“Technical tweaks”? Did the author write this while sucking huffman’s taint?
How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
Submitted 10 months ago by shish_mish@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/30/reddit-moderator-protest-communities-social-media
Comments
rtxn@lemmy.world 10 months ago
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Did you see spez’s senior prom picture in the article?
gregorum@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Very certainly
Zectivi@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”. (Emphasis mine)
This is the same tone deaf response I’ve come to expect from Reddit for some time now, and is why I’m happy to no longer be a user of their platform.
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
That same quote caught my eye. It’s just bullshit. Or course they’re no quantitative way to measure quality on a qualitative scale. Any long time user can see there’s not much going on like there used to be.
Kalysta@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The only thing that’s changed is all the good modetators have left and the default subs have gotten worse.
God forbid you say anything mildly positive of Palestine on the main politics site. The AIPAC hired mods immediately permaban you.
bh11235@infosec.pub 10 months ago
I don’t disagree, but don’t pretend you haven’t effectively set up the equal and opposite thing here. No mods will ban anyone but other than that every comment section is an implicit competition for best pro-Palestinian talking point, even when decency demands otherwise. We don’t talk about Oct 7, and if we do it was friendly fire, and if it wasn’t it was a natural consequence of Israeli policy in Gaza and that is the real issue. Yeah fine we admit the attack was not a hundred percent morally sound if you insist so much, but we don’t assign a moral weight to it or linger on it because hey when you make innocents suffer, you sow the wind and eventually reap the whirlwind, oh sure Hamas’ response was ugly but what can you do, you know, be a bastard and it comes around. Now it is our moral duty to call loud and clear for a ceasefire – the cycle of violence must stop.
I know what you’re thinking: that’s not fair! That’s not my opinion! Yeah, the circlejerk doesn’t care about your private opinion. You know better than to contradict any of the above around here in writing, and that’s enough. I’m sure a lot of people privately think “oh… tbh that last IDF strike was unconscionable” before posting on /r/worldnews the part of their opinion they know the crowd will like better.
SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 10 months ago
October 7 was a disgrace, Hamas must be destroyed because they don’t ever want a lasting cease fire. Israel’s authoritarian leadership eats dick and must be deradicalised for any change of lasting peace. What are people gonna do? Down vote me? Please do who gives a shit?
foggy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I am of the belief that reddit just replaced leaving users with LLM drone users to fill the void.
dhork@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
sbv@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
dhork@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes. Affirmative.
Yearly1845@reddthat.com 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain
TheBest@midwest.social 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
LuisAnton@social.vivaldi.net 10 months ago
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Tom Cruise.
freebread@lemm.ee 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now
DigitalNirvana@lemm.ee 10 months ago
The bots were always there, the bot-to-human ratio is just much higher now.
_number8_@lemmy.world 10 months ago
reposting the worst quote i heard all year - or perhaps all my life
“There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
fuck spez, fuck reddit
ersatz@infosec.pub 10 months ago
Yeah, he doesn’t care about users privacy or well being, all he cares about is being the one to monetize users data.
I hate all silicon valley techbros in general, but spez is on another level. Reddit should never have brought him back on board after he sold the company. He’s useless.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
It isn’t like Alexis Ohanian was any better.
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
“We don’t want other AI to train on this data, only one we’re involved with.”
ForestOrca@kbin.social 10 months ago
How corporate social media's biggest user protest, and exodus, rocked reddit, acccording to corporate media - FTFY
Player2@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
Haven’t been on there since the event, though I do read some threads if they come up in a search. Not intending on returning, though I haven’t gotten rid of my old account yet
NullaFacies@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Honestly, Fuck Steve Huffman.
I’m excited to see where Lemmy, Mastodon and the Fediverse go as I believe that’s what Aaron Swartz wanted Reddit to be when it merged with Infogami; a user curated platform about anything, and a great source of knowledge.
chocolateo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
dugg their grave
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
I’m surprised they didn’t mention us at all. I wonder how many people actually made the transition as a result. Surely it’s more than dozens?
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 10 months ago
A few tens of thousand of people. We can see that through the statistics of active monthly users since then. I think many just left Reddit though, but unfortunately not enough. But still, if I look at the content and comments through RedReader it feels all kinda different there. Even more reposts than before, much more bot comments than before, much less comments overall and /r/all just looks different because many previously big subs are not really there anymore, while a lot of more niche subs suddenly appear frequently. It sometimes also feels more toxic with al lthe disinfo and insults but that might just be because a lot of the moderate people left. So the lack of sane comments puts an extra highlight on the shit stains of Reddit.
Lividpeon@kbin.social 10 months ago
Left reddit recently bc of the toxicity, massive noticeable uptick across most subs. Blatant racism, homophobia and hate in general with next to zero moderation. The ads were just cancer(without a blocker) with the sponsored "he gets us" ones being unblockable and funded by a christian hate group prominently showing up constantly. Kbin has been an alright replacement minus the server issues recently
ersatz@infosec.pub 10 months ago
3.58K users / day
That’s how many people use this sub per day, according to the sidebar. And I would guess it’s one of the bigger ones? So it’s more than dozens, but it’s still a blip for most social media sites. At least until the next spez inflicted fiasco happens and there’s another user surge.
TheDeepState@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Down with Reddit!
cranakis@reddthat.com 10 months ago
The entire “dozen” agrees!
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So say we dozen!
Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 10 months ago
So many comments/posts look like bots.
Reddit always had a “repost” problem. But this time, not only am I feeling like I already saw this post, but also all the top comments? Just regurgitation of posts from years ago.
Lividpeon@kbin.social 10 months ago
Its karma farm, they wait to repost a popular post, then post the most popular comments from the old one verbatim. Its gotten really bad
metaStatic@kbin.social 10 months ago
Reddit's repost problem was brain doners posting rEPOsT!!!1!! on every fucking thread like everyone else was able to no life the internet as hard as them.
How many times did you see something new to you only for the comments section to be a shitstorm of people harassing op for not posting OC like reddit wasn't a fucking news aggregator designed specifically to repost crap.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Hey have i got a video of a tractor stopping a prairie fire for you!
athos77@kbin.social 10 months ago
[Huffman said,] "We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private."
Really? 'Cause that's not the impression I've been getting. :scepticalThor:
Zectivi@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Agreed. It didn’t feel respectful when they started replacing mod teams that refused to reopen.
AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Slowpoke image: did you guys hear about reddit
altima_neo@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
What’s a reddit?
shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Small mammal with long ears, they run around quickly and reproduce just as fast
Lightrider@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
#fuckingcapitalists
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 10 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In June, thousands of Reddit communities plunged into darkness – making their pages inaccessible to the public in a mass protest of corporate policy changes.
With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.
“It bothers me that social media companies are increasingly restricting our abilities as researchers who care deeply about these sites and who believe they can provide many benefits for people,” Chancellor said.
Reddit’s corporate overlords were ultimately unmoved by the massive blackout, and most of the thousands of dark subreddits went back to normal after a few weeks.
Users who have long been dedicated to the site, some of whom have spent countless unpaid hours working to make it better, are exhausted and resentful – and many have simply left.
The original article contains 1,685 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Neato@kbin.social 10 months ago
Ever since earlier this year I've had WAY more friends, family and news articles I've seen mention or link to reddit than the past. I don't know if it's confirmation bias since I left reddit or if it just gained popularity at the same time or what. But I used reddit for ~12 years and few other people in my circle used it heavily. Now it seems like it exploded?
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I was a long time user too and I even moderated a few small subs and I was active in the groups I was with. I was a user for ten years and I grew these groups I worked on. After the change I gave up all four of the communities I ran, deleted my account and never looked back.
I think the explosion of popularity came as a result of the API change fiasco and the protests that people created. Reddit became headline news all summer and I think new users flocked to it because of that. The problem is that most people don’t care about creating content, they move over to find content.
Like everyone already said … The Reddit change brought in new lurkers that only want to watch while at the same time most of the popular creators left. There are not that many popular creators or active users who like connecting people because it takes a lot of time and work to do … for sure it literally becomes a full time job. When a website loses those core people, the content changes and becomes less interesting.
I go on Reddit once in a while to check in its status and if you notice, a lot of the popular subs have slightly decreased in activity but if you look at the forums, a lot of the content and activity is recycled from years ago. Reddit can probably live on recycled content for years but it will be a decline and the decline will take a long time before it becomes obvious.
Zectivi@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I was in a very similar position as you. Thirteen year user, moderator for a few smaller subreddits, including one that provided support for a US-based mobile phone carrier, and deleted everything when the API change happened.
It took time and effort to coordinate and help uplift those who generated the great content for those subreddits, but Reddit, Inc., was unwilling to help us moderators who had developed and used the tools necessary to do it. I wasn’t willing to put in the additional time since Reddit was themselves unwilling to, post API change.
Yearly1845@reddthat.com 10 months ago
You know what the cruelist irony of this whole thing is? Reddit finally made a mobile website that’s actually pretty decent.
Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Can someone message the editor and share how because of this backlash, many moved to other platforms - like lemmy?
ryan213@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
"Despite these concessions, dozens of Redditors promised to stop using the site altogether "
There are dozens of us!! Lol
nicetriangle@kbin.social 10 months ago
Fucking delusional on this writer’s part. It was far more than dozens and a lot of those people were power users with an outsized influence on the community.
I personally moderated two 150-250k user subs. Stepped down from both and wiped all my posts and comments and have not contributed a single thing since.
GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I modded multiple million user subs, and ended up replacing all of my posts with the same text before never logging in again. Wonder if I’ve been removed from any of them yet.
Side note, my life has improved so much after not doing free work for reddit. The things I’d see everyday… looking back I’d never do it again.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I went from multiple comments per day and posts almost every day to a couple comments a week and I think I’ve made one post since the protests
That place got hella toxic since the protests
thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I wish that was true for askhistorians. For some reason, there’s a lot of people with a huge amount of knowledge and potential that are attached at the hip to corporate platforms.
Selmafudd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I tried to wipe my comments but I during the protest I couldn’t access my user page, I could manually navigate to each of my comments via the posts but that would have been an impossible task. Soon after submitting a service ticket I was permabanned for a comment I’d made 2 years earlier… and even more bizarrely they message me a few weeks later saying they’d taken action against an account I’d reported for CP 4 years ago
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
I didn’t wipe my old account, but I have not been back since everything went down. I’ve looked at it occasionally but contributed nothing. It seems pretty shit atm.
_number8_@lemmy.world 10 months ago
i think most reluctantly have some use for it still. i only use it for gamethreads and the shittiest of shitposts, or for super niche things that don’t have any equivalent on lemmy. at the end of the day, i think people would rather stay connected with their communities than abandon them, even if it means providing value for some of the stupidest and most malignant people in the world at the same time. look how many people are still using twitter
ElleChaise@kbin.social 10 months ago
This is so emblematic of the human condition. Poisoning ourselves to relieve stress, buying slave-made clothes to stay warm. Burning our skin to attract mates. Toxifying our own environment for convenience. Humans really are some dumb ass creatures. We are reaping what we sow.
stoy@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I had to create a new work account on reddit as it has the by far best community for sysadmins I have ever found, and I needed help with an undocumented issue in a system we use at work.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve logged into Reddit since I started using Lenmy
ryan213@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I haven’t really either. Apart from the the odd Google search results here and there, but not actually logging in.
harry_balzac@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I did a couple of weeks ago, after being off it for a couple of months…it was awful. I closed my account and deleted my saved login info. I only go to it now if it comes up in a search and seems relevant.
Neato@kbin.social 10 months ago
That link linked to /modcoord at perhaps dozens of moderators promised to leave, which is far more impactful than users. I know just from watching kbin, lemmy and other sites grow from this summer on that hundreds to thousands likely left reddit. Unfortunately it's probably a drop in the bucket but Web 2.0 was always probably going to win. The only real way I can see of us getting out of that en masse if when each site inevitably kills themselves through mismanagement.
psud@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I was a moderator of a minor misspelt subreddit. I marked it private when I left. That’ll annoy about 700 - 2000 people. I haven’t deleted my account, and I do visit every couple of months for a community that hasn’t moved which I like (though it has gone downhill)
sbv@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
no need to exaggerate 😬
Orbituary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I didn’t see you at the convention in Munich last summer.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
I teleconferenced in. Did you go to the seminar on chafing?
tacosanonymous@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I’m doing my part. 🫡