That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn’t care if you’ve been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There’s nothing for you to “negotiate.” As far as Reddit management is concerned, it’s “my way or the highway.”
Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it’s time to let go.
The mods need to understand that the admins see the mods just as the mods see the users.
They can be gotten rid of on a whim and no one will care
Well, we former Reddit mods don’t need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I’m not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they’re pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it. They’ve taken it back down after the DMCA was filed, we’ll see if it goes back up.
An ultimatum is a negotiation.
I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it’s the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.
All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.
Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would’ve been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could’ve gone.
Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.
I’m with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.
Not only this, but this has happened before. It was called Digg back in 2010.
I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That’s the final call.
I’m going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I’m spamming at this point.
A lot of Mods might be looking at all the work they have put into their communities over the years and think “I can’t leave all of this.” Which at this point, given Reddit Corp’s behavior, is a sunk cost fallacy.
It’s time to jump ship, or learn to live with the new reality. Which is really the same as the old reality, the thin veneer of civility has just been stripped away. This is Capitalism and it always turns out this way. Just look at how many products have been ruined, because someone, somewhere decided they needed more money. Anyone familiar with Hasbro’s heavy handedness with Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons knows what I am talking about.
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don’t think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they’ll be fine…
That’s until you factor in that the majority of that 0.6% and 0.2% were the people running their site for free, disabled people, or both.
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
I’m the same! Although I’ve even tried to avoid clicking search links to Reddit as well
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
Joining this was easier since I haven’t been on Reddit since the 12th
Got past the habit stage. Now I’m onto alternatives
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There’s way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It’ll take time for communities to grow, we can’t expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I’ve noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.
Lemmy is something like .02% the size of reddit
Do you think that number would change significantly if one were to discount bots from the calculation? I swear 3/4 of comments on some subs were bots, I’d like to think that it’d take a chunk off the actual reddit user base
Let’s change that!
What do you propose? Lemmy is significanly more difficult to understand, sign up for, and use, with far less content than Reddit. And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
I think as more powerful apps are created with simple sign up UIs that auto subscribe to the communities you request etc, and pull content from multiple sources (kbin/Lemmy/mastodon) all on one page… It will become easier for the less technically inclined to join. Just give it time and keep participating here instead of reddit.
And the majority opinion seems to be ‘fuck those kids that don’t understand how to use lemmy, we don’t need them’.
I see that too. I suspect that will go away with time. Possibly not very much time tbh. You often see that sort of attitude when a community based around new software is very small and new as culturally it is heavily influenced by people either involved in development or who pride themselves on being early adopters. Neither group is usually very good at understanding the significance of the barriers to entry for most people. Right now we’re seeing an influx of people who couldn’t care in the slightest about poking at new technology, but who are willing to do so because they want to explore a valid alternative to Reddit. That influx will naturally shift the culture and I’m pretty confident that going forward the general vibe will be that accessibility is an important thing (especially as blowing up accessibility for no good reason is at the core of why a lot of the new people are leaving Reddit.)
I disagree that it was harder to sign up for. At least on Lemmy.World (which I’m confident will become the default instance over Lemmy.ml) you just put in a username, email address and password and you’re in.
It does have far less content than Reddit. However, it is largely more active users who create and moderate content who are moving over. It’ll take time but they will grow the communities into places with a lot to offer new users. By the time that happens, it’s likely Reddit will do something to upset and displace their users again and they’ll find growing and thriving communities with increasingly compelling content to greet them. (and hopefully, even if Lemmy hasn’t become much easier to understand by then, the explanations and the guides and all the other “welcome new person” stuff will be more evolved by then.)
undefined> I disagree that it was harder to sign up for.
You are correct, and I misspoke. By ‘harder to sign up for’ I was referring to not just the actual sign up process, but the steps involved before the actual sign-up process (deciding on an instance, which itself requires learning what ‘instance’ means, as well as at least some research into what federation is, and what the differences are between instances).
That I can relate to. It definitely slowed me down a little when I was looking at trying Lemmy out. I think with all of those sorts of concerns it is inevitable that there will be better and better support for making the onboarding process as easy as possible as time goes on. What sort of resource do you think would have made getting into Lemmy easiest for you?
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
I’m in the same boat, I just joined today and I’m surprised but Lemmy already scratches the same itch that reddit did
Not only is the vibe similar, is markedly better, like Reddit from around ten years ago. Just a vibrant community of actual people, not a Mob of bots and astroturfers with a few people in between.
I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
no memes to scroll through if there is no one to post the memes
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
it’s still too early. These things take time.
True I suppose things could change over time. We’ll have to see.
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It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
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It was just a matter of time, really.
Reddit can’t run without its moderators and it can’t monetize without data. I encourage everyone who’s defected to Lemmy from Reddit to wipe their old Reddit account using Redact. I just wiped my old account of 15 years worth of comments and post history.
I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.
It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.
I’m waiting for a couple of days until I’m sure my deleted comments stay deleted. After that, I’ll wipe my 6 years old account.
As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.
I’ve had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can’t in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
Mods like that probably exist. There are also many quiet mods, particularly in smaller communities, who try to govern even handedly. I never engaged in any protests or pushed any agendas until the recent API changes, and am trying to set up an alternate space to help ensure a space exists for the content/community.
Quite honestly, I don’t like moderating or leadership and sort of fell into the role. Now that I’m here though, there’s a sense of duty/obligation that makes it hard to leave.
You don’t even notice the quiet mods. If they’re doing their job right, it can seem like they’re not doing anything. If they ban your for misspelling Ganon on a Zelda sub or demand you write an apology essay for pointing out that Joe Biden has been creepy on a politics sub then they are doing doing it for power.
Honestly, fuck 'em.
Reddit deserves to crash and burn in my opinion. Every social media platform eventually runs it’s course and then is supplanted by something else. No idea if Lemmy is the platform that eventually rises from the ashes of Reddit, but everything from the way Reddit was run from a corporate level, down to the users was toxic as hell. It needs to go away.reddit was the same thing as twitter, just a woke censorship mob that deleted dissenting opinions or even insinuating a slightly different viewpoint.
It’s funny that this “slightly different viewpoint” when pressed for details basically always ends up being hardcore racism, homophobia or other great things.
Define woke.
“Progressive things that scare me.” Is the usual definition in my head anyway.
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I’ve been here for a bit, here’s my first participation. Ayo!
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With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we’d better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it’s mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez’d so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?
Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I’m sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.
It’s easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn’t really make any difference.
I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.
If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.
You’re right about the apps coming great, I just downloaded Connect for Lemmy and it took all of 5 minutes for me to transition from baconreader. This app is smooooth too. What other apps are there though?
I’m using Liftoff. Just switched yesterday after Jerboa completely blanked out on me. So far, so good! The dev seems to be actively debugging and improving the app, so I have high hopes for this one. The reddit Sync developer is also in the process of making a Sync for Lemmy, with a hoped-for release in six weeks.
Connect seems really good so far.
Big thing is time for now. The Devs of some of the largest Reddit apps are onboard with making Lemmy apps but given Reddit’s disgustingly short timeline for the API changes they’ve not really had the time required to do much.
I’m certainly waiting with for Sync for Lemmy as I used Sync for a decade and am more than happy to wait and support the dev.
Sync won’t be the only major app either.
You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you’re interested in.
I’ll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won’t have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I’m glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.
Like others, I’m also here from Reddit Is Fun. I was a reddit user for over 16 years (with a 15 year old account). For over half of that time, RIF was my exclusive conduit to Reddit as the desktop site became increasingly unusable. Now that RIF is gone, I won’t be going back.
Invested time… And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.
Invested time… And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.
I was an early user of reddit, and it had a lot of the same problems this place had. There were no “smaller subreddits”, everything was small. But the quality of content was good, so I stuck around. It really takes a lot of effort to build a community, it doesn’t come for free. I hope you stick around and help 😀
Long live OSS.
I think only linux users moved over here… maybe
Windows user checks in. But I’ve got to admit, just as with Mastodon, the sign-up process (and finding communities across servers) might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers as most people that are on here now.
might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers
That’s true.
Honestly, signing up was a horrible experience.
I signed up yesterday. It was not bad at all. No blood oaths or anything.
It took me a few tries over multiple days to sign up successfully
I had swear the First Ideal. The storm light is kinda fun though.
Journey before destination, Radiant.
Journey before destination, Radiant.
Really? I don’t know, I just went to a page and wrote in my data, just like registering on any other page.
It took me about 12 attempts over a few weeks to sign up. It always got stuck at the “submit” and would just load endlessly, but never send the confirmation mail.
Different computers and phones and browsers and happened across multiple servers. …I can totally see how that drives away a lot of people.
I’m here from reddit is fun , I’m on Android and going to try on my windows PC in a minute
Technically Linux…
Dude I have communities I still want to be a part of there. It’s not easy to just walk away. I have now but when the NFL season starts it’s going to be hard to not go back unless there is a good alt here.
If they’re that important then pay them.
No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.
If the company is treating you as an employee, they are required to pay you. There is precedent for this.
You think those “open or else” threats are taking Reddit closer to that conclusion?
IANAL (oh yes, I do): As soon as Reddit The Company started exerting unilateral control over subreddits and their moderators for business purposes, and not legal or liability purposes, they most definitely were treating mods as employees.
I think they are getting closer to else
The TOS definitely gives them quite a lot of leeway there. While TOS obviously don’t supersede actual law, if unpaid internships that are clearly doing actual labor are generally allowed to exist, I’m skeptical that what is explicitly called a volunteer moderator position would run afoul of the law.
AOL had volunteer assistants. Ultima Online had volunteer assistants. The courts ruled that those were employee positions based on the way those positions were managed.
Don’t even get me started on unpaid internships.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of there being any precedent there. However, at least from those two cases, it seems that they were both settled out of court, so there hasn’t actually been a legally binding ruling on this kind of issue.
To be clear, I’m not saying that unpaid internships etc. are good; only that I’m not sure a court would find them to be literally illegal (regardless of whether or not I think they should be).
Unpaid internships are legal so long as the business receives no value from the intern, and the courts would uphold that, if ever a case came before them about it.
In practice, the only people who have the option of taking an unpaid internship - where they have to spend many hours a week in a workplace that doesn’t pay them, to the exclusion of spending those hours in a workplace that does pay them - are already finanically stable enough to do so, probably because of generational wealth. AOL and UO were exceptions, probably because people wanted to participate in those communities in their spare time, as a kind of hobby.
Those people are being inducted into the system that propagates that generational wealth. It’s not in their best interest to protest not being paid when they should be, because the repercussions of doing so would be being excluded from that system. So it’s highly unlikely that any real “this should be a paid internship” case would ever be filed. The amount of hours which would be ordered to be compensated, even if it was treble damages, wouldn’t be worth the cost of going to court, let alone being excluded from whatever industry.
Or, I know this is crazy, don’t piss them off when you already make their money?
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
There’s nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there’d just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there’d be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I’m just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don’t think the volunteer model wasn’t working. It’s the admin layer outside the mods that’s broken.
Yeah I was a mod. I didn’t want pay, I wanted appreciation, assistance, and to not be fucked over. I appreciated the free duolingo though. Paying me would’ve made it a job and it’d be a job well below my actual job pay rate.
Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.
