Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
If i may dream, the actual solution to this issue would be a mod/user takeover along the lines of a factory occupation, or a more peaceful worker buyout. (Sometimes the former leads to the latter.)
When the tools of production are a server farm, how do they get taken over? What does it look like?
To be a little more grounded, the real targets of this action should not be “reddit” or /u/spez. It should be whoever is actually in charge. Do we know who that is?
I think the Fediverse is an illustration that innovation can thrive without profit motive. Maybe just copying services, picking up the pieces, and moving there is the only reasonable protest anyone can do on the Internet.
In essence, to make one’s own website, with blackjack, and hookers.
Actually…forget the website!
And thus lemmynsfw.com was born
I don’t know how you’ll get a capitalist prepper to surrender his golden goose.
Dont ceos serve the board? I am only vaguely framiliar with this kind of business but i donnot think he “owns” it? But i may be confusing that with a post IPO structure.
Board is elected by shareholders. Until the IPO, there’s no way of knowing what percentage of the company each interested party owns. If spez or his buddies own 51% or more of the company, the company runs on “fuck you, I do what I want” style. The leverage investors would have would be 1) what to do with the percentage of the company they own 2) withdraw money 3) buy out spez and his buddies 4) sue if they can prove the company misrepresented what it was going to do with their investment money.
Which route they’d prefer would depend on their assessment of the total valuation of the platform and the contractual terms of their initial investment
great answer thank you!
so, sounds like #3 could be good if there is anyone decent with enough money to spend on it. which I can’t imagine who that would be.
A lawsuit would take ages, even if it was simple, which I doubt would be the case, and I doubt a judge is going to make specific rulings about API fees or whatever.
Wild fantasy: form a collective (some sort of formal co op structure) of users/mods/devs and buy out some investor(s), OR wait til the IPO and buy lots of shares to have a formal voting bloc. What do you think? I am thinking of some sort of semi democratic/representative structure. Better or worse? It burns to the ground in chaotic drama, or it manages to be barely coherent enough to function with all internally competing interests?
I would advise against buying stocks in a corporation as part of a hostile takeover. If reddit has a competent legal team (though I’m not convinced they do), such an action will accomplish nothing and the company will simply be flush with cash from the IPO. Alternatively, you succeed, and then what? What does distributed governance of a community hosting platform look like? How do you tackle all of the financial pressures that led Reddit to turn into what it is today? I think the more sustainable solution is to put your energy into advocating for alternative platforms such as here, tildes, or squabbles
Also, I never recommend any financial investing strategy that doesn’t put you first. Not that I’m saying the stock market is good, but because it’s part of an overall exploitative system, and your financial strategy needs to be your plan for navigating that system. Foolhardy investment strategies run a ton of risk of feeding the exploiters and leaving yourself with nothing to survive on. I know that sounds bleak and dramatic, but seriously, please distrust banking practices the exact right amount to keep yourself from getting hosed
OK, ok you talked me out of even a day dream. I do remember hearing about people trying to make changes at… coca cola (?) doing shareholder action trying to get them to stop stealing water from people or something like that and it basically didn’t work.
Agree wrt stock market etc. I mean the whole thing is based around the workers at the companies being fucked and you are just trying to get in and exploit them a bit extra. That is your best case scenario as an “investor”. I was kind of filling in an implied worker coop thing I guess. Anyway this kind of intervention has been attempted in various venues for decades and never works as far as I know. Sometimes worker take over and worker buy outs do work and I guess that is more what I am really thinking of. I am thinking of the 3rd party devs, mods and users as workers. But you are right they never succceeed to take over via sneaky means; only directly.
Disturbingly, there is really no way to know who actually owns a private company like Reddit. Once it goes public, then the owners will be the shareholders (and in reality, the owners are the major shareholders who have a controlling stake).
The only clue to the current ownership is whatever management wishes to disclose. Spez wrote a blog post in 2021 indicating that they issued $250M in “series E funding” to existing and new investors.
If there are any finance bros around here, they may be able to dig up some sort of disclosures from bond auctions to try and see who bought it.
The only confirmed investor I know about is Tencent. They invested in 2019. Its possible they were also some of the “existing investors” Spez referred to in 2021.
Bottom line: nobody knows who owns Reddit. But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow.
Yikes, I had no idea Tencent is a Reddit investor. That’s another big reason for me to steer clear of Reddit!
But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow
He’s exactly what they want. A complete straw man with a hateable face, a genuine Nimrod that thinks he’s the smartest guy in any room he’s ever been in. Sprinkle in being a privelaged yes man and he’s the perfect face for an ownership group that wants to remain anonymous. He’s literally Tom from Succession, might even be who that character is based on IRL.
The older redditors may remember that he was moderator of some VERY dodgy subreddits back in the day and tried to cover it up. We remember, it will come back to haunt him at some point.
If you can sate my curiosity, what dodgy subreddits?
/r/jailbait
It’s difficult to prove these days as most of that era was wiped and the internet archive doesnt have much from that time.
There are some people saying it was possible to add arbitrary users as mods for a while, some that say he made himself a mod as part of cleaning up that subreddit. but a lot of people also say he was a mod for a very long time.
Do you mind me asking which dodgy subs? I’m mostly familiar with his election 2016 (non)work and half assed too little too late follow up. I was on Reddit from 2010 or 2011, but I really don’t recall knowing anything about senior leadership until 2014 or 2015
/r/jailbait
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…
Honestly I was genuinely so sick of reddit that I didn’t even bother deleting.
The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.
that right there is the biggest reason I never swapped to the new reddit redesign. Looks and aesthetics are one thing, but constantly having fake notifications about “you may like this post” or “you may like this community” shoved into my feed with the same notification icon as an actual reply to a post kept getting on my nerves.
Yes that’s it. It feels sort of manipulative.
Going to download my data tomorrow and delete my own 11 years worth.
Sad day, but also very cathartic.
What are you using to download it?
If you use Power Delete Suite there is the option to download your comments before editing (or just download). However it’s not great if you’ve got years of comments. If you click the download button it caps out at about 65k. But if you inspect the button the full export is available in the href so you can copy that into notepad. However the formatting is not great (CSV unfriendly characters are escaped), so it’s a bit of a clean up.
There is the alternative of requesting all your data from Reddit itself. A preview I saw from someone else shows a more extensive dataset than you get from PDS. I’m still waiting on my data request (it’s only been a day and it can take up 30 days).
Thanks, Power Delete Suite was exactly the type of thing I’ve been trying to find for the past few days.
I want my contributions out of Reddit’s hands, but still leave a protest up. PDS allows me to edit all comments and self posts to “[this user data has been purged]”.
Is there a difference between the various types of data requests? There are 3 options based on different laws, but do they give different information?
Interesting. The comments are now lagging well below normal. Here’s a screenshot from the blackout tracker. The red arrow shows how reddit is still spamming lots of new posts, but comments are much lower than usual. Normally, at the peak times, comments are at or even above the number of posts. Not today though.
Since the source graph gets wonky immediately before the crop, there’s not really enough here to compare against from the before-times (last week).
But what is here looks like a very large problem on the comment front, with each peak being lower than the last and and the latter two nadirs following the same pattern. The presumed “small number of power users” were having a noticeable impact more than 48 hours earlier. (and, hey … good on them for using 0 as the axis)
good on them for using 0 as the axis
They basically had to after today’s outage. Both almost dropped to 0.
This is cool where did you find it? Or did you generate it?
Guessing it’s this: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/
Thanks @Kushan@beehaw.org. That is indeed where I saw it. I forgot the link in my post.
Thank you!
Makes sense, posts can be (and are) automated via repost bots. Commente and genuine interaction is impossible to fake.
Genuine interaction is hard to fake but there is definitely no shortage of bot comments or astroturfing in the comments
But if the only thing left in the comments section are obvious bots, even real users not planning to join in the Reddit blackout will start fleeing.
Yep. Expecting a lot of bot comments on bot reposts that are just copied portions of top comments on previous versions of that repost.
It had gotten to the point where I didn’t feel confident upvoting much at all anymore, because so many posts were automated content, and worse, more and more comments were just bots stealing contributions made elsewhere (or even further down in the same post) by actual people.
It’s only going to get worse now.
I really hope the fediverse is able to do something to safeguard against all that. Because if it’s not already testing the locks, it’s coming.
The rust subreddit is apparently considering moving to Lemmy:
My Moose Sense was tingling and I decided to check on the subs I moderate on Reddit. Sure enough, there were issues.
One of the three subs was set to ‘restricted’ (nobody can post or comment but the sub is still open), not private. (I’ll pedantically put my explanation for this at the bottom so you can ignore it).
However, the seniorest mod, who is never around (seriously, his last post/comment was 10 years ago!), decided the sub should be private, not restricted. And he’d tried to do it himself, but because he hadn’t been around for at least two years, the site wouldn’t let him make the change! So I’ve changed it and it’s now private.
Additionally, a report troll appeared, because he couldn’t make any comments. I guess that’s an even better reason to make it private.
[you can now ignore my exposition blather]
The sub was set to restricted instead of private because, well, part of this protest is also about people with vision impairments not being able to use the iOS mobile app and relying on 3rd party apps. If a subreddit is private, any message set by the moderators (“This sub is private because…”) is not displayed by the Reddit mobile app. So the idea was, restrict access so any regular mobile reader would be sure to know what we were doing. But with 7000+ subs dark, I don’t think it’s any great mystery any more.
Would love to see a list of large subreddits that aren’t participating and the statements (if any) they put out explaining why.
r/Australia made a half-arsed “we support the movement, but we’re not going dark” post which was met with much ridicule from the community as “pissweak” and “a very Australian response, like our climate change policy”.
There is an education based sub I was an active member of. Last I checked they have not gone dark or made an announcement. But people might depend on it for school and exams. So I’m OK with them not going out. They also are not huge.
Dunno if it counts as large, but r/Ukraine is understandably staying open and made a statement in support of the blackout
/r/Games basically said they wouldn’t close up because it’s Summer games news week so why hurt the people coming to the subreddit? But also some kind of “we stand with the blackouts so we’ll make some very light changes in protest”.
I’ve generally liked and preferred Games to other choices on Reddit, but it showed they just didn’t care. Went ahead and unsubscribed because of that weak response.
Yeah, I didn’t understand that either. Its not like video games are some sort of resource that lives may depend on, like r/ukraine which is more understandable. Oh God we wouldn’t want to miss a Nintendo Direct or something, would we? 🙄
I can kinda, sorta understand their reasoning and I think Summer Games Fest is very awkward timing for them to blackout.
If they don’t participate in further protests (and I see more blackouts happening), that’s when we know they’re full of shit.
The sysadmin sub isn’t participateing because it is a major resource for patch Tuesday
The mod team has a strong “keep the trains running” mentality.
Comes with the job I suppose.
The mod team is high on their own farts. Was told point blank when I started in the field “Don’t rely on r/sysadmin for anything. You’ll get worse than wrong information there.”
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
Honestly the subreddits for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Mr. Rathschmidt added that some apps are more efficient and require significantly fewer A.P.I. calls and that “Apollo is notably less efficient than other third-party apps.”
“The vast majority of A.P.I. users will not have to pay for access; not all third-party apps usage requires paid access,” he wrote, adding that access is “is free for moderator tools and bots.”
That is some shoddy reporting there. Selig is cited earlier in the piece, so to let that quote stand unchallenged either means an editor didn’t see it or … well, I’d rather not get more confirmation from the Times on that front.
The Apollo developer said something like, and I’m heavily paraphrasing, Reddit recommended to use less than 10000 api calls per user per day and he was at like 300.
So he was fat before the recommendation so why further optimize it. He said if Reddit worked with him, he would have been happy to do optimizations, but s as months notice does not really give him time.
I’ve noticed this a lot about mainstream reporting - seems to give more voice to corporates than anyone else.
I’ve read a number of articles on the protest over the past few days and not a single of them really explained all the issues well.
- Journalists are often outsiders to these disputes and a full nuanced description of the situation requires more time than it takes to be the first reporter with the scoop in a world where news outlets pay more for news to be newest than news to be most accurate
- News outlets are big corporations and will often be favorable to corporations
- Corporations usually give very simple canned statements that are very east to parse and publish while dispersed groups such as unions, protestors, and online forum members have much less centralized narrative and can have a litany of different reasons for sharing a similar stance
Corporate journalism has its own special place in hell for me. After all the creativity was removed from rather central editing functions, I set about automating what was left at a hub and got shown the door when the efficiencies started to threaten justifying salaried positions.
I’ve experienced 1 first-hand. They call you and leave a voicemail. If you don’t respond within 24 hours they’re going to publish anyway and probably get a lot of things wrong.
I hear PR companies will basically write for the journalists on request, and sometimes journalists will take it just to get ahead.
It’s more difficult when they can’t just call up John Mastodon from the Fediverse PR department and copy-paste a press release.
I can chalk a lot of that up to the presumed reader knowledge in the Times style guide simplifying things tremendously. I mean, who knows if anyone uses those anymore …
It’s just really glaring to have a quote with a claim that’s not easy to immediately verify as a reporter (1/xth the efficiency, per [source 1] / [source 2]) with the creator of the app quoted earlier but not used here. I would be livid if that made it to the desk.
They’re still going on about efficiency, meanwhile Apollo only used 0.4% of the requested daily limit Reddit required of 3rd party apps.
They set the limit, and are now acting like their hands were forced by an app hitting 1/250th of that limit.
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I’ll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn’t coming naturally.
And, yes, I know the username doesn’t match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.
