I added reddit.com to my ublock filters - it was kind of an automatic click a few times a day and it's been a nice way to break the habit so strongly. I've got friends doing the same, and our microcommunity has formed around another platform already, after collectively losing reddit.

It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of research. Just 'API priced at ridiculous levels in 4 weeks'. They immediately had to walk a bunch of exemptions for those obvious considerations out. So extraordinarily half-assed. And for such a small sniff of revenue. They must be desperate.

I also added reddit to my ublock filters. Amazing how I never realized how often I go on autopilot and type reddit.com/r/whateversubreddit. If anyone else wants to do it, just add ||reddit.com^$all to your filters in ublock origin.

Thanks, i just did it too since you made it easier to know how

I just logged out of my account everywhere, and turned off "remember me".

It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively, almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing "reddit.com".

Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!

Breaking the muscle memory has been the hardest part for me. I don't have that much investment in Reddit succeeding and I'll be damned if I don't try to tap the app on my phone 3 or 4 times a day still, even after deleting.

I deleted my account and my 3rd party app and I found myself reflexively tapping the now-empty spot on my home screen 5-10 times yesterday. Today I haven't and only went to the mobile site a couple times to see what's going on with the state of things, but left as soon as the first "Oops, this /r/AskReddit text-only post is NSFW, open in the app!" message came up.

I have however visited HN and kbin 5-10x more today.

I moved the Sync icon to a folder and replaced it with Hack (a hacker news app).

Good idea, I've followed suit.

Replace re (enter) with ne (enter) and hang out in new. Hehe

> neddit.com

> redirect to CBS.com

am I missing something?

ne|ws.ycombinator.com

The other poster had it right, I get to HN by typing ne (enter) or n (enter) in my browser address bar.

Oh yeah, me too. Spaced which URL we were talking about.

I'm silly I guess... It's the first bookmark on my toolbar.

<Click> Hacker News

I get here by typing hc (I prefer the compact hckrnews layout)

Yeah same, either "ne" or "news" in address bar depending on how many "ne" things I've visited recently

I treat Reddit now like I do Facebook. Containers in Firefox, accessed only through VPN. It's no longer a reflex - I have to put in at least a little effort to view its content. With pi-hole and ublock origin too.

I don’t know why they didn’t just offer API access at a fair price, it seems like it would have resulted in a better outcome than their current rock and hard place decision between backpedaling and never getting rid of the API awhile unprofitable, or getting rid of it and creating a diggv4 fiasco of the site being used to promote leaving the site.

The last part is really what gets me. How could they possibly get that far along with the plan of "charge for the API" without doing a basic analysis of all the stuff people currently use the API for? That really gives an indicating of where their focus is.

I deleted my 8yo account. It was right after someone downvoted me because pointed out something that broke with their opinion.

That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle jerks. Why was I part of any of that??

> It was right after someone downvoted me because pointed out something that broke with their opinion.

It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty well.

Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the right model for moderation.

I've never used Slashdot, how is the moderation model superior?

Instead of a plain up- and downvotes, you rated a given comment with one of several positives (insightful, interesting, funny, informative) or negatives (troll, flamebait, offtopic)

The best part was you could set your personal filters to exclude “funny” comments, or boost “offtopic” ones if you want. With thresholds! So the funniest stuff could still break through, but you didn’t have to wade through a million pun posts to find the serious comments.

They also have a metamoderation system where others’ moderation choices are shown to you and you agree or disagree.

Never seen another site like it. Kinda hope /. makes a resurgence.

And it would show the sum of the +1 and -1 votes, and the most applied label, e.g. (+3, Informative).

I have to say the most enjoyable comments were often those that got to +5 but with a negative label, like (+5, Flamebait).

If I remember correctly, you also couldn’t moderate on posts that you had commented on so it prevented using downvoting as extra signaling that others agreed with you in an argument. Also, you got 5 moderation points sort of randomly, you didn’t have the option to always be moderating. I browse Slashdot occasionally but once I found HN, the topics and discourse interested me here more, haven’t really spent much time there in years.

Thanks. I forgot about the 5-at-a-time thing! But now I remember the tiny delight when I was entrusted with that little clutch of power. I “spent” them wisely.

And this is another thing I think made that mod system good. Only so many points available.

It used to be 10-at-a-time. And you could game the system by moderating 'underrated' or 'overrated' which were never metamoderated iirc.

Man, I haven't been on Slashdot in like 15 years. My username has four characters. To give you an idea how long ago that was.

You're right, it was a pretty good way to do moderation. As in everything with software, what old is new, right?

I only have a 5 digit Slashdot ID, but I remember the early days. I really, really liked /. back in the day. I don't remember what happened to drive me away but going back now the content seems to be very similar to what's on the HN front page now. However, there's something about the look and feel that is off-putting to me. Maybe its the fonts or the stuck in the 00's design.

IIRC, they also limit the base scores from - 1 to +5, while only giving people a limited number of points to distribute. It helped avoid what you see on reddit sometimes where a comment gets piled on for no reason.

Also -- people would randomly be given moderation points, and you only had so many at a time. I think people's chance of getting moderation points was weighted by how 'good' of a community member you were (account age, participation in moderation, metamoderation 'agreement')

Soylentnews also exists based on the slashdot source, and uses the same/similar moderation.

It’s crazy that slashdots moderation and meta moderation didn’t spring up elsewhere, but it was probably too complicated for what most people want out of a voting system.

I wouldn't say HN is as bad as reddit, with the mob mentality downvoting. At least on HN, some people show signs of taking a moment to think.

Of course, I realized that for years, however, and now I’m realizing maybe I should quit hackernews as well

I've always felt the downvote option was a colossal mistake and just allowed controversial or unpopular points of view to disappear, strengthening the filter effect for everything else.

I mean even 4chan doesn't have downvote functionality, if people disagree with you they'll just call you a f* or n* which, while nasty, doesn't actually change visibility of your post, plus only the admins can ban you or delete a post, not jumped-up mods, and frankly you'd have to be pretty extreme on there to earn that.

But 4chan is also a complete cesspit. Like any place that adopts "free speech absolutist" attitudes. Reddit's heyday is long passed, but at least it is still very useful for grassroots information amalgamation. If you've ever had to google some issue, typing reddit into the query will land you some posts with discussion in them. Good luck finding that on 4chan.

there's a few semi-shady things that 4chan does better than anywhere else though. like finding pdfs for rpgs. not to say it's not a pit, cess or otherwise, but there's a good few nuggets swimming around in there.

It is a cesspit but for broadening perspectives it is much much better than reddit, even with less structure of discussions and worse discoverability.

"free speech absolutism" wasn't ever a huge problem, on the contrary, the suggested alternatives always seem to end up worse.

You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.

> You have to suffer through idiotic opinions if you expose yourself to new ideas. There is never any alternative to that and there is no magic moderator that can make this decision in your stead. It isn't any more complicated than that really.

The main issue with that is that it assumes anyone on the internet is arguing anything in good faith. Boosting checkmarks has turned twitter to nearly unusable to actually unusable, because the signal to noise ratio on the replies from checkmarks tend to be somewhere on the factually provable incorrect to outright slurs spectrum. Expecting any better on 4chan of all places will be a a fruitless endeavor more akin to self-harm. If you don't want to wade through shit, maybe don't have your discussions in a sewer.

HN, while not perfect, will often be a place that cultivates some rare insight.

There is no trivial way to detect motivation, on the contrary leveraging the accusation of someone arguing in bad faith is usually seen as ending an intellectual exchange.

To be realistic, this can be that case, especially on the net, and there are ways you can make an educated guess. But it stays a guess and in the end I want to do the guessing myself. It cannot be outsourced aside from the most trivial cases like spam, advertising, etc.

That aside people with a foul mouth might use words differently while others people might receive it as a slur. We now have words that have much more might than they had before with the better approach to such issues.

This seems very naive to me. There are enough people yelling "OK Groomer" at me on certain platforms that I know the signal to noise ratio is bad enough that engaging is at best a waste of time and at worst getting more soundbites than I could possibly debunk, so I lose the optics part of the debate by default.

See "Never Play Defense" from the alt-right playbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA

And as an aside - HN is not guilt free on this topic. There's a general tendency for comments to go right past the topic even outside this. For instance, every remote work thread turns into a generalized remote vs onsite debate, without the specifics of the article being weighed in. Even worse, HN also has a tendency to devolve into calling authors of posts deranged (or deranged, but with nicer choice of words) more for their identity and politics rather than the words they wrote, as was the case with Alyssa Rosenzweig's article being posted a few weeks ago.

It simply isn't viable to assume good faith for everyone. I often (unwiesely) get into fights with transphobes that I shouldn't, and I had maybe 2 insightful well-reflected discussions over the past 10 years. Sometimes they'll complement me on not fitting their expectation of an "SJW" (which is, presumably, a screaming child), but then go on to call me a slur anyway. And when I say slur, I am very positive that this is the right classification. Unambiguously.

I recommend the entire Alt-Right playbook series, in fact. A lot of these concepts are not limited to the alt-right and are often used incidentally by everyone, but it is important to know when you have no chance at rhetoric overcoming... anything. I guess sometimes the sword is mightier than the pen, especially in a post-fact world.

I agree, downvoting is a bad idea across the board for silencing people that are not in the majority group-think. You don't even have to have a reason to down vote someone.

Do you think Hacker News should get rid of downvoting?

Im not sure, it doesnt seem as bad on hacker news. I agree its really bad on reddit though.

What I find interesting is that on HN, downvoting doesn't seem to have a negative impact, not as much as Reddit anyway. And I wonder if that's because folks who use HN really care about HN - I do - and make a good-faith, concerted effort to contribute in a positive way, with moderators who will enforce rules, but will not remove posts they disagree with (Reddit), or mandate arbitrary and inconsistent standards (Reddit).

We are experiencing almost a reverse Library of Alexandria of House of Wisdom moment. The people are Boston Tea Partying their own contributions, destroying the value by using scripts to delete all their comments. As sad is it is to see the platform go to shit over time, I feel a poetic peace along with my bittersweet sadness to see such a loss of information, all at once. In some sense there is no undoing this week, even if the blackout ends. As they say in The Worlds End, “for the greater good.”

>Groupthink circle jerks Hate to say it, but fleshy meatbag humans love this stuff on and off line. Our species is evolutionarily motivated to group up.

It's completely undeniable, societal progress regardless. We still do it all day every day, some worse than others.

> Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.

I agree this is likely, which will extend the negative reactions further and alienate even more users. Unless Reddit execs do a 180 in the very near future I think the platform will be forever crippled.

Large networks rarely die overnight and whatever happens they will still have a number of users for the foreseeable future, but the steady fade to irrelevance will begin in earnest.

Power users drive a huge amount of content and moderation, and they are especially livid right now for good reason.

There are not enough volunteers to handle the load. Companies depend on free labor to moderate things and will never be able to afford the actual cost of doing business without that free labor.

I currently moderate 2 subs (down from 5). I'm looking to offload those 2 without having them get banned for being unmoderated (again).

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators.

To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. At least if the mods of some sub go haywire, users can always create another sub. With widespread use of AI moderation, there'd be nowhere to go to escape.

> I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators.

THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi.

The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah."

We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing.

Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.

Strange, I had all of my accounts banned but my spouses weren't. Same wifi. Appeal process was over 48h later and I was unbanned. If they were doing that, it seems any account that ever used Tor or a VPN would be banned.

Maybe they saw your "it was my neighbor on my wifi, I swear!" and reflex-nuked.

Also, mods don't suspend accounts, employees do. From user reports. Then admins reinstate or don't.

I wouldn't put it past them to auto-nuke any appeal with the word neighbor, though. That's the "my dog ate my homework" equivalent of trying to get out of a warranted ban.

FWIW, I've played around with Palm a bit and if you feed it some rules it's pretty good at explaining which rule a "bad" post violates. It could be a good initial triage

Kind of happens already with auto moderator.

We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.

Yeah, but if the tech keeps improving at the rate it has been then more and more of it is going to get automated. And tbh, that’s a good thing. Moderating is a horrible job that frequently causes mental health issues for the people who have to do it.

Something like GPT 4 didn't exist 5, 10 years ago, re Zuckerberg. It won't take much further improvement for eg OpenAI's models to effectively handle moderation based on learning from instruction for a given community's moderation needs.

There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity.

This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon.

Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.

Pretty arrogant to call it a comical failure when OpenAI is openly stating they're not training GPT 5. I think people who think we can do much better than GPT 4 without insane cost scaling and a nuts amount of data (that's going to get harder to collect when regulations start to kick in), probably don't know what they're talking about. We're deep into diminishing returns here.

I do think we can do much better than GPT4. Size isn't everything. Small models can outperform large models, when trained and finetuned in the right way. And transformers are hardly the be-all and end-all of language AI either - there's plenty of reason to believe they're both inefficient and architecturally unsuited for some of the tasks we expect of it. The field is brand new, and now that the ChatGPT has brought the world's figurative Eye Of Sauron on developing human-level AI, we're going to see a lot of progress very quickly.

I wonder if they will still make the AI sign an NDA so it can’t talk about the PTSD it has from work.

Because they make all their content mods sign one that also absolves them of all responsibility.

I expect that AI will increase the need for human moderation. LLMs are better at producing passable spam than identifying it, so any gains in AI moderation will be more than offset. I actually worry that AI spam will become too powerful for even good human+AI moderation and we'll see the death of high quality open discussions online.

Where will reddit get enough mods to police the hundreds (thousands?) of subreddits each with tens of thousands of members that are rebelling against the API changes? Blocking/firing the existing mods would make the site descend into chaos.

They are really only going to care about the top tier subs, the rest will be replaced by the community. So really we're only taking 20-100 subreddits, depending on definitions.

8000 subs went dark.

Reading comprehension is a dying skill.

Wow, very condescending!

Depends on what you consider "top tier". 26 subs with over 20 million subscribers are private or restricted. 86 subs with over 5 million subscribers. I was too lazy to count, but there's several dozen more over 1 million subscribers and a ton over half a million.

I'm skeptical they can afford to lose all those subs or replace their mods.

source: https://reddark.untone.uk/

Probably wherever they're getting all the accounts that are astroturfing and regurgitating all the same points on HN and other sites.

I recently learned this is actually something that college aged people do for extra cash.

I don't know... I've been on there on and off all day, and it's honestly better today than it has been for a long, long time.

Well they’ve already started doing it

Which subreddits?

source?

It already happened

Besides alienating the users even further directly, forcible replacement of the mods with sycophants will also make the subs be ruled by people who don't quite get theie local cultures, don't know what's it's "normal", and that'll be overburdened and outright despised by their userbases, who'll shit the subs even further.

It'll be hell.

It doesn't work out for everybody. Lots of high quality communities outside of reddit have been invaded by people looking for an alternative and as a result they are now fighting massive traffic spikes, spam or the general reddit hive-mind taking over their discussion.

Do you have any examples?

HN

lemmy.world

There is a noticeable uptick of barely concealed white supremacy here in the last 2 days. I would feel confident saying that the way upvotes and downvotes work on a cultural level has changed.

We've had conservatives here forever, but I haven't seen people talk about things like "replacement theory". I think there's been a definite overton window shift towards the right wing.

Yesterday there was a question where someone asked what /. is and there were 20 replies with "slashdot" in reddit style. I haven't seen a straight out of reddit comment thread like that for months.

I've definitely found myself angrier reading hacker news than I have been in the months previous. I haven't figured out if that's more of a "we become what we behold" (https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb) or a real change.

The right-wing bent on HN has been here for at least 5 years, probably longer. I haven't noticed it get worse, just more confident because its been allowed for so long.

Your view is a little simplistic. There is plenty of useful information on Reddit. I'm a big fan of home-related subs for example, where a lot of trade-knowledgeable people seem to hang out. There is a wealth of information on subs like r/DIY, r/HomeImprovement, r/paint, r/woodworking, etc.

I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.

My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.

Reddit also largely offers a uniform browsing experience, single starting point, and single log in. The comment tree can be easier to have side conversations in and although subreddit names sometimes fall in this trap, hobby forums had/have all kinds of whacky names which make discovery hard. Reddit primarily lacks the in comment photo display of old style forums.

Unfortunately, it's practically impossible to find real individuals discussing things via Google. It's all promoted content and blogspam.

A lot time ago, Google used to have a filter you could select for "forums". Once that disappeared, we had the "+reddit" hack. Now what? I have no idea.

My recollection is that during the Google+ period, Google changed their indexing and basically destroyed every other forum. Things that were first page results dropped out completely and lost virtually all of their ad revenue.

Reddit also offloads the complexity of forum management from moderators and removes the friction of registration.

If you want to create a traditional forum, you have to figure out how to host it, what forum software you want to use, how that software works, how to configure it, etc. If you get attacked by spammers, hackers, or trolls, you have to figure out how to stop that more or less from scratch. It requires a significant amount of technical knowledge, time, and money to make it work.

Then, even if you use a dedicated forum hosting service, your forum is still basically on an island. You have to find a userbase and attract them, convince them to register dedicated accounts for your forum specifically, and keep them coming back, which is really hard if you don't have an existing userbase to make your forum compelling in the first place.

With Reddit, nearly all of that goes away. Creating a subreddit is extremely easy and costs nothing but time. Moderators still have to moderate, but they don't have to figure out how to manage forum software or handle DDoS attacks. Since any Reddit user can join and participate in any subreddit, and since posts appear on users' homepages in one feed, communities can grow much more quickly and are less likely to die out due to inactivity. And there's only one UI for the whole site, so users don't have to learn how to use whatever random forum software each site has chosen.

What, you don't want to sign up for 27 different forums, all using their own variations of CRUDs?

The solution to Reddit is a similarly centralized approach managed instead in the style of Wikipedia (not suggesting exactly replicating their governance, rather something generally akin to Wikipedia's not-for-profit direction).

Slashdot+github

People use Reddit because the alternative is blogspam. When I try to find DIY or home improvement advice, I see the same points repeated without much detail. The articles are intended to push Amazon affiliate links or other services.

I want to see real problems other homeowners are facing and the knowledge many other homeowners have to fix it. That's not something I see on any platform other than Reddit.

Everyone uses Reddit because everyone uses Reddit. Most people old enough to remember forums agree that forums were a dramatically better solution, but they're generally dead now (with some exceptions). Discourse is almost entirely Reddit or Facebook these days.

Forums were and are generally terrible. When you get a forum in a Google result, or for some topics where forums still are a major way to distribute information, usually you get a crowd of informed but confident people, paginated poorly, with a bunch of dead links. The worst is people who write or distribute code and use forum posts as a substitute for version control. That is still a thing in some niches.

I can't agree that forums is dramatically better. I know/remember the feeling when you opens thread in forum with title that you are interested in just to see 200+ pages of slowly ongoing flamewar and spam.

Why do you think forums died? It wasn't because everyone serendipitously decided to switch to a dramatically worse system.

When Twitter went crazy, there was a clear migration path 'Just use Mastodon'[1]. With Reddit shut down, there's no clear alternative for communities to migrate to.

You say forums are clearly superior? Are you volunteering to operate r/seattle (or whatever community you/I care about), and its 100-500,000 users as a phpbb board? I sure as hell ain't...

[1] I mean, there are problems with that migration path, but they are significantly smaller than migrating a large subreddit to a forum. Reddit, both pre- or post-enshittification is still the path of least resistance for running a community, which is why people who put in the time to run communities use it, over self-hosting. It wasn't 'dramatically worse' for the people that mattered.

Forums still rule for discourse content for some subjects. Some of them are basically grand-fathered in because Google will surface them and their communities started before Reddit. Guitar gear is one of those. There are still half a dozen forums that provide way better discourse than Reddit. I imagine a big part of that is because the users are an older age group.

Using forum you have to scroll via dozens of pages while trying to follow discussion by reading separate comments divided by other comments. With reddit tree structure of comments you can easy and quickly follow discussion and votes helps you understand of significancy of each comments. Same as in HN btw.

> I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software.

Phpbb-style forums are a mess. Simultaneously too ordered and not ordered enough - you don't get threaded replies, but you do have to put everything in the right topic and the right forum. No notifications that do the right thing.

For years I remember forum makers refusing to offer a "just notify me when someone's replied to my question, otherwise don't bother me" feature on the grounds that it would destroy participation. IMO the main reason Reddit won is that it offered just that.

As a way to create a community "I want to ignore anything that isn't a direct answer to a specific question" is something of an anti-feature.

I've never made lasting connections with people from Reddit/HN for exactly that reason.

I wonder if that's gonna work against the boycott here. If for most people Reddit is more StackOverflow question+answer + TV (mindless background scrolling) than a sticky community/communities, than that will make mass migration that much harder to coordinate and manage.

> My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the broader web. Google+search+display ads at scale killed the web, now we're back to AOL.

This is clearly the reason in my eyes. I append "reddit" to most of search queries not because reddit always has the best advice/information, but because the alternative is usually wading through page after page of SEO blog spam. Even if I know the information is better found somewhere else, I can usually find that somewhere else from reddit.

Want to compare headphones? Search returns blog spam. Computer components? Blog spam. Software framework or library question? Blog spam. Healthcare / Medicine? 1000 government / hospital websites that all give the same useless information. Nutrition? Blog spam. Every search results is either endless affiliate spam blogs or endless blogs all sharing the same trivial parts about a topic.

It's possible that there is a ton of useful information on the internet, but it's certainly not easy to find. It's amazing to me that Reddit failed to take advantage of their position as quasi internet hub, and seem to just want to be yet another endless content scroller app.

Google SEO. The first thing people often do is search for something on Google. The first result(s) are often Reddit

> The only loser here is the corporation side.

I'm not convinced they lose out either. The front page doesn't really feel different than it did before. There are a handful of "Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments" posts, but I'm kinda blind to them the same way I'm blind to ads as I scroll past. Otherwise it just feels like any other day on reddit.

Are we using the same website? Reddit is devoid of any decent content right now, on account of the blackout.

But r/popular looks normal for the most part.

Completely disagree, my homepage is almost empty.

I was looking at tents earlier and wanted to see reddit reviews but literally every single link was private. Reddit has to be noticing this.

People thought the meltdowns over the various FB redesigns or [x] decisions would hurt FB too (there were many major ones).

Most regular users on Reddit view it through feeds not individual subs. It’s very plausible the bulk won’t even notice, except when other people tell them it’s happening or it makes the news. Eventually others might wonder why they haven’t seen some sub posts recently but it will probably take a month or so.

These are the people clicking ads and using their mobile app.

The top ten things on /r/all is currently two articles about Trump and "Reddit is killing third party applications (and itself). Read more in the comments." from eight different subreddits.

I don't think that's the only losers.

As a mod I am getting messages from regular users who are desperate to see posts that have likely troubleshooting answers to problems they are having at work.

Reddit is kind of a critical technical resource for some people and this is really hurting them at least right now.

Has there been any suggestion to update messages to suggest using the internet archive to see old posts?

Yep, I suggested that and I also suggested an IRC channel which I know to have active people that help with the same technical system that the sub does.

Shopping for a phone plan last few days have been pretty annoying.

If they forcibly replace mods, Reddit is dead.

That's a very dicey prediction to make. It might be dead in the long run but for now, the pent up traffic will all start flowing back to those subs. And who knows, who is to say if the newly installed mods are better or worse than the present ones? Maybe they will just be the same.

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Let the ruling classes tremble!"

Barron's reports that Reddit's potential IPO is now in trouble.[1]

[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/reddit-stock-ipo-revolt-6e8...

a certain reddit-astroturfing restaurant with a big campaign launching, must be less than pleased.

Agreed - good.

Huffman / Reddit Inc. have misread this repeatedly. Just saw he's reportedly assured staff it will "blow over" and "hasn't hurt revenue".

Wrong move.

Completely avoidable PR disaster, and until the ego(s) driving all of this step back, they'll just keep making the situation worse.

I will be extending my blackout on the site indefinitely.

Just one of the dumbest PR / corporate comms debacles I've seen. Almost as though the Reddit execs saw what Twitter is doing and said "hold my beer".

You are clearly feeling very righteous, but I think you should temper your righteousness. You might want to consider that while spez may not be the best human, he has had a commendable commitment to free speech. The Reddit platform has been protecting speaking truth to power, and in this case that power is himself. He has the power to shut down anti-spez content on reddit and for the most part has let his platform be leveraged against him.

Another executive won't matter because it's not the executives determining direction. It is the investors. It is the investors that want to destroy one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet. It is investors that don't want Reddit to be a platform for speaking truth to power because they are that power that truth would be spoken to.

When people write posts like this, they are missing the forest for the trees. It is the investors who are to blame. The investors benefit when spez gets blamed and not themselves.

I see no reason to think we would get a new CEO better than spez. I am not defending spez, I am not defending his edits of people's posts, but the fish rots from the top, and the investors are above the CEO. The investors are the party that deserves blame.

A bunch of what you said is probably bang on, but I can’t let that “for the most part” slide without mentioning he has literally been caught editing comments that were directed towards him in the past. https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

Exactly, I see merit in your comment. They are making it some kind of "David vs Goliath" situation where spez is the Goliath but judging by the ease with which these mods were able to close shops and killed traffic to their subs all of a sudden, this now seems more of a "elves vs dwarves" situation where both sides have somewhat roughly balanced powers.

If you want to go back to original sin then reddit should not have gone public and installed the investors as the ultimate power. Steve Huffman was one of the founders

I'll give you that, but I also don't think it was clear at the time that "next quarters profit" culture would destroy everything good.

The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."

Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.

But next quarter's profit always destroys everything good. Why should this have been expected to turn out any differently?

I don't think that was a part of the collective consciousness 10 years ago.

People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later."

So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.

You might be speaking specifically about Reddit and the Q4 profit question, but otherwise I want to point out that the idea that immediate returns in business ultimately destroys good products has been in the cultural consciousness for much longer than 10 years.

This was not something I thought about, understood, or really had conveyed to me until I was in my late 20s and saw it happening first hand with product after product. When I asked "why" the answer was there, but I didn't get the answer until I asked the question. I didn't ask the question until I saw the harm.

So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.

There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".

We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.

... since when is Reddit public? What?

Actually that's true, Surprised it took so long to be pointed out. I guess I should have said take VC money

> he has had a commendable commitment to free speech

and a love of r/jailbait

What 20 year old doesn't?

> he has had a commendable commitment to free speech

Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.

I'm not very sympathetic to crying about loss of free speech from people who do not protect free speech themselves.

Isn't it a bit hypocritical to ban people from r/conservative for not toeing the party line and then complain about that same behavior being applied to themselves?

I considered those actions to be protective of free speech rather than in violation of it.

Parent commenter is talking about (banned) conservative subs, not r/conservative specifically.

And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.

> journalists get their news article

well, except for Buzzfeed, who seems to exist solely to repost Reddit threads with GIFs.

Maybe AI scabs?

Am I missing something - all reddit has to do is one code change to prevent subreddits from getting private or closed.

Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.

Reddit forcing open the subreddits would result in massive backlash from moderators, who are often the main people providing content and enforcing content quality. It would crank the degree to which Reddit is tarnishing its reputation to 11.

A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users who don’t post top-level content or serve as moderators are on the 1% who do.

Maybe. I'm not sure though. Reddit has an organic way to grow it's user engagement. It didn't start out with all of these mods. The general mood/experience on reddit today is much chiller. A lot of the people susceptible to feelings of indignation are gone. I think it's very possible new mods / content contributors will grow organically, conforming to whatever in house tools reddit creates. But who knows, maybe it will go the way of digg.

That would make some communities public that had nothing to do with this protest

Blood sacrifices won't be enough, unless the sacrifice is the company as a whole. Oddly enough, the only time that Reddit managed to unite its userbase for a cause, that cause was against Reddit itself. Users might disagree on the best approach, but practically nobody trusts the company any more, it isn't just the CEO.

That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.

>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.

They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.

End-users lose too. There's a lot of information that is now harder to find (assuming it's cached by a 3rd party) or not reachable at all.

Reddit probably needs a way to monetize their platform, I have no idea how well their finances look.

I think reddit did change for the worse though. Restrictions to speech and opinions, aggression if you deviate from the allegedly correct perspective. The company did revoke their principles of free expression for sleazy advertisers and market "research". Typical corporation.

Of course they need a way to finance their costs, but I think in the long run they shoot themselves in the foot. I believe we will also see age restrictions in the near future and do away with anonymity. Might kill the platform completely though.

Reddit is seriously underestimating the impact of users waning in muscle memory launching their app or going on their site. This is going to cost them way more than the $1M per year or so in missed ad revenue from users who wouldn’t user their app without Apollo. The reputational damage alone is huge. Add the angered mods and users. Investors who were considering buying into the IPO see how much power the community has, and can topple the platform, which means they will value the company less.

A prime example of cutting your nose to spite your face.