To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Exactly. My sympathies are with those creators & moderators who have received awful comments from reddit users that are too naive and impatient to understand the protest actions.
Too stupid understand who butters their buns also...
They seem to assume that new ~~mommies & daddies~~ mods & content creators will rise up to take their place. Like all that effort grows on trees or something.
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People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.
And they very much don't want to do that.
And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.
Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.
And they don't wanna.
Vicious, but true. I'm still struggling with whether or not I'm going to astroturf my comment history and delete my account. I see a lot of folks saying their comments were restored and then they had no way to log back in to delete them again. For now, I'm just going to leave my Reddit account dormant. I suppose it isn't super effective to leave my content there for Spez to benefit from, but I kinda feel like it does more harm to people just looking for answers than it ever will to Spez if I were to remove it. All around, this is just a ridiculously stupid situation we all find ourselves in over the whims of small minds chasing after big money. Again.
May I say that whatever you decide to do, you've already "won" this? First, giving a shit about people, and second, spending time grappling with those truthfully complex issues has enriched you, and all of us.
One suggestion is to edit them with wording like fuck spez, so that if he deletes your content it won't be you that yanked it away from people.
But they could just revert that easily enough, rather than delete outright (although are they smart enough to do that...?). Another could be to insert an explanation at the top or bottom of all your (best/all) stuff that you do not condone Reddit's actions but decided not to punish end-users for the actions of that powermod abuser.
And eventually you could migrate it elsewhere but yeah, that's a bit hard to do atm when users would have trouble finding it. OR, you could combine these approaches: for each answer, make a post to kbin/lemmy about the issue, then edit the original to include solely a link to that new location. That would kill 2 birds with 1 stone by helping people realize where to go for high-quality content, while providing the direct answer (there's no need to create an account or deal with fediverse issues, anyone at all can just read it). (The down-side is that spez could easily revert that back too, but if so then you could keep trying, like spell out the link to futz with its automated detection.)
But whatever you end up doing, I see that you are doing it because you care, and that's already a win in my book. :-)
Personally, I'm leaving my comments intact because I doubt that Spez is really going to benefit much from them in the long run anyway.The technology behind AIs currently seems to be moving away from simply throwing vast amounts of data into the training to a more precisely fine-tuned high-quality training dataset, so there's probably not going to be as much demand for Reddit's trove as Spez thinks.
And besides, the old PushShift archives are still floating around. We don't know how the legal or technical situation will shake out but maybe people will be able to use that for free training.
I'm leaving my comments intact because I doubt that Spez is really going to benefit much from them in the long run anyway
The technology behind AIs
I think rather than AI the idea is to reduce ad revenue by moving content off of reddit so folks will stop checking reddit and thus reddit has fewer ads seen.
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i do not like what reddit is doing one bit, but please stop. what reddit is doing is not anywhere near equivalent to real actual abuse, and implying it is is a little offensive. have some perspective
I totally hear you that comments like this can feel insensitive of people who have been abused. I'm an abuse survivor so I get where you're coming from and appreciate your intent.
What I disagree with is that we shouldn't make this comparison at all. The same relational dynamics and structures that give rise to mental, emotional, physical, sexual, etc. abuse and exploitation give rise to this behaviour too.
It's like the pyramid of rape culture (https://www.11thprincipleconsent.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Rape-Culture-v5.png). The stuff at the bottom isn't one for one equal to what's up the top. But the underlying structure and foundations are the same no matter how far up you go.
The same as any form of abuse, no matter how big or small, is underpinned by the same thought patterns, behaviours, power dynamics, culture, societal attitudes and practices, etc.
EDIT: removed preview of pyramid so no one gets smacked in the face with unpleasant descriptions scrolling down. Typos.
I've been abused. I suffer from ongoing complex PTSD from that abuse.
I have some fucking perspective, thank you very fucking much.
And that perspective is that the word is broadly defined, and that exploitation is fucking abuse. It's not physical abuse, no, and I didn't say that it was. I'm fact, I was very careful to avoid such comparisons. But exploiting people for their time and labour so that you can generate obscene amounts of wealth for yourself is exploitative, it involves lying to people, both implicitly and explicitly, and it involves engaging in emotional and psychological manipulation.
And that's a type of fucking abuse. It's the exact same type of abuse that narcissists inflict on their victims. It's just being done in a way that the law and our culture sees as legitimate, because there's a lot of money involved, and we all fall under the yolk of rich mother fuckers who think they deserve more from us, just because they already have money.
I make the comparisons not because I lack perspective, but because I have it.
Because corporate behaviour like this feels too fucking familiar, given that perspective.
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as somebody who has several decades of parental abuse to look back on I don't consider this offensive. on the contrary. spez and reddit follow many entries of the emotional abuse playbook to a t.
Nailed it. Nicely summarized.
yup. if they deally care, they would either join or make the content themselves, yet they do neither and make it about mods
Are kbin or Lemmy posts being indexed by search engines? If the content was created, would anyone be able to find it?
If we build it, they will come.
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I posted a similar comment elsewhere but along the same line of thought: The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There's a real problem of Apathy in today's culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don't give a fuck about "ideals" or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
The most toxic users of Reddit want to stay there rather than come here? Oh boo-hoo, cry me a river:-). If they are happy with their childish toys, then let them be - that's a win for them, and a win for us too?
Okay, so that's glass-half-full thinking, and more realistically the situation is also half empty at the same time, but both are true at the same time, so we'll see what happens I guess.
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Tbh - some of us, like me, did leave our most valuable comments to the tech community behind. Whether it helps reddit or not I still posted things to help others. I did delete much of anything outside of very tech related subreddits though. Also I promoted some software I wrote when applicable so it would only cut off my own nose to try and spite Spez too, so no I would rather not do that.
Reddit will die a slow death I am sure, but the heart of reddit is certainly gone.
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I've already felt the sting of the protests when googling solutions to various issues. I used to be able to include "reddit" in the search and would almost always find relevant information quickly, but now as OP mentioned many posts and whole communities have gone dark.
It's all been really eye opening about the potential negative consequences of having so many communities and information in the control of so few.
Yeah it's so dangerous for Reddit to be in the control of a single CEO
I do wonder if the Fediverse will ever be able to replace Reddit in terms of searchable terms for niche questions. I hate that a lot of niche communities that I’ve been apart of recently have been on discord or reddit. If those communities stay there then all that tech support will be lost; like tears in rain.
If Reddit remains the place for those kinds of niche questions that probably means spez will win in the long run. That’s what brought me to reddit, whenever I had a question reddit was always the best result.
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Google's VP of searching has even mentioned that, which really is Google's fault as it was an issue long before spez caused Reddit to crumble - Reddit was just propping up Google's bad choices, then Musk bought Twitter and started running it into the ground, now Huffman sees both of those as examples to follow somehow... plus Stackoverflow is on strike, and the internet archive / wayback machine is facing legal troubles and may have to cease existing b/c of some decisions they made during the pandemic as well. So it's not just Reddit: it's enshittification of the entire internet.
I know what you mean, but also it's kinda fun to solve my own problems lately, even if it takes 100x longer:-). Fortunately cached copies of many Reddit posts exist, although unfortunately those do not always include comments:-(.
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Yep, the whole thing had ordinary and third party app users pitted against each other, only because blaming the mods would've reopened the subs faster than going against reddit itself. And the fact that 90% of reddit don't use third party app makes it that much worse. Goddammit spez you cunning mf.
It's really that high? I'm surprised, I would have thought 3rd party app use was way more common.
Among higher than average users it seemingly was. Given that reddit was saying the third party apps were using above average amounts of API calls per user. They said it's because of the 3PAs baing unoptimized but it was likely that more engaged users used 3PAs.
Wow so they've prioritised the casual users over the power users... You know, the ones who actually post the content... This should go well /s
Anecdotal, but I've been talking about this whole thing to my partner. She doesn't really care though because, in her own words: "I tried to use Reddit a little while ago, but I didn't like the app"
Had a good chuckle to myself over that
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i think it's cuz a lot of us were redditors who used it before they even had an official reddit app, and so it wasn't pushed on us as the default option. the older, more dedicated reddit accounts disproportionately made up the active userbase
I can't be the only one who was still using old.reddit desktop site even on my phone and tablet.
I noped out of the new shit the day they released it, and gladly clicked their provided link to take me back to old.
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Before they bought a 3rd party app. The official app was alien blue first
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People are only using the 3rd party app line because it's the most relatable argument. It's much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there's no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren't as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There's no scenario where things get better for Reddit.
Imo, more emphasis should have been made on how spez treated Christian, the Apolla dev. It's honestly disgusting. And not even any kind of apology or direct reply. Spez just went on to smear Christian's name more with disinformation he fed to the press via interviews.
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It'll be interesting to hear from the odd user that kept their accounts how things change in the coming weeks and months. It's cool that so many websites made articles about it but it still felt very clickbait and polarized on even those sights. Users will know the truth and hopefully update us on the shitshow to come.
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only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest
That's one of the most solipsistic "if it doesn't affect me it doesn't exist" comments I've seen in a good while.
To give the poster the benefit of the doubt, it's probably just a very poorly worded frustration that /r/20flavorsofshitpost (with the mindless horde) is operational when /r/thethingiwant (with a passionate small community that adds a lot of value) is dead. It sure could have been communicated better, but I really don't think it's meant to claim the protest only affects the poster's interests.
It's harder to see the difference when 10% of a huge sub leaves than 80% of a tiny one.
People are way to shortsighted to see how it can affect them as well.
The amount of "I don't use 3rd party apps so it doesn't affect me" comments were very noticable.
These changes and the ones that Reddit will implement to rail the userbase even harder will affect the people one way or the other at some point.
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For the other people like me that hadn't seen solipsistic before, it means very egocentric in this context.
It's referring to the philosophy that the self is all that can be known to exist.
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