Technology

There's still one protest possible.

LEAVE REDDIT!!! GET THE FUCK OFF OF IT! LET IT DIE. MAKE IT DIE!

Same with twitter.

....I'm gonna go ahead and say it.

I like it better here.

The only way to win the reddit game is to not play.

You know what's not impossible? Leaving that shit hole and never coming back.

It's sad how many docile idiots remained on Reddit and Twitter after last year.

It's amazing to me that so many people are willing to work as unpaid moderators so that Reddit's investors can make more money.

The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.

A friend and I were recently discussing how spineless modern boycotts are.

We set a goddamn deadline for when the Reddit boycott ended. No wonder Spez just waited. Most people then just continued using the website. What a disgrace.

Imagine if after one week of the genocide in Gaza, the BDS efforts just stopped. A boycott must be indefinite. It should go on until demands are met.

so many leaders are forgetting what the point of protests is. yes, protests are annoying if you're a leader. but they're better than the alternative. that's the whole point.

More hilarity: as of about a week ago, it appears the reddit algorithm has also started boosting posts with negative karma on their horrible mobile app. Guessing it's a move towards 'negative engagement'. I have not seen it myself (I don't use the reddit app) but I see users complaining about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1frcdxs/it_looks_like_reddit_is_currently_trying_new_ways/

(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark's)

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit's platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I've seen on Lemmy has been largely "we don't need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there". So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can't rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.

Stop using Reddit, problem solved

It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.

They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.

They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.

I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.

Go_JasonWaterfalls on the platform, writes in a post on r/modnews. “We have a responsibility to protect Reddit and ensure its long-term health, and we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm.”

You mean like killing all third-party apps and selling user-data to AI companies? That kind of harm? Oh no, you meant "harm" to your personal finance.

...we cannot allow actions that deliberately cause harm

Seems like that's about the only actions Reddit execs have taken over the last several years. Glad I left when I did.

But the protests made it clear that letting moderators make their communities private at their discretion “could be used to harm Reddit at scale” and that work on this feature was “accelerated” because of the protests.

Because Reddit admins deserved that harm. We've handed them all this free data and resource and they decided it was theirs.

Is that the site we all left cuz it’s a turd? Yeah? Don’t care. It’s called principle.

I'm out of the loop on Reddit, but I was beyond a power user on there two years ago. Back then, if every human user on the site stopped using the site, the admins would not have noticed any difference because nearly every post was bot networks reposting old top posts and filling the comments with the exact comments from the last time it got upvoted.

Garbage website. I miss it for what it was capable of for a while there.

Reddit is one of the most infiltrated and astroturfed site. I have absolutely no confidence that the leadership are interested in addressing that. When there were suspicions it was anti-US actors, they had to take action because the government would get involved. But we all know that such pressure doesn't exist for other astroturfing actors, state and private.

There are many valid reasons outside of a sitewide protest for a subreddit to go from public to private, so Reddit doing this is a scummy move on more than just one level. Just one more reason why free alternatives like lemmy are superior.

fuck u/spez

“While we are making this change to ensure users’ expectations regarding a community’s access do not suddenly change, protest is allowed on Reddit,” writes Nestler. “We want to hear from you when you think Reddit is making decisions that are not in your communities’ best interests. But if a protest crosses the line into harming redditors and Reddit, we’ll step in.”

Yall have very clearly demonstrated that you do not care about the communities best interest, and you have no interest in hearing what we think. Fuck Spez and good riddance to reddit

At this point I'm more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person's name and profile pic...and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser's name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I'd say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.

People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they'll just double down.

I'm not surprised. I'm on this site because I'm sick of being banned on reddit for thinking wrong.

May I be blunt? I don't think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.

FUCK SPEZ

The other option is for all the mods to quit. AI can probably do a lot of basic tasks, but without mods they wouldn't have a site pretty quickly.

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?

...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely