This should be a lesson to all remaining mods to stop putting their effort into that site. Reddit doesn’t care about who helped build it. They only care about making money for themselves.
What a shitty way to remove you. Completely uncalled for.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Mods should quit moderating altogether IMO, more than 20 thousands participated in the protest, there's no way they could replace them all in a reasonable time-frame, it would be a much better chaos than the blackout.
Yeah, I get that they must be very passionate to what they do for free, but to keep putting energy into a place where they have been shown to be considered expendable seems difficult to find the motivation. Don't seem worth it to me unless the organization they volunteer for is supportive. People quit for less for paying jobs.
Maybe, for maximum damage, they should save this mass resignation for when the IPO happens, just to screw Reddit's admins. In the meantime, the mods should promote Reddit alternatives in the subs. Nothing too explicit, but some links being mentioned in sticky posts/comments should suffice.
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I'm really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.
There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.
You can read it all here:
https://archive.org/details/pandoras-vox-on-community-in-cyberspace-by-humdog-1994
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Hermosillo
It really does show that none of this is new. It's what the internet really always has been.
@PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz I'd dispute that he gained nothing from "the sale of his soul". We all get something out of posting online, even if we're not paid for it. Money isn't the only thing of value one can receive. I greatly value the discussions I've had over the years and the knowledge I've gained from anonymous posters contributions. I don't think I'd even have the job I have today without online exchanges between people looking for and giving out helpful information.
It's a fair point but, I think, misses the gist of her argument. Humdog was super famous back in the 90s as a prolific online poster. Her entire life was pretty much online at a time when that was highly unusual. Keeping in mind that this was back in 1994 (so one year after the World Wide Web came into existence) and the prevailing attitude of most people back then was that the internet was a great leveller that would remove hierarchy from society and give power to the individual.
Her point was simply that the nature of posting on a large corporation's computer network actually gave more power to these companies than to the user. She wasn't saying that posting online was pointless or valueless.
She was pretty much the first person to ever say this.
This is completely tangential, but it's pretty wild that I could reply to your comment by simply pasting the link into Mastodon. No account creation on a Kbin instance required.
It's great isn't it?
It's actually the first time I've been excited for web technology in the last decade!
A very good read and quite prescient.
Great perspective and a fanstastic way of seeing how we should view our participation in all this internet activity
There does not seem to be a celebrities magazine here yet. You could make one and become a mod of it.
How do you make your own magazine
That sounds like a very good idea. The work must carry on!
I don't know if you need to hear this or not; but you also don't have to donate your time to anything for free anymore. Nobody would blame you for throwing in the towel (if you feel you need to, that is)
Where can I find out what a magazine is on here? New to Lemmy. Is that like a subreddit?
magazine = community = subreddit
Magazine is the term used for kbin.social users like @Gamers_Mate@kbin.social who is a Kbin user. In Lemmy they are called communities.
You can do a search on your local instance like:
https://lemmy.world/communities
or use a community browser like:
It is! Magazines are a feature in kbin, and Lemmy calls this sort of thing a Community. You’re seeing the kbin terminology here because this thread started on kbin.social. If you pay attention to URLs, that’s also why it’s /c/subredditname on Lemmy and /m/subredditname on kbin.
The other major difference with kbin magazines is that you can configure them to pick up content from Mastodon using a hashtag, and it will show it in threaded format in a separate area of the magazine that’s easy to get to. It’s great for news, giving people an outlet for self-promotion without cluttering discussion, or helping get a magazine started if the topic is popular.
Thank you for your effort building a community on Reddit. It gave a lot of people enjoyment. I'm sorry that Reddit didn't treat you better.
That’s just insane. Even if the content is good.. I’m just not sure I could justify going back to a place like that.
Yup. any site that treats their userbase and mods that way isn't worth using. Mods and users put in countless hours to make that site a better place, and this is how Spez treats us. Fuck that. Fuck spez. Fuck reddit
It's hard to articulate. Reddit is at its core only a platform. All it did was give users a place to create, curate, contribute, and connect to, with, and for communities. Reddit was our magic feather. We didn't need them all along. All it did was tear down some mental blocks, so we could get started.
We wouldn't even be that mad if Reddit was trying to be reasonable. They're just being parasitic toward us, if we're being honest with ourselves. They want us to do all the work, so they can make all the money from our work, and then they want to charge us money for the honor of having been monetized. And it's not even that they're just chasing multiple different monetization schemes in moderation so that everyone profits. They intend to be greedy fucks in every transaction. They want users to pay subscription fees for Reddit premium (which isn't well priced, and therefore doesn't sell many subscriptions). Furthermore, they want developers to pay outrageous API licensing fees (which aren't well priced, and therefor almost all the developers are just shuttering). Not only that, they want to charge API fees toward AI training companies. My guess? Their prices are again too high, and the result will be that AI studios will just not pay for an official license and will do web scraping. It will require more work for them to get the scrapers to properly parse the threads, since what AI studios are interested in are threaded conversations right now. The AI studios will determine it is worth it to pay some engineers to do that rather than to pay the money Reddit wants (per my understanding, Reddit is charging the same money for AI studios as 3rd party apps).
So, where does that leave Reddit? Only with advertising revenue. They could lower the prices for their other services and make more money than that, but you would need to understand long-term cause and effect to do that, and u/spez has NOT demonstrated that kind of awareness. As evidence, note that advertisers are starting to reassess their contracts with Reddit (which by the way, their ads suck! You've collected all this demographic info about your users, but you can't provide advertisements that draw any kind of interest!? And you think you can be of value to AI companies!? What the fuck are you doing!?). Reddit's greed is losing them money.
AI companies will scrape reddit, doing it on old reddit is easier, so they will shut down old reddit.
Mark my words.
Yup. Any platforms deserve to get paid for their API. They're not a charity. But what reddit is doing is absolutely ridiculous. They knew that the TPA devs wouldn't be able to pay costs that high. They knew all along that it would shut down, most, if not all, of the TPA.
I can't imagine how it feels to put so many hours into building a thriving community just to have it thanklessly ripped from your hands.
As an 12 year reddit user who almost never posted or commented, thank you for all of the hard work you and others like you put in to make reddit as great as it was.
Hopefully fediverse will prove more resistant to greedy corporate interests in the years to come. I'm looking forward to building this new community with all of you!
Damn, that's extremely shitty and I agree that someday we will see the ashes of reddit being scattered in the digital wind
I'm so sorry. It's a real loss of something you valued and took pride in. It's also a loss of community. Be kind to yourself while you mourn the loss. (We're all feeling it to some degree.) But you have a fresh, new community right here for you.
I’m sorry this happened. I deleted my Reddit account yesterday. I build up a subreddit from the ground up as well with 18k subscribers, which is a huge amount for me.
Someone has offered to take over the Reddit and with a tear in my eye I deleted my account. For me it is proven that I can no longer trust Reddit and I don’t want to be part of it anymore. Your message confirms my choice.
Chin up, new chances will arrive!
And the Braindrain continues…
Welcome aboard!
Expected behavior from Steve Huffman's lackeys.
I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
Pretty much the silver lining in all this. Best of luck to you and your adventures here in the Fediverse.
Friend, is there any truth to the rumours of a lawsuit from current and former mods against Reddit, for back pay? I'm pretty convinced there's a case there, and your story is a prime example. One argument from Reddit might be that you and the community were the primary beneficiaries of your volunteer labour, but for Reddit to take your mod powers unilaterally sure makes them look like an employer rather than a maintainer of a public forum.
In the US, there are no circumstances under which a private for-profit company can legally accept volunteer labour like that. Further strengthening your case would be how much Facebook pays for moderation of their platform. Reddit built an entire business on the backs of people like you, and your stake in that should be recognised and compensated.
I just read a write up AOL that someone linked on another thread. AOL started selling ad space and changing the chatrooms up on their whim even though it was the unpaid works or volunteers that built the community. AOL expanded and looked for a pay out. It normally happens, but the way they did it destroyed any good faith between their unpaid workers and AOL proper. They ended up having a class action lawsuit and settled for 15 million. 5 to each, unpaid workers, lawyers, some charity. I could see a class action lawsuit building for this.
So many stories like yours are coming out. Thanks for sharing.
The momentum definitely seems to swinging Lenny’s way. Glad to see it.
I manually deleted all of my comments from the past 13 years because I don't trust an app to complete that process. It took a long time, partly because I revisited a few threads along the way. I'm feeling great about my content being unavailable to Reddit, regardless of whether anyone cares or misses it.
Yes, I do miss Reddit. No, I will not go back. Not because I don't find any value in it -- I do -- but because my personal sense of justice gets in the way of wanting to contribute any longer. The time I used to spend scanning Reddit for new information or drama or funny anecdotes is now spent thinking about how I can contribute to my community in other ways.
The tonedeafness of this C-suite is remarkable. And like twitter, I'm stunned at how quickly they are steering the clown car off the cliff.
I liked twitter, despite its flaws. I liked reddit too--some of it was a swamp, but you could have your little island and mostly be ok. Like most tools they could be used for good or bad, and you could focus on the good.
But they flushed all of the good. What a really stupid plan.
Welcome aboard! Glad to have you here!
Also, eff spez!
Also, eff spez!
Whoa, there! Language!
Try this instead: Fuuuuuuuuuuck Spez. Fuuuuuuuck Steve Huffman. Fuuuuuuuuuck that vile sociopath.
Are you talking about Steve The Pigboy Huffman? That Steve Huffman?
Maybe about Steve Jailbait Huffman
I like to believe that spez has a room, down in his bunker, that is full to the tits with freeze dried dicks. Just bag after bag jammed in there so tight that the door pops open and they spill out. The door is probably labeled “Steve’s Num-Nums.”
And every night, spez sneaks down there to eat a bag of freeze dried dicks.
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Reddit won't die in a big catastrophic Digg moment, that was a rare event that doesn't usually happen so blatantly.
However, Reddit has reached its high water mark though, I absolutely agree. It'll slowly continue to bleed good, contributing power users like yourself in favor of becoming an algorithm-run mass-appeal corporate shit hole just like Facebook. It is very sad to see moderators like yourself being treated so poorly though and I hope you stick around here at least somewhat even if it's just for your own sanity.
@vaprz Sorry this happened to you. I'm not surprised. Mods are going to be thrown over the side at an accelerating rate IMO. The protest is indeed hurting F u/spez otherwise he wouldn't have to do this. My opinion is that he will do whatever it takes to try to get his numbers back up and his ability to sell Reddit and buy his island depends on it.
If you're the sole-mod of a sub - always add like 4 of your own alt-accounts as mods below you
I was added as a mod to one sub without sub-settings permissions and the main mod account was deleted, so I deleted all the posts and stickied a text-comment saying 2023 blackout, message mods to join private community hehe~
Damn. That's brilliant.
holy fuck
i'm just some asshole with a 13+ year old account that would bitch and moan in the comments section
i can't imagine dedicating so much of my time to build a wonderful community and then being unceremoniously cast away as part of a large purge of dissent
I somehow ended up as the sole moderator for r/Corfu. It's a VERY slow subreddit. I'm not sure if I should ignore it, or if there's something I can do with the tiny lever of 'power'.
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