reddit.

    Let’s hope it’s enough users to make a change. I myself will be deleting everything and my account on June 30th. Let’s hope something changes.

    • An indefinite shutdown would not work - the moderators of the subs who perform them will be kicked out and be replaced by people who want to keep the subs in operation. Plus, it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise. I think a 48 hour protest is reasonable, but beyond that, there’s not a whole lot you can do.

      • it’s a disservice to people who do use Reddit as a resource for work or otherwise

        While true, between this and the Twitter fallout I’m hoping more people are seeing the folly of making dependencies of centralised services that they do not own and have zero sway over management decisions of.

        There were many people pleading with folk to stay on Twitter because of the communities they had built or the activist work they had been achieving… but that was all built on a house of cards.

        Now is the time to do the work to shift away from depending on platforms that don’t care about their users real needs & embrace a better way of being!

        I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here 😂

        • I appreciate I’m likely preaching to the choir here

          Yeah but it amazes me how many people just don’t get it. People on reddit looking for an alternative… “let’s go to lemmy”, “nah there’s lefty weirdos”, “ok let’s go to <closed source reddit clone>”, “ok this is gonna work out great!”

        • I’ve been trying to constantly educate others about the importance of shifting to de-centralized platforms. That’s the conversation that needs to be happing. Both online and IRL.

          I’m new to Lemmy but started using Mastodon 3 years ago. Been exciting to see it explode since the enshitification of Twitter and really hoping to see the same thing here.

        • I run a site for owners of a very specific model of RV, of which they only made less than 2,000, and who knows how many are still on the road (they ended production in 2000).

          There’s also a Facebook group. The Facebook group is good for general conversation - hey, I’ll be in Colorado, anyone near there? - but for technical issues, it’s frustrating, because if someone does answer the question, it’s difficult to find in the future. And Facebook’s algorithms mean that the topics aren’t presented in time order or anything like that, so you can easily miss a post that has something important to you but isn’t a major discussion topic.

          And then, it’s all controlled by a company, so if Facebook decides to clean up old stuff tomorrow, there’s nothing we can do. “But it’s so hard to use the forum!” because I have self registration turned off and you have to email me for an account (spammers). Meanwhile the Facebook group gets t-shirt spammers about twice a month.

          It drives me nuts.

          • Lemmy and personal forums have a similar issue though. Just like users were previously at the whim of the large company to provide service, now they rely on you. What if you were to get board of running the forum or (however terrible) something were to happen to you?

            Now the site and all of it’s content is lost for the users permanently. Lemmy instances also have this problem. They rely entirely on a single administrator, (or small group of them). In the Web1.0 days this wasn’t such a large issue, because websites were most often read-only for content consumption and web forums were small and populated by niche tech savvy people. These days however, the users create a lot of the content that is hosted and they naturally expect it to persist.

            Lemmy needs some way of allowing users to port their profile and content from one instance to another, and a redundancy system where instances can partner with others to host data for redundancy purposes, or something to that effect. Maybe users pay a small hosting fee for their own content and it’s not tied to an instance? Though I’m not sure how that would work, I’m just spitballing.

            There’s a lot of problems to solve, and this fediverse is a very interesting idea, but it’s not perfect and introduces a lot of questions. I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of good, but I’m not sure entrusting the longevity of the content to admins of a particular server is the best plan.

            • You’re correct, though my forum could be archived on the Internet archive (I’m not sure if it is, but it could be).

              I agree with your general point though, there are still single points of failure in Lemmy.

      • To some degree, you’re right, reddit probably won’t change regardless of what mods do. If they really are feeling the blackout, as you’d say they’ll probably just replace the moderators and open the community back up, rather than reverse their decision.

        However, I feel like it’s reddit doing the disservice to their users, not mods who are taking action by protesting. Ultimately, and if reddit do replace the mods and try and continue as normal, then it sends a stronger message to the community that reddit doesn’t care about or respect them and it’s not a not a good place to continue being.

        In the dynamic between reddit the company running the site and the users, there is limited power users have against reddit which holds a lot of power, but protesting like what’s happening now one of the main tools users have.

      • If neither option will work then take whatever option causes your opponent the most trouble. I very much doubt they want to shake up moderation on thousands of subreddits overnight.

        • I’m also dubious of how possible it is to replace moderators outright. These are all individual communities with at least somewhat separate tools of moderation let alone unique practices that have made the community what it is. Does videos still feel like videos with an entire different moderation team? Maybe, but I bet the niche crochet community won’t.

  • Good on the mod team of /r/videos! It must have been a difficult decision to walk away from a 26M+ sized community but I think it’s definitely better to scuttle the ship and go down with it than capitulate at this point. This is a bold choice that’s left Reddit between a rock and a hard place.

    • Yup this is massive and it’s not a niche subreddit. That means, most likely, more will follow. Sure, reddit will probably force it back online with new mods or whatever, but THIS is how you make a statement. Hat’s off r/videos!

      • Damage is done, there’s no coming back for reddit. Spez showed his true hand and how he doesn’t care and is willing to lie to us all for the sake of profit.

        Opensource for the win

        Federated sites for the win

        We don’t need a for profit company to provide what reddit provided.

        Even if they backtracked, I sorely hope no one believes them and goes back.

        It’s not just about the API to me, reddit became toxic and there’s government psy ops all over it using botnets

  • For me it’s a double sided problem. Even if reddit solves the moderation tools problem which user the api (and they will because those are the tools of the free labor they explore) there will be still the problem with the user experience. Even if subreddits reopen I will never use the official reddit app, the same way I refuse to use the official twitter app since apps like Falcon Pro, Flamingo or Talon stopped working.

    Reddit CEO can bargain the deal he wants that I don’t care anymore. For me reddit is now only a repository where I will continue to search specific information. It is no more a place where I want to participate in online communities.

    • That was my line of thought as well, however…

      Reddit will stop being a good information repo very quickly as users who actually know what they’re talking about leave and the information stops being up to date. The trend of adding “reddit” to every google search will die out soon.

    • Yeah - the AMA with spez was the writing on the wall. No matter what/how users protest, they can only delay the inevitable changes. I deleted my 10+ year old account and cut my losses. The last thing I want in my social media is platform drama.

    • I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen too.

      They’ll kick dissident mods out, install their own, and just reopen the subs like nothing happened. There’s precedent of that happening I believe (although for much more reasonable reasons, like mods going rogue for stupid or anti-free speech stuff).

      And it’s going to be an absolute shitshow. I feel sad, but I also kind of love it. You reap what you sow, I guess.

        •  GraceGH   ( @GraceGH@beehaw.org ) 
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          301 year ago

          Someone on the fediverse (might be here?) asked “Do you want Lemmy to succeed or do you just want reddit to burn?”

          I’ve landed on “both, for independant reasons.” Its been high time reddit’s corporate greed gets checked, and what a better way to go than an icarus flight?

          •  Satouru   ( @satouru@beehaw.org ) 
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            211 year ago

            I agree!

            I want Reddit to fail because they overestimate their value and think that their software is why Reddit is popular (even though, let’s face it, the software was absolute garbage during the time where Reddit became popular, and is still is, albeit for different reasons).

            I want the Fediverse (and not specifically Lemmy or Beehaw, although I’m in love with both at the moment) to succeed because I think that the idea behind it gives the communities that it hosts total control about what they want to do, regardless on the people that hosts them.

            So it’s not really that different, as it all boils down to the same point: the importance of communities is paramount, and the tools that are given for that are important but also mere accessories. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but I think that it gets the general idea.

        • But here’s the thing: are you going to miss Reddit or the communities that they allowed you to partake in?

          Because there’s no reason to miss the former - and you’ll miss the latter either way because a lot of people are going to just stop using Reddit after the changes come into effect anyway, so the community will certainly change.

          I think that this move made most of us lose something. Which is certainly sad, but we’ll lose it either way, so might as well get rid of the platform they hurt us, right?

      • Call me paranoid, but imo, Reddit might just install ML based mods. I’ve seen quite some progress from these tools recently and they might pull it off.

        What that will do to the emergent culture of each sub will be a big unknown.

    • I’d kinda love to see that, it’d be huge. Could even get some of the larger sub mods to maybe open kbin or lemmy instances instead? I’d be great to have their motivation and talent in a community not dependent on reddit’s good will.

  • This is great to hear! Unfortunately the reddit exodus will likely splinter a bunch of niche communities, but it will definitely be for the best. I’m all down for the “de-consolidation” of the internet!

    • The tricky thing will be the small niche communities that are already hosted on Reddit. For example, there is a group of us dorks who are really into home automation with HomeKit. I’d hate for that small group to splinter into smaller groups that are so small that they’re no longer a good source of collective knowledge.

      I don’t really have a great solve for that problem, but as someone who does experience and service design by trade, I’ve found this to be a fun puzzle to marinate on over the past few weeks.

      • That’s where most of my devastation lays with all of this. Parting ways with reddit was more and more in the back of my mind steadily over the last few years. I was only holding on due to being active in some of those small, niche communities. I finally deleted my reddit account the other day and have no intention of going back, and I feel horrible about what will happen to those little communities but I cannot continue to support the big, soulless corporation that reddit has been striving to be.

        It’s going to be a weird and interesting transition period for a part of the online commhnity going forward. We can only hope for the best!

      • Yeah that is a really tricky thing, even if those communities decide to go “we’re moving to ______”, they will inevitably be leaving behind a lot of their userbase, and be giving up a large amount of SEO and discoverability. The large number of users is what gave reddit its value, so I can only hope that groups that might disperse find a central place again. I definitely don’t envy the position this leaves moderators in rn.

        • My big fear is that a lot of niche communities might move to discord, which will really hurt discoverability. One of my favorite things about reddit is that if I am listening to a new band that I like, there’s a good chance I can find a subreddit named after them with plenty of fans who are happy to discuss their music.

          Being locked behind a discord server is even worse, because it is very difficult to preserve the messages and posts made there.

          • Absolutely - discord is probably one of the worst choices to host a “discussion board” type page for those reasons. They are well on the path of enshittification too with all the bloaty unnecessary features they’ve added over the years.

            • The over reliance on Discord has made me give up participating in some reddit communities, too. It sucks to start a discussion only to be told by regulars That its frequently discussed in the Discord and I should look there.

              No. Discord is IRC 2.0, not forums for preserving convos like reddit and lemmy.

                • The forum feature feels half-baked when you have to click through bots to even access the knowledgebase. IDK. I’m old school and from an era of the internet where chat interfaces where chat interfaces and forums were kept separate. I don’t appreciate the threading in Discord because it makes past conversations harder to follow, not easier for me.

            • When I was part of a group searching for alternatives to GoodReads, one of the problems I had a hell of a hard time explaining to some users was the “walled garden” effect. They just couldn’t understand why having posts be invisible to search engines and forcing non-members to sign up in order to see posts was the kiss of death when it came to potential growth.

          • Agreed. I love Discord for having a hub for friends groups or gaming groups or whatever, it’s nice to have everything in one place, but when you want a discoverable forum, discord is not the place. It’s a communications hub, not social media.

      • I was thinking the exact same thing. My interests are home automation with Home assistant and media management with sonarr/radarr and associated programs. Reddit is such an incredible resource for those communities, it’s gonna be hard to replace.

        • Reddit didn’t have the breadth of communities back when it had it’s initial big growth spurt from the digg migration. In time this whole thing could match it.

      • This is absolutely a concern for me as well. There are plenty of niche communities of which I am a part on Reddit and I hope they don’t splinter out. We will see what happens! Guess it’s hold your breath and explore alternatives (hence me finding Lemmy).

  • Absolutely incredible to see. Very happy that one of biggest subs called reddits bluff. Which I believe is where we are. Reddit thinks the users that actually care about 3rd party apps will move on at this point and reddit will have the everyone else switch to their apps with no more of a thought than swiping up to the next tik tok video. I’m deleting my last account on Reddit now in solidarity. Lemmy and the fediverse feels nice. I am in near complete control of my data running my own instance while still being able to interact with literally everyone I want and don’t want. My ublock isn’t blocking a single thing, no trackers, no more being a commodity. Already fine communities are springing up with thoughtful moderation, rules and inclusivity.

    I am super excited about what is happening here.

    • As someone who used to love r/selfhosted and all the stuff posted on there I’ll have a look at hosting my own instance when I get the time to figure out how it all works.

      I didn’t even think about the privacy/tracking aspect. My Pihole isn’t blocking anything and my Ublock isn’t blocking anything. This is quite refreshing to see.

  • I’d like to see the big subs each create an official mastodon account for the sole purpose of announcing trustworthy information. One the subs come back up, especially if it’s earlier than expected, how will we know if they were taken over by the admins?

  • I appreciate the effort, but since this is one of the main subreddits the Reddit admins will simply purge these subreddits of their mods, install new ones, and reopen it (they’ve already done something like this before).

    The real question is how well will the sub operate then? I imagine not very well since all of the experienced mods and their tools are gone.

    •  Lycan   ( @Lycan@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      This was my immediate reaction too. Reddit will likely replace the current moderator team of r/videos and reopen. Nonetheless I can appreciate and respect the gesture/message.

      • This is easy to do for one subreddit. And it’s a large one. Would easily need 10+ mods to keep it running. But if a few of these large subreddits revolt, I don’t think reddit can simply replace them all.

        Not only that but I think replacing the entire mod team would cause a revolt anyways. Tensions are extremely high

        • I wonder if Reddit might just end up like YouTube: mostly relying on automated content moderation bots, and the human review being a big pool of low paid people who aren’t assigned to specific subs who just do quick checklist reviews.

          It’s gonna be great.

          • I can see that happening, they’re definitely not going to pay for all the mods they’d need to replace current ones. Sounds like that would absolutely kill a lot of smaller communities, but I doubt they care.

            • I can’t exactly go into why this isn’t possible in the short term, but it’s extremely unlikely that reddit could effectively moderate things automatically in the near future.

              I mean hell, look at youtubes comment section.

              And they don’t have the money to pay moderators. As spez said, they aren’t profitable (only thing I believe him on btw). I seriously think that spez has entered a Putin-type situation where he has very few opportunities to keep his job right now.

    • Seconding this. They’ll likely install their own mods and force-reopen the sub, since it’s one of the bigger ones.

      Same with r/technology, and other main subs, id assume

  • Wow! I didn’t expect something like this from such a big subreddit. I expect the admins will just take it over though.

    Depending on how many other subreddits do this, they won’t be able to run all of them on their own.

      • This is my first time seeing a kbin and a Lemmy user interact with each other. I did conceptually understand the fediverse, but this actually puts it into perspective. That’s amazing!

      • In my opinion having mainstream adoption is a double edged sword. It’s nice to have that larger user base, but at the same time most subreddits went to crap when they became default subs. I’ll never forget starting out my career r/personalfinance was not a default sub and I could get very insightful specific advice from people who really seemed to understand what they were talking about. Flash forward and it became a default sub. Now it’s an echo chamber and borderline circlejerk sub. It feels like a parody of what it used to be.

        So far I don’t miss that or mind the smaller feel here.

  • I commend the shutdown but if things get out of hand reddit admins will take over the popular subs. They won’t let a prime sub get shut down by mods.

    • I think there may not be enough competent volunteer mods to take it over. They could replace them with paid reddit employees like other big platforms but that’s gonna cost them more than the 20mil a year they apparently think 3rd party apps are costing them.

      • At this point in time, reddit cares about numbers, not competency. It doesn’t matter If a sub (or the entire site) degrades over time, as long as IPO numbers are maximized so they can cash in.

        • How soon is the IPO? New mods on the biggest subreddits would make those subs horrible for a long time while they figure out how to moderate it properly. Even when mods do their regular work, regular folks can get very heated about mod behaviour. Can you imagine that happening across all major subreddits, all at once?