Reddit: “Subreddits are for the community of reddit users who rely on them.”
Community of reddit users: “We think the sub should stay private, and if you force it open, we’ll spam sexy John Oliver and porn.”
Reddit: “wait no not like that”
This message is mind-blowingly tone deaf.
It’s not tone deaf so much as it’s gaslighting. Their intention isn’t to get compliance or work through any of the valid concerns - their intention seems to be to cover themselves and give plausible deniability for potential investors.
They’re sending this to mods as if they are the audience, which we know is not the case since anything the mods say is not actually considered.
Except that’s not always what’s happening. A couple subs I’m in have voted to reopen, when they’ve had the ability to vote at all (since it’s hard to vote when the subreddit is locked).
One voted to reopen and the mods removed the poll and are pretending it went their way despite some people having screenshots of the poll.
A few days ago I didn’t have a single reason to leave reddit. Yet, with so many reasons now, here I am, and I look forward to lemmy and kbin.
Ditto. I wasn’t happy but I thought they’d find some sort of compromise since being reddit, the replacement for Digg 2.0, they’d surely understand they can’t just be complete twats about it. Then they started denigrating/banning their own mods… Wtf?
There are still a few niche subs I’ll have to keep using reddit for for now, but for everything else I’m happy to move on. I’ll also be cancelling my reddit monthly subscription, obviously.
It would have been so easy, just add some rules to 3rd party apps in exchange for reduced API charges.
Any middle ground would have sorted this out in a few days with minimal issues, now they are trying to put out an oil fire by throwing water at it.
There are still a few niche subs I’ll have to keep using reddit for for now
Id at least say stick to your guns. I left before the the blackout and haven’t been back since. It sucks because I’m missing GameDay threads for the Braves, and 1 or 2 niche subs I’d visit daily, but using it less is still using is.
im taking to Discord to replace gameday threads for me… honestly with how fast game day threads go its probably better.
They have forgotten the faces of their fathers. The entire reason people left Digg in the first place was because they tried to make ads unavoidable. And oh look that’s the entire reason Reddit is killing third party apps. They’re intent on dying the way Digg did, for the same reason.
/u/spez is a pain, and that is the truth.
If you used a credit card for your subscription fee, would going directly to your credit card company and doing a chargeback cause more chaos for Reddit? Instead of politely canceling your sub and asking for a refund? Chargebacks are a PITA for accounts receivable.
Yeah, I ended up canceling my premium and I’m now using it to donate to lemmy / mastodon instances I’m migrating too. They (spez) has destroyed any (trust) chances of me going back too.
thats what annoys me. If reddit had came forward and said “API access is expensive, we need to be paid a reasonable fee for it, or we cant afford to continue”, i would have dontated, or paid for it.
But just saying “its insanely expensive, in 1 month”, and then attacking the mods just pisses people off.
Can’t wait to see Reddit crash and burn
lol, “subreddits belong to the community of users…” clearly doesn’t belong to the users. That’s the whole problem
This is why I left reddit, they say they care for the community. Only to use their actions to remove good moderators (maybe 1 or 2 bad ones in the process of this fire bombing of bans) and the nail in the coffin being u/spez doing more dumb decisions. Like doubling down on the API. . . Despite the protests and his app going downhill.
Moderating is volunteer work. Spez is a narcissist. Why volunteer for a narcissist?
Because I’m sure all those people aren’t volonteering for spez but rather the subs users, the ones that keep their communities alive because of their shared interests.
“Narcissist” is a psychological term describing a person with NPD, a disability in ego regulation. There is no evidence that Spez is disabled, neurodivergent, or otherwise mentally disordered. Even if he did suffer from ego disability, there are plenty of good reasons to hate him, and hating someone for being disabled is a bad reason. Comments like this one contribute to the stigma faced by mentally disordered people.
OK; he has such a need for control that he modified toxic comments directed at him.
On November 23, 2016, a member of a subreddit dedicated to Donald Trump, /r/The_Donald, posted evidence indicating that Reddit administrators had modified multiple user comments inside the subreddit. Following this post, Huffman took responsibility for the comment modifications, writing, “Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again.” His administrative modifications involved changing one specific insulting phrase, in several comments, to make them appear as if the insults were directed toward the moderators of the subreddit instead of him.
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-caught-secretly-editing-user-comments-chatl-1789342358
You might not like Ellen Pao, but it’s funny that the NBA sided with her comments against him in 2020:
When moderators protested in 2023, Spez compared them to Landed Gentry.
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Reddit was founded in 2005. In January of 2008, Reddit decides to let users create their own custom reddits, or subreddits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit
So the Landed Gentry are from 2008 + (15 years). How many Parent-to-child hand-offs can you really expect in that time?
He belittles volunteers (moderators). He has manipulated the site. He is currently scrubbing the site of disparaging comments about himself now.
https://lemmy.world/post/392621
He is not someone to volunteer your services for. Moderation is like gardening. It’s a never-ending activity of pulling weeds.
You listed a lot of great reasons to hate Spez, and none of them are that he’s disabled. I said in my comment that there are plenty of good reasons to hate Spez, and that hating him for being disabled is a bad reason. It seems like we fundamentally agree on the premise that Spez is a garbage dickbag, and why. Since we agree so strongly, maybe you could edit your top level comment to remove the part where you call him a narcissist. That way we can focus on bad things that he’s done rather than an alleged disability.
Narcissism has existed long before the DSM. I’m not certain why it should be inferred that someone is disabled or have NPD if they are simply a narcissist.
Because the term “narcissist” entered the public discourse as a shorthand for “person with narcissistic personality disorder”, and that’s what pop psychologists, self help book writers, and lifestyle gurus mean when they say narcissist. That’s where the word’s use in pop culture comes from. It refers to a person with an ego disability.
Ok, I have edited my comment to “*Spez exhibits unlikeable characteristics. Why volunteer for someone who exhibits unlikeable characteristics?” better now?
Thanks
Yeah this type of stuff brought me Lemmy.
Dear person volunteering your time and effort for what you thought was a worthy endeavor. We’re trying to commodify your work so we can make a killing so don’t fuck it up for us.
Dear Spez,
I’ve learned that Reddit wants to profit from my content. I’ve therefore decided to monetize my content going forward. I have very reasonable rates of $50 USD per post. $75 USD for long posts.
I’m willing to discuss this with Reddit but these rates are nonnegotiable.
This
I love the condescension here - your protest is “taking a break from moderating”
It’s corporate rhetoric.
They define the reality they want their audience (press, investors) to see: No protests, no demands, no conflict with Reddit, just moderators not taking their job seriously while Reddit is taking its communities seriously and reaching out in good faith and with empathy.
Then they go all method actor and assume this reality, and start writing.
All that lazy “landed gentry” no longer volunteering their time and labor.
Im a reddit mod with a sub over 20 million - today they removed our top mod, and then sent us a message saying that ‘we requested a re-ordering’. It’s total bullshit.
i wish they’d just fucking nut up and be up front about it. then you can at least see it in plain view as can everyone else.
“we’re putting down dissent, regardless of if it kills our site usage or valuation. get on board or fuck off.” is the exact same thing that’s occurring, but is at least slightly more respectable than this microsoft-esque “we’re doing this for your own good (whether you like it or not)” approach.
Fuck Spez, Lemmy is doing alright. (I like community ran solutions better anyway)
Subreddits belong to the community of users…
So you’re providing tools to allow democratic control of subreddits, right?
Right?
If you set a few AutoModerator rules, you can make everyone a moderator.
Pure chaos. It’s brilliant.
I mean, one of the subreddits just gave all subscribers to it mod status. I think it was political humor. Something like 1 million people are now mods for that subreddit.
One of the other admins said they hadn’t talked about that in an interview shortly after spez said that.
So once again he’s talking out both sides of his mouth.
… and other orifices
You have the right to decide which hand your mind control chip gets installed on.
They are slowly taking away the platforms of free speech. First they came for the self hosted websites; then they changed the search engine functions; then they came for twitter; now they are at Reddit. Make no mistake this is not just about an IPO. This is about controlling how the public communicates. Discourse is discouraged.
The trouble is they didn’t like what actual free speech had to say which was we just want to use apps that work, so now he’s having a temper tantrum.
I think it’s a combination of both; people want apps to work; reddit wants ads to serve and NSFW content removed prior to IPO; and they want to disenfranchise the user base. It’s similar to the twitter fucking stuff; change of moderation; change of API access; and control of what people are saying. In addition /u/spez is pissed that he sold in 2005 and wants his share of internet gold. ;)
It’s hilarious to me that they are telling subs that they can’t just switch the NSFW button on like that, after they recently made the vape communities go NSFW against their will.
All the mods should either reopen everything and stop all mod activities (ie quiet quit), or just go down the John Oliver route.
What is the John Oliver route?
Several subreddits have limited new posts to “John Oliver looking sexy” after having a public consultation and vote by their userbase.
As a way to comply with forced re-opening, a pinch of malicious compliance and to show how completely non-sensical the “democracy in subreddits by the users” idea Spez floated is.
The internet makes a habit of mocking polls and votes. So yeah.
I wonder if there’s a sexy john oliver community lol.
Reddit’s staff or the fucking mafia?
They are gonna make you an offer you cannot refuse
Listen Jimmy, that mod status o’ yours, it’s quite nice, aint it? Would be a shame if something happened to it. Real shame.
- The Reddit Admins, probably
both send threats, I only see it as a single unit and not as two different orginizations.
It’s ridiculous that they are referring to the protest as a “break”. Are they that dilusional?
No, this is passive aggressive for “if you don’t want to do your unpaid job then get out”.
