this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.

However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed:

Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future

Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation

However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.

I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.

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[–] WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social 136 points 2 years ago (5 children)

But they want users to vote out mods?

They don't want subreddits to close, but they've closed several.

Seems almost like their complaints actually don't make sense given their own actions are just an excuse...

[–] liminis@kbin.social 37 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Christian Selig's receipts (Apollo's dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.

Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators' right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.

[–] density@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)

Have any of these referendums happened? I have not been able to follow all this

[–] GreatBigJerk@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Not yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to build an automated way of doing this.

[–] SirNuke@kbin.social 25 points 2 years ago (1 children)

God I hope they are dumb enough to follow through with this. Going to be hilarious when a subreddit votes out a Reddit employee who was installed as a mod.

[–] Izzgo@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

votes out a Reddit employee who was installed as a mod.

That won't happen until Reddit decides to pay mods.

[–] jclinares@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

There are admins who are listed as mods in some subreddits, even if they probably don't do any moderation these days. Spez is a mod of r/HighQualityGifs, for example.

[–] can@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago

No they've just starting removing mods directly.

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[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago

It seems clear to me at this point the Reddit admins are just making up whatever spur-of-the-moment idea they can come up with at any given moment. They had no idea that this shitstorm was coming and have no actual plan in place for dealing with it.

Keep the shitstorm spinning, I guess. The creativity of Reddit users collectively exceeds that of the admins.

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Spez vote:

Do you want your moderators to be replaced?

A) Yes
B) Not no

[–] elvith@feddit.de 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Do you want your mods to be replaced?

A) Yes
B) Affirmative
C) Yes
D) Sounds good
E) Yes
E) OK, do it
G) Yes
H) Also Yes
K) NOn't

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[–] static@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

Seems so,
There will never be a vote, it's just a smokescreen.

[–] vyvanse@kbin.social 81 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up

[–] CrexisEnnex@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

At this point I don't know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.

[–] GraceGH@kbin.social 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I think it's theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they've slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that'd get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.

Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won't happen.

[–] SirNuke@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I doubt this is really from spez. It's the investors who've poured money into Reddit as they've dicked around for 15 years. But now money is expensive. Personally I think they are looking to tap into the sweet, sweet VC money being pumped into LLMs (for which Reddit's API is prime training material), which might go down worse than "hey we're going to not so discretely kill the apps you all have built and love!"

So spez is an idiot, but replacing him wouldn't change things.

On a side note, my god was Digg's Kevin Rose also an idiot back in the day, but he was such a far better class of idiot. He did care about the site, even if he was hilariously incapable of running it. You just don't appreciate these things until they're over.

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[–] abff08f4813c@kbin.social 53 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Again, not a surprise. Totally awful, outrageous, and immoral.

But sadly, par for the course. The mods should allow a vote to move to the fediverse, and leave the sub permanently private in that case.

Or if reddit won't give them the chance to vote, just do it anyways. Like the admins just do what they want, so turnabout is fair play, amirte?

[–] Kakapo@kbin.social 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If people want to move to the fediverse, they need to move to the fediverse, not wait for everyone else to move first.

[–] awsamation@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, but you're preaching to the choir here. The number of people who are willing to take that initiative but haven't yet is only getting smaller. So now people are thinking about how to help along the group who isn't unwilling to move, just maybe not move alone.

Part of that is building the fediverse up, more communities, more activity, more of the stuff that made us want to go on Reddit beforehand. But the other part is seeing if there's a good way to motivate the next group migration.

[–] phosphorik@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I dunno man. I just jumped over today. Bummed about the way things went but I’ve been in denial about what Reddit has become for a while. There are more coming.

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[–] keeb420@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

But I thought we were a community. Spez said we were a community. Ho wouldn't lie would he?

[–] i_cant_sports@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

Cue the Anakin and Clueless Padme meme

[–] PugJesus@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

Ho wouldn't lie would he?

Ho lied.

[–] The_Empty_Tuple@kbin.social 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'd be surprised if there was ever a time the admins cared about the opinions/rights of mods or users. It's always been about freedom until freedom threatened their 'bottom line'.

[–] Nadya@kbin.social 38 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.

Which is it fuck-u-spez?

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[–] density@kbin.social 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For scale:

According to wikipedia the population of finland is 5.6 million.

[–] whitehatbofh@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

Maybe the world just loves Finland that much.

Right, Russia? 😏

[–] KKSakura@kbin.social 27 points 2 years ago

Reddit: "Democracy is what I say it is"

[–] experbia@kbin.social 25 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.

[–] whitehatbofh@kbin.social 11 points 2 years ago

That's less a regulatory thing and more of a shareholder lawsuit after the fact thing. Which I think r would be even more hilarious, rich fucks suing arrogant moronic assholes like spez and his Admin lackeys

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[–] BlueForestDev@kbin.social 24 points 2 years ago (1 children)

'deny the right' not sure the users had that in the first place

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They didn't, but you had spez out there just last week talking about community members voting on subreddit mods and policies, so it's good wording to hammer home the lie.

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[–] Thorned_Rose@kbin.social 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with "No, wait, not like that!!" and the mods adapt again.... this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:

The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.

People are already in open revolt. It's only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)... and Reddit's journey towards enshittification will be complete.

[–] BuddhaBeettle@kbin.social 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Honestly, If I were the mods Id nuke the whole subreddit: delete anything of importance, especially any important asset you made for that community (say, FAQs, resources, links, banners, logos, etc.) or better than delete it, edit it out with information as to where you are migrating, leave the shit behind. When you are done leave the sub closed till they take it away from you, and best of luck to anyone that has to rebuild again from nothing.

[–] brownpaperbag@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If anyone is going to do this, it needs to be done in stages so it can't be easily reverted back like we're seeing with the one-shot comment delete scripts. Slowly dismantle the sidebar information and links, fuck up the automod and other bot settings. Tweak the CSS and flairs. If you're going to go nuclear, make sure they can't easily get it back.

[–] BuddhaBeettle@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Im not a mod, but on a smaller scale on my own profile, I grabbed all my most upvoted comments (started from the really upvoted ones until I reached 20 upvotes or so) and edited them out to only leave the first few phrases or words. Then inserted a message that read:

"This used to be a full comment, you can find more resources in the link bellow since I have moved to kbin and reddit doesn't deserve my content! Bye reddit, you won't be missed!
For more [subject] advice, find me on https://kbin.social/m/[subject]"

Bonus points if I could cut the comment out at the exact time it was about to become useful "Whats actually going on here is that..."

Did that sorting by most upvoted and also my fresh, since it wass manual I only managed to do so much, But I liked the approach better than just deleting it all or editing with "fuckspez" so that they could get back and revert it.

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[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Users don't own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don't like how a subreddit is run, you're supposed to make your own, not take it over.

Reddit's admins are making up the rules as they go along.

[–] Thorned_Rose@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

Reddit admins acting in complete opposition to Reddit's own Content Policy 🤦🏻‍♀️

[–] RosalynKirk@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

That's not true. What they said was that the users who voted make up a tiny portion of the overall userbase.

However, you can't force them all to vote. You can only ask and accept the answer of the active ones that choose to participate.

Reddit must be exhausted playing these ethics games. Just admit that they want to kill 3rd party apps and they're not going to tolerate malicious compliance with the rules.

[–] ImaginarySaffron@kbin.social 8 points 2 years ago

I wonder if the next move would be to ban posts that invite people to move to reddit alternatives. Elon Musk did that with twitter, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Huffman tried to do the same. Maybe communities should use this time to organize on where to move while they still can have those kind of discussions.

[–] DaGuys470@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

2 million individual users that had a chance to participate. That's literally how democracy works.

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