It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs. Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam.

/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.

So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.

I remember the Reddit side quoting some very low number on third-party moderation tool use… something like 8% of moderators using third party tools.

Maybe that effect is overstated.

I would assume that a small percentage of mods are doing the vast majority of actual moderating. So the interesting statistic would be the percentage of mod actions performed via third-party tools.

This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).

I tracked down the original statistic. CEO u/spez wrote:

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

At this point I wouldn’t trust anything he says also, we’ve heard them say that time and time again with no real/good changes so I have no clue why we’d expect it now.

It’s similar to how the API is limited compared to what the official app can do and lacks many basic features (streaming or callbacks) that are needed to avoid polling it. They’ve said before that if they started charging there would be improvements to the API. Where are they? Are developers supposed to take them on faith/trust? I’m pretty sure Reddit has burned what little of that they have left.

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

I wouldn't be shocked if that's because third party bots are counted in there, and in terms of sheer scale of spam etc that is 80+ of mod actions.

Huffman has a very good reason to use figures in a misleading way to downplay the impact here.

And how many of these 8% are in the top XX millions user subreddit, how many of the 92% are moderators of the infinite list of < 200 users subreddit ?

Meh, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I'm a mod of a several-million-subscriber subreddit (one that's likely highly popular among HN subscribers). When we asked our community if they wanted to join the protest, the answer was a very resounding "yes, but 2 days aren't going to cut it"...

So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.

So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.

same here. r/sneerclub (18.5k) wouldn't have joined without overwhelming community support. Only question is whether to come back in two days. Also I think everyone on the sub knows very well it's a complete waste of time lol

Thank you dgerard, you are doing (acausal robot) god's work.

If you don't stay on Reddit where will you go? I'm eager to join communities that are moving to something less user hostile than Reddit. Bonus for anything OSS or federated.

That's not really decided yet. Without going into too much detail, a lot of our moderators are not as engaged as they once were: Eternal September has washed out many of our core contributers long ago, and the subreddit's focus has shifted over the years. Mostly to topics that (IMO) most mods don't care too much about (self-promotion, "beginner friendly content" instead of expert discussion, fluff...). So in my view, most of the subreddit is in strong decline and is just not "the place it used to be". With several million subscribers, I feel like it's very hard to foster a real sense of community. And once you hit a certain popularity, the amount of newcomers will always be larger than the "core", and good content erodes from there. I guess that's true of a lot of reddit, though. We could've tried harder to prevent this (or guide our community), but at the time we felt that "hands off" was a better moderation approach, and now it's likely impossible to change that course.

Anyways, IMO most of the really interesting discussion on the topic happens on twitter already. My best guess is that instead of finding a new home for the subreddit, we'll eventually just either give control to some other body (or reddit takes it from us) or we'll just set the subreddit to public again and let it go its way without being very involved (Most of the current mods weren't really involved anymore anyways). I'd love to find a new place devoted to this topic (twitter definitely sucks for long form discussion), but I haven't found such a place, and don't have the time/energy to set one up myself.

Its /r/machinelearning isn't it?