I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.
It’s reddit that’s changing the terms, not mods acting up.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it’s flight or drive.
Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.
Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don’t want to bother with isn’t actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.
That’s incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can’t describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I’m so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!
A while back Greyhound put up billboards on I5 in Washington/Oregon/North Cali with a bunch of rinky dink towns whose names were crossed out, their way of showing they were ending stops there, so fuck you hicks! But you big city folk will get where you’re going so much faster. It was a really obnoxious ad campaign.
There are reports they are undeleting content. The only option is to stop participating.
I’ve just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like “-> fediverse”. So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don’t have value to anyone anyway so I’m just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn’t the only choice.
On days I’m feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I’m that petty.
I’d skip the vote one, it’s just giving them a bit more traffic stats. Agree with the edit though.
If you wanna be petty, edit your posts into contextual nonsense that looks like it fits, so Reddit gets just a little harder to read.
Damn that’s a good idea. Sort by highest karma and make them word soup that makes readers question their sanity. I just went with ‘.’
Maybe you don’t mind doing it manually, but you can automate it too (at least until the api goes down)
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“The person that spread that?” Are you being serious? That’s happened to a lot of people. It’s happened to me repeatedly. In fact I’m right now yet again deleting a bunch of posts that stayed deleted for days and are mysteriously back again.
Yeah, that previous explanation makes no sense – the YT guy who recorded his entire session was deleting the same stuff over and over again.
That sounds like a server error.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that Reddit has decided to go to war with any unhappy users. I have zero respect left.
Out of self-respect, I will still try to understand whether something is a bug or deliberate.
Happened to me too, now that my account is deleted, I can’t go back and try again. I’m beyond pleased about it.
Are you certain it is the exact same comment or post? I think people are deleting everything (via scripts or whatever–some scripts are known to not work/only appear to be working–particularly ones that internally make use of pushshift or websites that relied on it–which reddit destroyed a few months prior to this incident), but everything isn’t actually everything because of the way reddit hides content in certain situations. When people have posted screenshots it has been content from subreddits that had be set private during protests and reopened. Reddit annoyingly hides your own content from yourself in many circumstances.
I’m not saying these undeletes definitely do not happen, but people have needed to delete content on Reddit for reasons the pre-date the protests. The legal risks to reddit for them to be caught restoring content that a user deliberately deleted is significant. So unless a whistleblower or compelling evidence emerges Occam’s razor will go with reddit bugs and “features”. Everyone knows reddit is bug-ridden. For all we know the delete function is DDOSable.
Yep, I got a similar case to yours.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I’ve been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
Folks were saying they had deleted their accounts and all the related data, which was coming back the next day. The reddit user agreement grants an in perpetuity usage license, so they can absolutely do that (unless you’re under gdpr).
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn’t work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
I’d be ok with it if it would stop reloading and shifting things around while I’m reading.
That fix is coming very soon, once we upgrade to 0.18.x
I’m so happy to hear that! Thank you <3
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that’s what it seems to me.)
For what it’s worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven’t seen anything get reverted yet.
While there may be cases of actual restoration of deleted content, I’ve been purging daily since about 5 days post-blackout on my (220k karma) main account, and the “restored” content I’m having to clean up is, afaict, exclusively from single subs at this point, some of which I know have switched their privacy/blackout status between purges.
I think this is incompetence and gross negligence, not intentional misconduct. So far.
I’m not convinced that is actually happening. I think it’s usually that people deleted when subreddits were private and then things that were not deleted appear when the sub reopens. Sort of dumb that you can’t access or delete all your content even when a subreddit is private, but there are also wierd things like you can’t see your own comments that were made to people that have blocked you. Dunno if that content reappears of people who have blocked you delete their accounts. Basically… Reddit is dumb.
Other reports sound like errors and bugs.
Chances are that many users are currently deleting masses of content. The server probably has limited resources for those types of activities. Robust design would give error screens, but yeah.
Added to @BestOf!
Thanks, I hadn’t subscribed to that magazine yet.
Well said!
I mean, sort of? They do technically own the servers and the code, but all of the content and moderation was provided by users. The idea that this should be a unilateral decision by the company is like saying that Fiverr and UpWork freelancers should not have a say in how those platforms are run. Strictly, narrowly, letter of the law as written, it’s true. But it completely ignores where both the revenue and the value for those platforms actually comes from.
It’s their decision…but arguably it shouldn’t be. And that’s also an important aspect of this conversation.
we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They’ve already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it’s time to cut them loose and move on, but you won’t be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
A TOS doesn’t supersede actual LAW.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn’t have the “and I live in the right place” question.
There seems some confusion over its legality though, and people talking about reporting it to attorney generals etc. But that protection if private information: the information that they put on a public platform, agree to display publicly, to strangers; that’s not private information at all.
You may as well say that people on the street have no right to observe that you walked into the McDonald’s next to them, and you will report them for stalking. It’s not merely unenforceable, it makes you look foolish to even threaten that it is.
I wouldn’t put much past Hoffman or his admins at this point, but what people are suggesting as malice is extremely unlikely. The idea that Hoffman has commanded the few admin staff he’s decided to keep on staff to go through arbitrary users to restore an arbitrary number of comments is farfetched.
It’s far more likely that comments are from locked subs becoming visible again, and/or that the sheer server load from so many users making requests to delete/edit their content is leading to 503 errors, or database writing issues. Reddit code is basically one long string of spaghetti at this point.
True. We can make them pay to develop a solution to sift and present it coherently.
If they undelete threaded content, they have to undelete the context. If the go full minimax solution and undelete everything… they have caused serious problems.
If you read the TOS, no, the content does not become Reddit’s. The user retains all ownership rights, but grants Reddit a very broad license to use the content. There’s another section that allows users to delete their content (which is consistent with them retaining ownership rights, although of course this doesn’t mean Reddit loses its license to use/copy the content).
This distinction is important—what Reddit is doing here is not taking the content and copying it and reposting it from its own Reddit accounts, it’s putting it back under the user’s original account. Under the TOS, they do have a license to use, distribute, etc. the user’s content. They are not required to give credit to the original poster if they do so. But this does not mean they’re allowed to put content back under someone’s name/account/original comment, thereby attributing that content to the user, after the user has deleted it.
I don’t know all the details of their TOS, just what I’ve read from it. And I have no idea if anyone is going to sue them or anything, or even whether a suit could be successful.
But as far as whether you give your content to Reddit, you don’t, you just give them a license to use it. If you want, you can read down to #5 and see the part I’m referring to. Reddit Terms and Conditions. I think the other part about being able to delete your content is in there somewhere as well.
That doesn’t revoke our editorial rights. I still have it, I’m using it.
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Don’t understand why other tech sites didn’t follow this story as closely as The Verge did. They are witnessing the downturn of one of the largest websites in the world.
Middle/ upper management for most everything don’t seem to actually know much about the real world from what I can tell.
Conde Nast used to own Reddit, I wouldn’t be surprised if they still have a big stake in it. Could also be shared advertisers.
Just because someone is good at their job, doesn’t mean they should be managing people.
True enough. Treating managing others as a reward for being good at a job has held us back this whole time in my opionion.
Some in the verge are 3rd party app users. They get the betrayal reddit users feel from the way the API change was handled.
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!! Work when WE tell you too!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
“Landed gentry”… Because that’s what I think about when I think about unpaid employees.
Step 1: open the sub.
Step 2: make every member a moderator.
Step 3: watch the world burn.
One subreddit did this IIRC
One time i think r/darkhumor did a while ago like make random people mods (or is it r/darkjokes ??) and… yea lol
/r/PoliticalHumor did.
They couldn’t actually before real mod status to everyone. What they did was create an AutoMod script that would automatically take mod actions based on comments and upvotes.
Can’t be done unfortunately. There’s a limit to how many pending moderator invites there can be. r/politicalhumor did the next best thing though.
What did they do?
They have a bot running that listens for certain commands in comments, so any user can lock a thread or do a bunch of different stuff just like a mod by commenting
That’s beautiful
Some of the actions are collectivized, requiring certain up/downvote totals on comments on posts or threads.
Back in the day a friend of mine ran a small forum for proto-shitposting where everyone was a moderator.
It went as well as you’d expect.
Am absolutely glorious dumpster fire?
Man Reddit is really trying to push a narrative of big bad mean mods, never mentioning they’re unpaid and being ignored while doing a shitload of labor
Honestly, that’s probably an underestimate. 3.4m at 20/hr (so 15/hr plus overhead) with 2000 work hours in a year only comes out to ~84 full time employees.
I really doubt they can do what most of the mods do with 84 minimum wage (sf Bay Area) workers.
Even if you outsource, the amount of expertise in specific fields is very hard to find even with money.
Yeah, the study authors explicitly say they are low-balling the estimate.
As mentioned earlier, mod logs do not include all moderator activities. For example, replying to moderator mail and deliberation, two types of moderation work reported in prior work (Dosono and Semaan, 2019; Gilbert, 2020) do not appear in mod logs. As a result, our estimate of moderation duration is designed to be a lower bound estimate. Although we provide an underestimate, our work serves as a first step towards quantifying this labor and paves the way for future work to comprehensively quantify moderation hours.
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That Google exec’s comments along with the Apple showcase of Apollo must have reddit leadership shitting their pants.
So much for the protest having “no effect”.
I think prospects of going public via IPO were tanked when a tech giant like Google is publicly venturing opinions about the platform.
And the Minecraft devs no longer find it a viable place to engage with their community.
Fucking. Minecraft.
Yeah, Google is just under the Mouse when it comes to companies not to mess with. Especially after they changed removed “don’t be evil” from their code of conduct.
I missed this, do you have a link to the Google exec comments?
The mods make the community. I have modded a few subs and it is a pain to do well, so I stopped doing it. I have definitely had issues with mods (who hasn’t), but if large numbers of the good ones leave Reddit is screwed.
I don’t think I’ve ever had any issues with a mod. I got mad at one back in the 90s on GameFAQs, but, in retrospect, they were completely in the right and were kind in their response to my complaint about their moderation.
I was banned from a sub for mass editing my comments, but that’s totally fair; I had no idea it was spamming their mod queue.
Anyway, agreed. I have complete respect for the mods that make the online spaces I frequent safe.
Do it. Show your true colors, Reddit.
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I’d like to kick Spez in the not stay privates.
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this was funny the first few times but it’s basically spam now, chill with sending it
Fuck you you spez. Is this the new RIP in
Piece?I feel so unappreciated. In fact, if sticking around means that I need to take orders, I’m going elsewhere. It’s possible to convey your message without treating me as an underling.
The sheer of panic in Snoo Platform, Inc. means that protest and blackout work.
IPO blackout looks even more good now.
What’s an IPO blackout?
I assume they mean go blackout again during Reddit’s IPO/Initial Public Offering of Reddit stock in an attempt to tank the stock price.
They’re unofficially making the blackouts against the rules. People will need to be more creative.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA “Delete My Data” demands, on each account.
It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
For those wondering… TamperMonkey browser add-on with RedditHistorySanitizer userscript (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code). It’s kinda slow, but much faster than doing it manually!
I don’t think that the blackouts were spineless. People tried talking, a protest, and then variations on telling the community that they’re migrating or quitting.
I saw mods say that they were reopening their subs instead of being replaced, often long enough to ask the community a few questions. Some of them burned down their subs regardless. Others are still trying to protest in creative ways, although I don’t know what will happen on July 1.
I hadn’t thought about tamper monkey. That should keep working even after the first.
The dumpster fire continues to burn. As Demi Lovato would say “Let it go, Let it go, can’t hold it back anymore”
Looks like they’re holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform’s big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I’m being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don’t think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it’s pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn’t what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going “Meh” when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
Sounds hard to bore someone like that. Vapidity culture doing work means content producers don’t have to :-\ Maybe won’t be hard to keep some (many?) Reddit remainers amused with a handful of chat or repost bots.
If the more engaged posters have moved over, do we really need the lurkers and mediocre posters to prop up the new discussion locations?
It was nice having everything in one place, but if everyone came over then it would just be the same thing on a new platform.
Yeah I really don’t want everyone or even a large percentage of reddit to migrate over here. Leave the trash behind. The users here are way less hostile and problematic
Subs opened… with who moderating?
Reddit has no fucking backup plan if the mods decide to bail. What happens? Communities go unmoderated, or randos take over which is even WORSE since randos bring about the possibility of the sub being shat up on purpose.
And note that many subs have trouble recruiting moderators even when they want more people.
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I can’t speak for anyone else, but I haven’t been back to reddit since the blackouts started. No desire to.
You’re not alone.
Reddit’s big and recognisable enough at this point that I don’t see it “dying” any time soon, but it’s certainly possible that this situation can result in some serious issues for their future growth potential and user activity. If a meaningful percentage of the site’s most engaged users (the ones posting the content people come for) leaves or cuts back their usage, and the moderation on subreddits deteriorates as a result of the available moderation tools getting worse, Reddit might find its valuation moving in the wrong direction.
Just because we’re unlikely to kill Reddit doesn’t mean we can’t affect the thing Spez and company are interested in - that IPO money. If the site becomes a Tumblr-esque wasteland of repost bots, AI-generated spam comments and OnlyFans sellers, it’s a lot less appealing to users than when it was a real, living website with engaging content. And if users are on average less engaged, would-be investors are going to see that and pause. Remember that Reddit’s taking its notes from Musk’s handling of Twitter here - and Twitter still isn’t any closer to profitability than it was when he took over.
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won’t sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn’t done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.
I agree with the alternate platform growth slowing down after next week.
I do think that Reddit has never had to deal with the consequences of a hard-to-use website and app before. People are not very tolerant of this. I think a lot of people are going to try to use the official app in the next few days, then delete it in disgust and find something else to do. They won’t be checking in weekly to find out if it got better.
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