• 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.

      • 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.

        • 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.

    • 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.

        • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.