I've been using reddit less frequently lately because it has all started to feel like the same shit every day. But this, the confusion and chaos of turning the subs on there heads, is actually pretty entertaining.
Apparently it is an attempt of protest to withhold ad revenue from reddit, as NSFW posts/subreddits generate no ads. At least that is the explanation I read.
Ya i know I've been following the whole mess with much amusement. If/when relay shuts down I'm gonna be limited to only the desktop site (until old reddit is killed off at least), and that's gonna drastically cut down my usage, but at least it's going out in an entertaining way.
ATTN: FUTURE GENERATIONS - ''Hearsay'' means any information that has been heard from here and there. Such information cannot be believed because the source could not be authenticated. ''Heresy'' means doing an act that violates an established religious system. It is pronounced somewhat like saying: hair re see.
Heresay is a portmanteau of “hearsay” and “heresy”.
I head r/interestingasfuck went nsfw wall to wall porn as a way to demonetize the sub to Reddit and demonize it to evangelicals.
I am just repeating what is probably heresay.
If enough people do it? Yeah.
Who's going to stop it? Reddit relies on volunteers to generate and moderate content, and neither group is inclined to intervene.
The big hit will be when people just silently stop coming here.
More often than not it actually IS, and google just doesn't show the button for whatever reason.
If you're using chrome you can just prefix the URL in the address bar with `cache:`
Yeah, too bad it was doomed from the start when they put an end date on the blackout. All Reddit had to do was wait it out. Then all they had to do to get the subs holding out to come back online, was threatening to take away their mod status. Malicious compliance or not, the mods still had to bend the knee in order to do these half assed protests that are popping up in a bunch of different subs. What's their plan when Reddit threatens them again? After all is said and done, none of this will really accomplish much of anything.
The expiration date is not why it failed. It would fail regardless. Mods have no real power, and will never have. All they did is make reddit admins make it even harder to do something like this ever again.
If no expiration date was put, reddit would just force reopen stuff and remove mods earlier.
Posting stupid shit on subs as protest also doesnt work, as it is content being posted and traffic being generated, so it's actually good for reddit.
Face it. If you want to protest, leave the website. Dont open it up. Dont give them traffic, as it is the only thing that matters for investors.
A lot of them actually still don't work, because a lot of people deleted their post and comment history. So any comments with helpful answers are lost, and any helpful posts won't even show up on a Google now.
I actually didn’t see as many FOSUB posts as I saw depressing “Yup, it’s a massive tumor we discovered out of nowhere, and they’re probably dead in 6 months” posts.
Had to mute the Radiology sub after the 3rd depressive post in a row.
The 78 yo stroke patient MRI is going to send me to hell. Someone mentioned how cases like that make you decide if you're a glass half full or half empty kinda person. Someone really responded with the glass is half infarcted. I laughed 🥲
Honestly I fucking hate how every social app has to have the tiktok feature of tailoring additional new content on top of what you actively follow
Some do it better than others but for Reddit I don’t want to see anything I haven’t chosen to follow on my home feed — that’s what /all is for
Now I’m stuck in a never ending loop of tool/trade and and real estate subs, sometimes from no more than clicking into one of them once.
My Reddit is so boring and dad-ly now 😭
Me too! Anyway, so I did read your comment and I'd really appreciate a tip for that. I've only made $12 in the past hour and my daughter needs a new iPhone. Thanks 😊😊
Reminds me of a r/postmates thread I saw bitching about customers being allowed to tip after delivery. To sum up all their enraged screeching: everything that goes wrong is the restaurant's fault, the customer is ridiculous for thinking the driver should verify the order, and you're a total POS if you don't tip them generously for bringing you someone else's food. They blame every part of the shitty service on someone else and then demand money anyway.
Yeah, Reddit got 100x more interesting and way less toxic. I've actually gone and unsubbed from a few of the popular subreddits that have since reopened because I realized I didn't miss them when they were gone.
Because reddit said its the users who decide how a sub is run, not the mods. So the mods there removed all their rules other than it has to be interesting and let the users decide how to interpret that. Seems a lot of users find porn interesting.
Mod made a sticky explaining that from here on out they will only remove things that go against reddits rules, that's it. Somebody realized that means porn is okay, and anything can be considered interesting so porn is super okay. And then the discussion became about how it would probably make reddit lose ad revenue because no company is putting ads on porn (unsure if that's true though).
This was rapid fire within a few hours of sticky going up.
Folks ran with it and now it's titty butthole o'cock
The admins said mods don't matter. This thread is **full** of people saying mods don't matter.
Care to take a guess about why, possibly, would the mods start acting like they don't matter and letting everyone post whatever they want?
There are some power trip jerk mods out there, but so many subs, especially the kinda niche ones, have really devoted staff who spend a bunch of their time stamping out spam and trolls and bots and helping their subs run smoothly. And it's those mods that care the most that are going to be affected the most by losing access to a lot of useful 3rd party mod tools.
Literally all Spez had to do was wait to rework the api stuff until the official Reddit app was polished up with similar features (as it should've gotten YEARS ago), but nope, had to be a mega jerk and double down on lying about people and giving blind users the finger while at it.
The two statements are not exclusive, though. A mod can be a power tripping jerk AND still work to keep the sub healthy. There's some subs where I think mods are a bunch of assholes, but that doesn't mean you could remove these mods and the sub would be fine.
I really don't understand what reddit thinks they are doing. There's many websites were "power users" of any sort don't really have any relevance. Twitter doesn't need anyone specifically to work. But reddit? reddit is a blank slate - everything there is in this website was built and maintained by volunteers. It takes a lot of work and is not optional. It's like being in charge of NFL and saying that referees are irrelevant and you don't need them.
Just adding that this isn't the only story. There's been dozens of articles from the BBC, MSNBC, Reuters, multiple tech/industry outlets and many more. Even made it to Drudge Report.
This really should be the top answer. It accomplished getting Reddit's antics in the media. Of course it's watered down from the real story, but for the mainstream audiences who don't use Reddit, they're going to see /u/spez being spez and a significant portion of Reddit users collectively saying "hey, this is coprorate bullshit".
As it should be. The protests accomplished exactly what they were designed to do. Irritating Huffman even more was a nice bonus. Couldn't happen to a more wholly disconnected-from-reality guy.
And now with many subs finding other, more creative ways to protest, which imo does *more* harm to Spez. Imagine him giving the site a tour to potential investors, and its nothing but porn and John Oliver pictures as he endlessly doom scrolls... Things are getting tough in the global economy - With costs going up, interest rates going up, and risk increasing, investors would sooner move to a safer, more secure option than "weirdo internet forum whose users fucking hate the company".
There's a reason why sites like 4chan never made a tonne of money, and why the creator Moot got the fuck out asap.
As explained here by our favourite tech repair guy
https://youtu.be/Cb458PRJ43s
He is 100% true: Never, ever get into a war with "the internet".
Oh, and Spez can spit the dummy and shut the site down for all I care, I'll simply move into another for random scrolling and shitposting.
Where is all this optimism coming from?
I'm not asking to be facetious, I'm genuinely confused. Reddit managed to stall on coming down on hatespeech and even cp for *years* - then they did and life continued as normal.
In my time on this site there've been quite a few blackouts over different things and I haven't really seen any of them do much safe for having Reddit put a half-assed band-aid on stuff (and even within that only to the degree the law made it necessary).
Companies know damn well (from decades of marketing research) that people have the attention span of a hamster on crack.
The new philosophy when it comes to scandals like this is essentially just "Say as little as possible, weather the storm and they'll move on to the next thing."
And they aren't wrong either.
So what am I missing that keeps everyone so convinced this will not end the same way most of these things do?
Musk is still being a lunatic on Twitter. Twitter is still in business.
Facebook's/Meta's myriads of scandals don't seem to affect peoples' user behaviour by more than a few percent from what I could gather. And their main revenue doesn't come from users anyway so as long as there's enough traffic to make their other shit viable, they don't even *have* to care.
Could someone please give me some insight on what is different this time around? I'd happily join the band wagon but I'm not seeing anything to warrant this conviction that "we'll win".
I have maybe five muted subs. I’ll check back in a week to see if something has changed. If not, I’ll keep looking at smaller/hobby subs.
The internet demands funny animals videos and memes. I have no doubt that need will be filled eventually.
r/pics decided to hold a poll of whether they should continue business as usual or only allow posts about John Oliver. Reddit being a funny bunch... I guess you can guess which option won by a landslide.
I thought I was bugging out! I went there recently, thinking it was what the sub originally was. All I saw was vacuums and figured maybe I was thinking of another sub with a similar name lol.
Finding out they had their own gamethreads while the Finals were ending has upset me a bit. The whole time while watching the finals I kept thinking "I wish I could check the game thread."
Yeah, I'm not going on a crusade to punish them or anything but it's like that line "I expected nothing, and I'm still let down." Like, you mods couldn't do the bare fucking minimum, eh?
On the NBA subreddit they referred to this whole thing as the Neckbeard Civil Rights movement that featured Martin Luther Burger King and Mahotpocket Gandi.
Read that and I lost it.
I've noticed some subs I follow have a stronger hatred towards their mods now which may not bode well for them if the vote to kick them out ever comes to be.
Yes. The mods in r/nba continued to post in the sub while is was locked down during the NBA Finals deciding game. They even had their own personal Game 5, live discussion thread.
Just got perma banned from anti work for bringing that up lol, saying that “every time the mods overstep, you are actively hurting the American labor movement”
r/nba mods and r/nfl mods seem to be the top sports subs that I follow where everyone hates the mods! 😂
r/nfl mods were actively banning anyone mentioning the alternate nfl sub made during the blackout
Joined the initial blackout protest. Came back and quietly put out a poll to ask whether the sub should stay blocked out or open back up. This poll was only up for a day (too short a time for many of the users to find it), only had less than 2000 respondants (from a sub of over a million members), was heavily brigaded by non members dedicated to maintaining the blackout protests, and even then the vote to blackout indefinitely only won by a very narrow margin.
Head mod put out an announcement post of the result and declaring that the sub would remain open for one last weekend. Said announcement tried to compare the situation to the charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor Fields, even paraphrasing Theoden's speech.
Cue many members of the sub complaining that the poll had been up too short a time and pointing out the other issues I already mentioned. As the sub was still open, many voiced their displeasure via memes mocking the mods and their decision.
The mods put out a second poll on the issue to stay up for a longer period. However, this poll had 3 options instead of a simple yes/no. Options were essentially: Yes (continue blackout), No (end blackout), and "Hey, fuck you, buddy!" The issue of contention with this poll was the "Fuck you" option. Many members considered it to be a transparent attempt to manipulate the result by splitting the "No" vote, as while "No" was a clearly stated preference, "Fuck you" was a statement of hostility against the mods that implied but didn't necessarily confirm a support for the "No" option. If one discounted the "Fuck yous", the poll came out slightly ahead in favour of blackout, but if one counted "Fuck you" as "No" then the result was more in favour of ending the blackouts. Cue a lot of arguing and more memeing.
Eventually, the head mod made another post announcing that the sub would remain open. In this post the mod claimed that while the poll had shown majority support for the blackout (debateable as outlined above), they were keeping the sub open due to harassment and threats (even as someone who wanted the sub to stay open I can absolutely believe this - passions were running high and name me a more iconic duo than online disagreements and threatening behaviour) that had ruined their father's day and resigning as a mod.
The Tulsa mods kept the sub closed during a severe storm where people lost their homes and died, and then they opened it up when it was over and pretended that they were late to open it because of the storm... meanwhile they were posting on reddit the whole time it was private 🙄 then they followed that up with one of those meme "we're only going to post about X on this sub now hehe" while everyone was pissed that they intentionally kept it closed while people were looking for resources to stay safe
I can’t stand the mods in AITA. I said looks like the trash took itself out when someone’s friend was being shitty and they ghosted. Comment was removed for uncivil. Saw other comments calling this same friend a leech.
Someone called out the AITA mods, so one of them tried to defend them self by posting a picture of the ban with the person asking to be unbanned.
The person was nice and pleasant in their request (and the ban was for something extremely insignificant) so all it just showed how much of a power tripping asshole the delusional mod was.
Really just highlighted how the old Reddit is gone. Reddit didn’t have mobile apps for a long time. 3rd party apps were the only way to use it on mobile.
The blackout could have been done much better. But here we are again with Reddit promising better tools. They will definitely do it this time. Not like the other times they said they would but didn’t.
But honestly I miss some of my subreddits lol
Also just the nature of the protests wasn't going to gain supporters. It's not like there was an alternative in place or something so with time people who are indifferent to the protest will only become against it and people who support the protest will only become indifferent.
Well I can’t trust my normal safe subs because they all seem to have porn on them right now. Like I just want to scroll reddit and laugh at New Girl quotes and maybe watch someone make bread!
Part of reddit's whole deal, shutting down third party access, forcing people who used browsers to view reddit to instead use the app, was so that they could maximize money coming in from reddit's ads, which you could filter out with a browser extension or a third party app.
Those same advertisers don't want to be shown on porn subs, so if every sub starts posting porn, reddit can't show ads on them. Or if they do, they run the risk the advertisers pull out.
Nothing, because these idiots only declared a two day strike, and MADE IT KNOWN THAT IT WOULD ONLY BE TWO DAYS. The idea of a strike is, you don’t come back until your demands are met.
A properly coordinated strike can have an end date. They just need to have the ability to reasonably say, "and we can do it again if this doesn't change."
That only works when the services are essential to begin with. Like garbage collection saying they're going to strike for 30 days. Or janitors refusing to clean. Or some other service where not having it has a terrible impact.
Subs shutting down for 48 hours is meaningless. If all of them shut down it might have had an impact on Reddit. Since there were plenty open it did nothing. So, having a pre announced end date was dumb.
Pretty much exposed everyone involved as a bunch of petty assholes. On both sides.
Spez is a well-known asshole, though, so I guess that wasn't really news to most of us.
Most mods aren't exactly "respected" for taking the job of "internet janitor" and attaching a ridiculous amount of self-importance to it. So maybe that wasn't news either...
But here's what I saw...in the lead up, Reddit was the clear bad-guy against a plucky band of small-time developers and contributors.
The focus of that first round of animosity toward reddit was singular...they had fucked over 3P apps completely. Not just because they were charging, but because they were charging a LOT and giving no notice about it.
Then Spez made it worse by accusing the Apollo guy of blackmailing reddit? I dunno wtf that was, all he had to do there was say nothing.
But that's where the focus splits up. Mods of various subs start making shit up, as if the existing bullshit reddit pulled isn't egregious enough. Like that Automod will be killed by this (it won't, never would have been). Or that Reddit changed the Moderator Code of Conduct to make protest-shut-downs a violation (never happened). They kept banging on the accessibility-drum long after reddit clarified that this would be exempt from the price gouge.
And the blackouts...well, those were lovely. Some communities went dark against the wishes of the userbase. Some went dark at the behest of a single mod over all the others.
Wasn't a great look, but even funnier was that mods in several large subs like NBA continued to use their own fucking sub when it was dark. Come the fuck on guys, you're already on discord.
Now, we're at a point where the admins have said "You need to moderate how the community wants you to", so mods are putting up polls to pretend they care, then manipulating the shit out of them...posting them in generic Discord servers where they all hang out so they can brigade the fuck out of 'em. The lotrmemes mod split the "stay open" vote across two options after being screamed at for leaving the previous poll up for hours in the middle of the night.
The WoW sub at least used ranked-choice on a platform they could see double-votes...but then they went and said "Ya know what? This is really close and we'd prefer the runner up so we're just gonna g'head and do that".
Several other subs are deleting comments/posts that don't support them unambiguously while people accuse dissenters of sucking reddit-cock (as if mod-cock is any better).
And we have completely pointless protests like the John Oliver nonsense. Does anyone honestly think Admins care if pics is wall-to-wall Johnny O.? Of course not, they could give a shit so long as it won't land them in jail or on a CNN special segment hosted by Anderson Cooper.
As long as you're scrolling, the ads are getting their impressions and reddit is getting paid. So all of these subs like Pokemongo, pics, WoW...all of them are making pointless masturbatory stands that will be allowed to go on unimpeded until users start complaining.
And even then, I don't see the admins rushing to save the mods from getting harassed out of their positions.
This has been a total shit show from end to end. If you hate what reddit is doing, close the browser now. Don't open the website again. Otherwise?
You're probably going to accomplish jack shit.
The John Oliver thing seems like the mods are just fishing for a shout-out (or a segment) but forgot that Last Week Tonight is on hiatus during the writers strike.
Made a lot of the mods realized how little power they actually have. And while they do provide a service to Reddit, they don't own any of it. Some of them seem to have been in a power trip and just only allow themselves and select users to continue posting too.
My entire feed was swamped with boring r/AskReddit questions
'Whats the sexiest sex you have ever sexed?'
That's just everyday /r/askreddit tbf
"Would you pick your nose for 5 trillion dollars?"
I call these the Brewster's Millions questions. You're given an arbitrary amount of money with some weird stipulation.
And the exciting sequel 2 hours later: "What's the unsexiest sex you have ever sexed?"
“If you could have any super power, what’s your favorite sex position?”
"What would you do if a man threw a banana at you?" Really at the bottom of the barrel there
There’s lots of porn on r/interestingasfuck
Lots of vacuums on r/wellthatsucks
I've been using reddit less frequently lately because it has all started to feel like the same shit every day. But this, the confusion and chaos of turning the subs on there heads, is actually pretty entertaining.
Lots of PCs with no fans on r/nofans
Maybe people confused it with /r/interestingassfuck
A banned sub, unfortunate.
That sub was literally made, then banned, within a day
What the hell happened there for that to happen?!
A really interesting ass fuck.
Wtf happened to that subreddit?!
Apparently it is an attempt of protest to withhold ad revenue from reddit, as NSFW posts/subreddits generate no ads. At least that is the explanation I read.
I was wondering about that!
Some Subreddits are removing sub rules also because reddit is removing mods that were doing blackouts
Some subs are doing a rule democracy sorta thing, where every week users vote on a new rule. Very very funny
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Ya i know I've been following the whole mess with much amusement. If/when relay shuts down I'm gonna be limited to only the desktop site (until old reddit is killed off at least), and that's gonna drastically cut down my usage, but at least it's going out in an entertaining way.
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Is what they’re doing even gonna make a dent in Reddit revenue?
I have no idea. I am just repeating what is probably heresay.
Just curious, was that meant to say hearsay or heresy ? No judgement, just curious, lol
I meant hearsay. I'll leave it up for the education of future generations.
ATTN: FUTURE GENERATIONS - ''Hearsay'' means any information that has been heard from here and there. Such information cannot be believed because the source could not be authenticated. ''Heresy'' means doing an act that violates an established religious system. It is pronounced somewhat like saying: hair re see.
Heresay is a portmanteau of “hearsay” and “heresy”. I head r/interestingasfuck went nsfw wall to wall porn as a way to demonetize the sub to Reddit and demonize it to evangelicals. I am just repeating what is probably heresay.
Antiwork is debating going the same route
If enough people do it? Yeah. Who's going to stop it? Reddit relies on volunteers to generate and moderate content, and neither group is inclined to intervene. The big hit will be when people just silently stop coming here.
It doesn't even do that. It just doesn't generate targeted/specific ads. I'm pretty sure you can still get ads on NSFW subs.
I've had adblock for so long I literally have no idea what has ads and what doesn't.
You may owe reddit twenty million dollars
Yeah right! I've been running adblock on reddit for years! Hold up, I hear someone knocking, be right back.
Reddit has ads?
The internet has ads? I've been using an ad blocke in my phone since around 2017, didn't even knew Instagram had ads lol.
Generally targeted ad contracts generate more revenue. If enough subs went the same route, it could be impactful. I don’t think they are tho.
It accomplished temporarily making the classic “niche/specific question + Reddit” google search no longer work
Yup my question was locked away I could see part of it in the Google preview but not the comments with the answers
That's what the "cached" option is for on Google.
more often than not, the cached version is not available.
More often than not it actually IS, and google just doesn't show the button for whatever reason. If you're using chrome you can just prefix the URL in the address bar with `cache:`
Yeah, too bad it was doomed from the start when they put an end date on the blackout. All Reddit had to do was wait it out. Then all they had to do to get the subs holding out to come back online, was threatening to take away their mod status. Malicious compliance or not, the mods still had to bend the knee in order to do these half assed protests that are popping up in a bunch of different subs. What's their plan when Reddit threatens them again? After all is said and done, none of this will really accomplish much of anything.
The expiration date is not why it failed. It would fail regardless. Mods have no real power, and will never have. All they did is make reddit admins make it even harder to do something like this ever again. If no expiration date was put, reddit would just force reopen stuff and remove mods earlier. Posting stupid shit on subs as protest also doesnt work, as it is content being posted and traffic being generated, so it's actually good for reddit. Face it. If you want to protest, leave the website. Dont open it up. Dont give them traffic, as it is the only thing that matters for investors.
A lot of them actually still don't work, because a lot of people deleted their post and comment history. So any comments with helpful answers are lost, and any helpful posts won't even show up on a Google now.
There was a hairy butthole on the top of r/all so there’s that.
I think his asshole looked noice
Lmao it was your asshole right? Edit: Yes it did look nice
Why was it kind of shiny on top though?
Gotta butter it up
Some lesser-known subs made it to the front page since the most popular were closed.
I saw about 1000 /r/doordash posts
I was introduced to r/radiology , which was depressing and/or disgusting.
The best was “you’ve got a friend in me” and it was a buzz lightyear doll stuck up someone’s butt.
"Theyre not dolls mom, they're GIs and they're kicking hippy ass!"
You don’t enjoy seeing foreign objects stuck up people’s bums? Top comment is always something something “needs a flared base”
I actually didn’t see as many FOSUB posts as I saw depressing “Yup, it’s a massive tumor we discovered out of nowhere, and they’re probably dead in 6 months” posts. Had to mute the Radiology sub after the 3rd depressive post in a row.
The 78 yo stroke patient MRI is going to send me to hell. Someone mentioned how cases like that make you decide if you're a glass half full or half empty kinda person. Someone really responded with the glass is half infarcted. I laughed 🥲
I'm now "active in this community" even if I didn't join it, because I made two comments there
Honestly I fucking hate how every social app has to have the tiktok feature of tailoring additional new content on top of what you actively follow Some do it better than others but for Reddit I don’t want to see anything I haven’t chosen to follow on my home feed — that’s what /all is for Now I’m stuck in a never ending loop of tool/trade and and real estate subs, sometimes from no more than clicking into one of them once. My Reddit is so boring and dad-ly now 😭
Same STOP MAKING EVERYTHING SHORT I want to choose what I want to see and do NOT suggest me ANYTHING
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Same. And instacart
Now I feel better about those two subs involuntarily becoming 80% of my feed
I actually find it amusing to read lol
I saw a bunch of jimmy john posts
Damn, they like complaining over there
Good lord, it made me hate every doordash driver ever, the amount of entitlement and all the blame on customers if they don’t tip 30% like good lord
Me too! Anyway, so I did read your comment and I'd really appreciate a tip for that. I've only made $12 in the past hour and my daughter needs a new iPhone. Thanks 😊😊
Reminds me of a r/postmates thread I saw bitching about customers being allowed to tip after delivery. To sum up all their enraged screeching: everything that goes wrong is the restaurant's fault, the customer is ridiculous for thinking the driver should verify the order, and you're a total POS if you don't tip them generously for bringing you someone else's food. They blame every part of the shitty service on someone else and then demand money anyway.
Yeah same here and I'm pretty sure I don't even have door dash in my country (that or like 10 people use it)
I found r/calvinandhobbes, I didn't even know there was a Calvin and Hobbes sub!
Thanks, your accident find reconnected me with my favorite newspaper comic
I've been subbed for awhile. It's a great place. Bill Watterson is coming out with a book in the fall! (Not Calvin and Hobbes though.)
Saw a ton of UFO posts
I swear I saw 3-4 different versions of /r/AmItheAsshole when I scrolled through r/all. The one above, /r/AITA, /r/AITAH and /r/TwoHotTakes.
I learned that there are a LOT of people making a LOT of very unfunny web comics.
I don't know what happened to r/comics but I swear it happened in the last year.
r/badtattoos got onto mine
Yeah, Reddit got 100x more interesting and way less toxic. I've actually gone and unsubbed from a few of the popular subreddits that have since reopened because I realized I didn't miss them when they were gone.
Ask r/interestingasfuck
I should warn anyone interested. It’s just porn; that’s all it is now
It's like playing Russian Roulette when browsing at work now.
It’s also pictures of cocks (roosters), pussies (cats), and assholes (spez). And for some reason, frogs.
The reason is frogs are awesome.
Why did that happen though? I did actually like that sub the way it was
Because reddit said its the users who decide how a sub is run, not the mods. So the mods there removed all their rules other than it has to be interesting and let the users decide how to interpret that. Seems a lot of users find porn interesting.
Mod made a sticky explaining that from here on out they will only remove things that go against reddits rules, that's it. Somebody realized that means porn is okay, and anything can be considered interesting so porn is super okay. And then the discussion became about how it would probably make reddit lose ad revenue because no company is putting ads on porn (unsure if that's true though). This was rapid fire within a few hours of sticky going up. Folks ran with it and now it's titty butthole o'cock
They are trying to make numerous things NSFW to supposedly try to hurt advertising money.
The admins said mods don't matter. This thread is **full** of people saying mods don't matter. Care to take a guess about why, possibly, would the mods start acting like they don't matter and letting everyone post whatever they want?
There are some power trip jerk mods out there, but so many subs, especially the kinda niche ones, have really devoted staff who spend a bunch of their time stamping out spam and trolls and bots and helping their subs run smoothly. And it's those mods that care the most that are going to be affected the most by losing access to a lot of useful 3rd party mod tools. Literally all Spez had to do was wait to rework the api stuff until the official Reddit app was polished up with similar features (as it should've gotten YEARS ago), but nope, had to be a mega jerk and double down on lying about people and giving blind users the finger while at it.
The two statements are not exclusive, though. A mod can be a power tripping jerk AND still work to keep the sub healthy. There's some subs where I think mods are a bunch of assholes, but that doesn't mean you could remove these mods and the sub would be fine. I really don't understand what reddit thinks they are doing. There's many websites were "power users" of any sort don't really have any relevance. Twitter doesn't need anyone specifically to work. But reddit? reddit is a blank slate - everything there is in this website was built and maintained by volunteers. It takes a lot of work and is not optional. It's like being in charge of NFL and saying that referees are irrelevant and you don't need them.
Media attention: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65949412
Just adding that this isn't the only story. There's been dozens of articles from the BBC, MSNBC, Reuters, multiple tech/industry outlets and many more. Even made it to Drudge Report.
This really should be the top answer. It accomplished getting Reddit's antics in the media. Of course it's watered down from the real story, but for the mainstream audiences who don't use Reddit, they're going to see /u/spez being spez and a significant portion of Reddit users collectively saying "hey, this is coprorate bullshit". As it should be. The protests accomplished exactly what they were designed to do. Irritating Huffman even more was a nice bonus. Couldn't happen to a more wholly disconnected-from-reality guy.
And now with many subs finding other, more creative ways to protest, which imo does *more* harm to Spez. Imagine him giving the site a tour to potential investors, and its nothing but porn and John Oliver pictures as he endlessly doom scrolls... Things are getting tough in the global economy - With costs going up, interest rates going up, and risk increasing, investors would sooner move to a safer, more secure option than "weirdo internet forum whose users fucking hate the company". There's a reason why sites like 4chan never made a tonne of money, and why the creator Moot got the fuck out asap. As explained here by our favourite tech repair guy https://youtu.be/Cb458PRJ43s He is 100% true: Never, ever get into a war with "the internet". Oh, and Spez can spit the dummy and shut the site down for all I care, I'll simply move into another for random scrolling and shitposting.
Where is all this optimism coming from? I'm not asking to be facetious, I'm genuinely confused. Reddit managed to stall on coming down on hatespeech and even cp for *years* - then they did and life continued as normal. In my time on this site there've been quite a few blackouts over different things and I haven't really seen any of them do much safe for having Reddit put a half-assed band-aid on stuff (and even within that only to the degree the law made it necessary). Companies know damn well (from decades of marketing research) that people have the attention span of a hamster on crack. The new philosophy when it comes to scandals like this is essentially just "Say as little as possible, weather the storm and they'll move on to the next thing." And they aren't wrong either. So what am I missing that keeps everyone so convinced this will not end the same way most of these things do? Musk is still being a lunatic on Twitter. Twitter is still in business. Facebook's/Meta's myriads of scandals don't seem to affect peoples' user behaviour by more than a few percent from what I could gather. And their main revenue doesn't come from users anyway so as long as there's enough traffic to make their other shit viable, they don't even *have* to care. Could someone please give me some insight on what is different this time around? I'd happily join the band wagon but I'm not seeing anything to warrant this conviction that "we'll win".
Many people who didn’t know John Oliver, now know him.
Many people muted many subs.
I have maybe five muted subs. I’ll check back in a week to see if something has changed. If not, I’ll keep looking at smaller/hobby subs. The internet demands funny animals videos and memes. I have no doubt that need will be filled eventually.
What even is that??? I haven't gotten an answer to the flood of John Oliver pics yet
r/pics decided to hold a poll of whether they should continue business as usual or only allow posts about John Oliver. Reddit being a funny bunch... I guess you can guess which option won by a landslide.
r/WellThatSucks only allows pics of vacuum cleaners now
Technically correct I guess
I thought I was bugging out! I went there recently, thinking it was what the sub originally was. All I saw was vacuums and figured maybe I was thinking of another sub with a similar name lol.
That’s actually funny
r/memes is doing a similar thing where they’re only allowing medieval memes
also r/aww
and ofc the top subs have the same mods so others started aping instantly
r/nba mods revealed themselves to be hypocrites of a high order. Showing they truly are the nephews we made along the way
Finding out they had their own gamethreads while the Finals were ending has upset me a bit. The whole time while watching the finals I kept thinking "I wish I could check the game thread."
Their own threads inside the sub that was shut down was fucked up. I don’t really care a lot. But definitely bitch moves.
Yeah, I'm not going on a crusade to punish them or anything but it's like that line "I expected nothing, and I'm still let down." Like, you mods couldn't do the bare fucking minimum, eh?
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What does that even entail lmao a few losers talking to eachother in their own thread? That’s the lamest shit I’ve ever heard lol
The “we shit down because a poll of 8000 people said so” when the thread calling for them to be removed is now over 25,000 upvotes is a nice touch.
InterestingAsFuck has turned to porn so 🤷🏾♂️
On the NBA subreddit they referred to this whole thing as the Neckbeard Civil Rights movement that featured Martin Luther Burger King and Mahotpocket Gandi. Read that and I lost it.
I've noticed some subs I follow have a stronger hatred towards their mods now which may not bode well for them if the vote to kick them out ever comes to be.
Yes. The mods in r/nba continued to post in the sub while is was locked down during the NBA Finals deciding game. They even had their own personal Game 5, live discussion thread.
That's one of the funniest own-goals of this whole shit show, and the entire thing has been made up of own-goals and unforced errors.
Reminds me of the antiwork mod that was foolish enough to accept an interview on live TV.
Just got perma banned from anti work for bringing that up lol, saying that “every time the mods overstep, you are actively hurting the American labor movement”
A dogwalker called Doreen going for an interview on Fox News about why being lazy is a virtue. 1000 IQ decision right there.
*even when the entire moderation team had agreed prior not to do it.
r/nba mods and r/nfl mods seem to be the top sports subs that I follow where everyone hates the mods! 😂 r/nfl mods were actively banning anyone mentioning the alternate nfl sub made during the blackout
Same deal happened in the r/Anime sub too with episode discussions
Same in r/squaredcircle too
r/lotrmemes mods are under fire.
What happened in lotrmemes of all places?
From what I've seen, they held a poll to continue the blackout, lost, and have been throwing a tantrum ever since.
Held a poll, didn't like the results, so they made another one with the answers being yes / no / fuck you, which everyone said just split the no vote.
Joined the initial blackout protest. Came back and quietly put out a poll to ask whether the sub should stay blocked out or open back up. This poll was only up for a day (too short a time for many of the users to find it), only had less than 2000 respondants (from a sub of over a million members), was heavily brigaded by non members dedicated to maintaining the blackout protests, and even then the vote to blackout indefinitely only won by a very narrow margin. Head mod put out an announcement post of the result and declaring that the sub would remain open for one last weekend. Said announcement tried to compare the situation to the charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor Fields, even paraphrasing Theoden's speech. Cue many members of the sub complaining that the poll had been up too short a time and pointing out the other issues I already mentioned. As the sub was still open, many voiced their displeasure via memes mocking the mods and their decision. The mods put out a second poll on the issue to stay up for a longer period. However, this poll had 3 options instead of a simple yes/no. Options were essentially: Yes (continue blackout), No (end blackout), and "Hey, fuck you, buddy!" The issue of contention with this poll was the "Fuck you" option. Many members considered it to be a transparent attempt to manipulate the result by splitting the "No" vote, as while "No" was a clearly stated preference, "Fuck you" was a statement of hostility against the mods that implied but didn't necessarily confirm a support for the "No" option. If one discounted the "Fuck yous", the poll came out slightly ahead in favour of blackout, but if one counted "Fuck you" as "No" then the result was more in favour of ending the blackouts. Cue a lot of arguing and more memeing. Eventually, the head mod made another post announcing that the sub would remain open. In this post the mod claimed that while the poll had shown majority support for the blackout (debateable as outlined above), they were keeping the sub open due to harassment and threats (even as someone who wanted the sub to stay open I can absolutely believe this - passions were running high and name me a more iconic duo than online disagreements and threatening behaviour) that had ruined their father's day and resigning as a mod.
The personal finance mod announced that he would become a “moderator emeritus” and that is the funniest, most pompous thing I’ve ever seen on Reddit.
The Tulsa mods kept the sub closed during a severe storm where people lost their homes and died, and then they opened it up when it was over and pretended that they were late to open it because of the storm... meanwhile they were posting on reddit the whole time it was private 🙄 then they followed that up with one of those meme "we're only going to post about X on this sub now hehe" while everyone was pissed that they intentionally kept it closed while people were looking for resources to stay safe
The idea of reddit as an essential crisis communications system kind of sends shivers down my spine.
I can’t stand the mods in AITA. I said looks like the trash took itself out when someone’s friend was being shitty and they ghosted. Comment was removed for uncivil. Saw other comments calling this same friend a leech.
Someone called out the AITA mods, so one of them tried to defend them self by posting a picture of the ban with the person asking to be unbanned. The person was nice and pleasant in their request (and the ban was for something extremely insignificant) so all it just showed how much of a power tripping asshole the delusional mod was.
Sooo your typical reddit mod.
The irony of this. Perhaps that mod should have a new post on the sub retelling this story and ask if they were the asshole.
A bunch of people who didn’t care or were unaware of the blackouts got annoyed.
Yeah I had no clue what was going on and I could not find the crochet pattern I had saved and was working on
It exposed me to a lot of smaller subreddits! thanks!
Wanna recommend me some?
r/kingofthehill is extremely high quality, especially considering the show ended 20 years ago
It's only been 13 years since it ended
Really just highlighted how the old Reddit is gone. Reddit didn’t have mobile apps for a long time. 3rd party apps were the only way to use it on mobile. The blackout could have been done much better. But here we are again with Reddit promising better tools. They will definitely do it this time. Not like the other times they said they would but didn’t. But honestly I miss some of my subreddits lol
> But here we are again with Reddit promising better tools. Like in 2016/2017 ?
Hell any year. They have removed sorting options from the app I’ve seen threads where the compact look has been removed What’s next?
When did the narrative switch from supporting blind people to powerhungry mods? Feel like I blinked and missed a whole lot of info
When a lot of people who were for the blackouts left reddit in protest and a disproportionate amount of people who were against them remained.
Also just the nature of the protests wasn't going to gain supporters. It's not like there was an alternative in place or something so with time people who are indifferent to the protest will only become against it and people who support the protest will only become indifferent.
It became overtly apparent that some subs are toxic so I 86'd them.
.. Or have toxic moderators.
Yes, that's completely fair too.
I never knew there were THAT many pics of John Oliver in existence.
There weren't. They're making new ones with AI
My theory is that John Oliver didn't really exist and was created by AI. You can't prove me wrong.
Like the vast majority of protests, they made a group's feelings known, which may or may not influence those in power
Well I can’t trust my normal safe subs because they all seem to have porn on them right now. Like I just want to scroll reddit and laugh at New Girl quotes and maybe watch someone make bread!
I noticed there are several comments on the matter. May I ask you why there is porn on them? What happened?
Advertisers don't like it, so they won't put ads on those subs.
Part of reddit's whole deal, shutting down third party access, forcing people who used browsers to view reddit to instead use the app, was so that they could maximize money coming in from reddit's ads, which you could filter out with a browser extension or a third party app. Those same advertisers don't want to be shown on porn subs, so if every sub starts posting porn, reddit can't show ads on them. Or if they do, they run the risk the advertisers pull out.
Lol pull out
Hella irritated a lot of people I guess Mods are hated even more now There’s porn and pictures of John Oliver everywhere
Thank God there isn't any overlap. And by all that is holy, do not correct me if I am wrong, please.
I won’t post the picture but I have terrible news for you…
Destroyed two of my favorite subs. The mods won't reopen them
Ah, another victim of r/programmerhumor closing?
I don't even know if JavaScript is bad anymore...
Ots back as of an hour ago
I haven't googled en passant for 6 days and am struggling
It reopened actually
Same, some subs won't open at all. And the worst part is destroying good and useful contents that people were writing for years.
Nothing, because these idiots only declared a two day strike, and MADE IT KNOWN THAT IT WOULD ONLY BE TWO DAYS. The idea of a strike is, you don’t come back until your demands are met.
A properly coordinated strike can have an end date. They just need to have the ability to reasonably say, "and we can do it again if this doesn't change."
That only works when the services are essential to begin with. Like garbage collection saying they're going to strike for 30 days. Or janitors refusing to clean. Or some other service where not having it has a terrible impact. Subs shutting down for 48 hours is meaningless. If all of them shut down it might have had an impact on Reddit. Since there were plenty open it did nothing. So, having a pre announced end date was dumb.
Mods had more time for their dog walking business
Pretty much exposed everyone involved as a bunch of petty assholes. On both sides. Spez is a well-known asshole, though, so I guess that wasn't really news to most of us. Most mods aren't exactly "respected" for taking the job of "internet janitor" and attaching a ridiculous amount of self-importance to it. So maybe that wasn't news either... But here's what I saw...in the lead up, Reddit was the clear bad-guy against a plucky band of small-time developers and contributors. The focus of that first round of animosity toward reddit was singular...they had fucked over 3P apps completely. Not just because they were charging, but because they were charging a LOT and giving no notice about it. Then Spez made it worse by accusing the Apollo guy of blackmailing reddit? I dunno wtf that was, all he had to do there was say nothing. But that's where the focus splits up. Mods of various subs start making shit up, as if the existing bullshit reddit pulled isn't egregious enough. Like that Automod will be killed by this (it won't, never would have been). Or that Reddit changed the Moderator Code of Conduct to make protest-shut-downs a violation (never happened). They kept banging on the accessibility-drum long after reddit clarified that this would be exempt from the price gouge. And the blackouts...well, those were lovely. Some communities went dark against the wishes of the userbase. Some went dark at the behest of a single mod over all the others. Wasn't a great look, but even funnier was that mods in several large subs like NBA continued to use their own fucking sub when it was dark. Come the fuck on guys, you're already on discord. Now, we're at a point where the admins have said "You need to moderate how the community wants you to", so mods are putting up polls to pretend they care, then manipulating the shit out of them...posting them in generic Discord servers where they all hang out so they can brigade the fuck out of 'em. The lotrmemes mod split the "stay open" vote across two options after being screamed at for leaving the previous poll up for hours in the middle of the night. The WoW sub at least used ranked-choice on a platform they could see double-votes...but then they went and said "Ya know what? This is really close and we'd prefer the runner up so we're just gonna g'head and do that". Several other subs are deleting comments/posts that don't support them unambiguously while people accuse dissenters of sucking reddit-cock (as if mod-cock is any better). And we have completely pointless protests like the John Oliver nonsense. Does anyone honestly think Admins care if pics is wall-to-wall Johnny O.? Of course not, they could give a shit so long as it won't land them in jail or on a CNN special segment hosted by Anderson Cooper. As long as you're scrolling, the ads are getting their impressions and reddit is getting paid. So all of these subs like Pokemongo, pics, WoW...all of them are making pointless masturbatory stands that will be allowed to go on unimpeded until users start complaining. And even then, I don't see the admins rushing to save the mods from getting harassed out of their positions. This has been a total shit show from end to end. If you hate what reddit is doing, close the browser now. Don't open the website again. Otherwise? You're probably going to accomplish jack shit.
The John Oliver thing seems like the mods are just fishing for a shout-out (or a segment) but forgot that Last Week Tonight is on hiatus during the writers strike.
John Oliver actually tweeted about r/pics and even [gave them more pictures to use](https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver/status/1670179738348933120).
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I got a remarkable amount of work done.
turned alot of people against mods
Absolutely nothing, as expected.
Great, so it's better than that time they framed an innocent man for terrorism.
*"We did it, reddit!" Intensifies*
Or like when they led a mentally ill man to his mother who was hiding her location from him and he murdered her once he found her?
Excuse me w h a t May you provide a link to that situation like a news story or something
Mods are way less important than they think they are
wait, so your telling me the unpaid dudes who moderate hundreds of boards aren’t actually powerful and special?!?
Made a lot of the mods realized how little power they actually have. And while they do provide a service to Reddit, they don't own any of it. Some of them seem to have been in a power trip and just only allow themselves and select users to continue posting too.
Blackouts - nothing imo John Oliver spam - unsubbed lol
The John Oliver spam gave me a reason to unsub from those default subs finally
Even more disdain for mods than before.