In any labor dispute workers test the water to see how much power they weild. They threaten or invoke some sort of action (like a strike.) Management respond with lockouts, terminations and so on. Ultimately there is usually some resolution where both sides understand their co-dependence, but equally understand the limits of their own power.

Reddit is following the playback here. Moderators instigate a "strike" of sorts. They get locked out. Management tests the water to see if they weild actual community power, or are just a small group of malcontents.

It will be interesting to see this play out.

Sadly, fighting strikes and unions has probably become an art at this point.

The law has evolved to help balance the relationship between employer and employee. It dictates limits on employer behaviour and also limits on employee behaviour. Usually there is a formal structure (union) to act as the employee representative.

None of which is in play here. There are no employees, just volunteers. There is no union. Yhe action appears to be somewhat arbitrary. Why private groups? Why 48 hours? Has there been any formal discussions to the root dispute? Is there a union for API users? What link us there between API users and moderators?

So yes, the response seems heavy-handed, but the proposed action seems premature. The mods are testing their power and Reddit is responding. And there's no law governing any of this, on either side.

They have basically reached the monetization phase, where most smart users bail either just before or shortly after. You get the same dynamics with tyrants, only you have more risks and more options available to you in the real.

Therefore management tries to excercise their power over nothing(?) in costs.

Both will ultimately recognise the limitations of their power, which may ultimately be a lot more, or possibly a lot less, than they believe.

In most subs most care about having that power to silence and punish people they dislike more than to do actual good, IMO.

I strongly disagree with this.

What you describe isn't most mods, it's just the loudest form of modding. Mods who do the banal tasks well will hardly even be noticeable.

I mod a few subs, in my experience most mods are just kinda boring.

Maybe not on the smaller subs that are truly community orientated, and maybe not on some of the bigger truly well run subs, but on most subs? Sure.

It's not true that all mods are volunteers.

Especially in an era of layoffs.

I'm speculating here, I have no insight myself.

Yes, and that's why the "good" mods have power (against Reddit), because they know not to abuse that modding power.

Bad mods will destroy the spirit of a community in months if not weeks, tanking their utility and usage. Reddit knows that (or did know that at some point).

That's not true. Mods abuse power all the time and admins don't give a crap. The good mods are good mods because they're not petty dicks.

We're all in relationships with others all the time. I can push my suppliers some, but not too hard. I complain about other suppliers, but in some cases have little power so walk softly.

Reddit moderators believe they have power over API pricing. I guess we'll see who is right.

(Might as well, the alternative is they just pack up their moneytables and get the hell out of our temple...)

Why is everyone calling this boycott a "strike?"

However these are "more than customers" who are foing more than boycott. They are actively "locking the store" so others can't use it. It's not a strike (they're not withholding work) but it's also not a boycott since they are taking actual actions that lock out other customers.

In no way, shape or form does a moderator "own" a subreddit. They are merely harvesting the land on Reddit's server farm. At the first sign of disagreeable dissent The Reddit Overlords, with a few clicks of the keyboard, can and will remove the protesters from their property. Any appeals will go to /Dev/Null.

I'm genuinely surprised that moderators are putting what little power on the site they have at risk. We all know that most moderators like a good power flex and some genuinely thrive off it yet I don't think they have thought this through. While they think it may be a noble and just cause Reddit won't tolerate a dip in ad revenue and will happily nuke their accounts and hand the subreddit off to someone else who will toe the line in exchange for free janitorial and field plowing duties.

If reddit wants to step up and moderate the site itself, it's free to, but if it wants volunteers to keep working for free it'll need to play ball with em in some way or another. That or play chicken and see if it wins.

Occasionally mods will duck out for a day, on purpose, to let members go nuts with content. That is what would happen without moderators and after a while, all those un-moderated subreddits would become cess pools of bot content and spam with members leaving and traffic will take a giant nose dive.

The more appropriate study is the one where rewarding children for drawing leads to a decrease in drawing compared to groups that were not promised rewards. What they did for fun and intrinsic rewards becomes less appealing when it becomes about extrinsic rewards.

I'm not sure what the theory is behind the mechanism i.e. why are intrinsic/extrinsic rewards not additive? Why does the extrinsic reward dominate and why is it less effective and less sustainable than intrinsic rewards?

After looking at a bunch of these behavioural experiments that often use money as an easy to implement reward or punishment - I suspect there is something just straight up "funny" about money. It contains some type of hidden resentment and pain. It's bribery to do something distasteful. It's compensation for damage. There is something unfair and insufficient about exchanging it for non-fungible life. There is something about it that poisons the exchanges it is involved in.

It’s really fascinating stuff.

I wonder if the principle applies to dogs as well.

if this was a profitable and beneficial endeavour it would already work this way. The reason moderation still lies in the community's hands (to whatever degree it does) is because reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users and many tens of thousands of large subreddits and this is not $15/h but millions of dollars in costs per month that is currently being donated by community members to a large for profit company.

It also adds a layer of deniability for reddit - "we didn't do it, that moderator did it" etc. You can see what the response to moderation is on twitter and figure out how valuable not having to deal with it yourself is.

Your solution isn't scalable with profit.

We caught "community builders" making disingenuous posts trying to pass reposted/translated content as OC to generate engagement. After getting caught doing so with their admin accounts they tried again using normal users.

They also had the bright idea to spam users via DM using a poorly templated message (verbatim "insert u/USERNAME") to promote localized copies of low-quality subs (the kind of trash you see on r/all).

Here the allegation is that Reddit is systematically astroturfing itself with the goal of shaping user opinion. But they're choosing to do it in a way that is very easy to detect (the comments are 100% identical, and as a bonus they all come from usernames that are recognisably automatically generated) and apparently completely ineffective (the comments mostly have -1 points, with a maximum of 1). And the only evidence is something that could have been easily done by absolutely anyone.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...

It says "either you watch this page in the official reddit app or not at all".

This link is the content of the post: https://i.redd.it/bot-army-in-full-effect-to-downplay-the-ch...

> This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.

Reddit is trying so hard to keep this under control.

I hope people start seeing the value in decentralization again.

Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking.

Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.

But what either of us said doesn't negate the sentiment of my original comment.

As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever.

All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost.

We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.

It borders on obvious to anybody who frequents HN.

I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever.

I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.

When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.

If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.

You could say this current upset is about Reddit management being pressured into censoring more to appeal to advertisers. What you call "controllability" is a double-edged sword.

> When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it [...] or you don't promote it's use [...] - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.

The same argument can be made for the Web as a whole, which despite appearances is still decentralised. When was the last time you heard a lay person say that they weren't interested in a website for their business because only unsavoury types use those?

This is an implementation problem; people will self-host (or rent from Linode or w/e) if that's simple and not too expensive, and they'll take the centralised, ad-funded option if self-hosting is too hard and/or the loss of privacy is deemed the lesser cost. While concern for privacy seems to be on the rise, ideology has never been the deciding factor for the plurality of users.

https://join-lemmy.org/instances says there's only 2.6k monthly active users in the entire "lemmyverse". That's not even getting off the starting blocks for even a single niche sub-Reddit.

Getting people to even humour the idea of going elsewhere when there's genuine value in pre-existing content is difficult, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, guides, advice et al, which unfortunately, Reddit is brimming with.

Windows Phone was a pretty good example of the "no users" problem: a solid alternative to iOS and Android, but not much in the way of big apps because of a lack of users, but the lack of users primarily stemmed from a lack of big apps. Chicken-and-egg scenario ad infinitum.

Not sure if all data is available anywhere? (Common crawl? Those big internet scrapes used to train language models?)

[1] https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87...

[2] https://github.com/Watchful1/PushshiftDumps

(I also imagine something like >95% of all Reddit content was produced in-between 2012 and 2023.)

Most of the value that I derive from older content is being able to recontextualize it for the present day, especially with extremely niche stuff.

However, user hostility from Reddit itself is likely going to lead to an exodus of power users, just like with Twitter post-acquisition. It might not be huge numbers of people quitting, but they're meaningful users, which are a sad loss community-wise. Especially if you assume that way more people just view a platform than actually post things on it, which is apparently vastly skewed in that way for most platforms; "lurkers".

Besides, IMO an ad-infused API where every Xth post/comment is an ad may be a compromise.

However, looking at the app, the moderation decisions, the 'firing', and just about everything that the admins do, I know they haven't measured anything.

I've worked in enough BigCos, startups, middle sized, &c. companies to know that Reddit's management, like literally every other company's management, is just making stuff up on the fly and hoping it works. Because that's all that they have ever done.

That's easy to measure.

Why is this even a guess?

The rumors of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated. I'm shocked at the number of people here who don't understand that Reddit has thousands of SWEs and PMs and Directors now, and they've definitely run the numbers on many outcomes.

Reddit has no viable competition for the service it provides. And it's no longer a space for techies and nerds, Digg v2 is something that happened in the old world. There's a bunch of people using Reddit exclusively on their phones via the first party app, and I'd bet it's approaching majority. Reddit is not going anywhere.

Reddit has ~1,000 employees total.

I would actually take the approach of "API Access is gated by the account paying money".

This is how Spotify did it (only premium users have API access) and the entire issue of paid vs. free becomes "pay for the API surface".

$Y is the additional amount of money that Reddit gets from improving their advertising metrics before an IPO.

Reddit is betting that $Y > $X. And they can stop counting $X when the IPO happens.

As far as I can tell, there's just not enough community presence elsewhere, for most communities, except a few places like Discord. And Discord sucks even worse than Reddit, in a lot of ways.

Because if they have not, it is hard to say what they rely on. And quite possible that they track which subreddits and users are profitable and which are not, and know exactly which people they want on the site and which they do not.

So you may be right that "greedy behavior" is driving their actions, but that might be manifesting in unexpected ways, such as deliberately angering the pieces of the community that don't click ads.

This is just speculation of course - I know nothing about reddit's operations, but it is worth considering that what is good for the users does not match up with what is good for Reddit's business. That will be a problem in the long run, but may drive their short-term actions.

It seems like a decent middle ground. But what would I know, I am but the son of a candle maker! I know nothing!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/reddits-api-pricing-...

They're basically using it to kill 3rd party apps and push their terrible mobile app.

where will you go?

Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.

Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit.

But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.

You say forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool, but Something Awful is still going and has always been $10.

I really don't want to be the product anymore. I would gladly pay for a good service with reasonable moderation.

I'm paying for Discord right now, even.

In practice in the present its understood that this is an uneconomical idea

Maybe its free APIs that are a zero interest rate phenomenom

Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized.

I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons.

It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway.

For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.

It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.

No, all the alternatives are just terrible, I can't see myself using your alternative either.

https://join-lemmy.org/

Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home.

You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.

One does not simply: Ban self hosters

The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.

https://basementcommunity.com/

Reddit is partly owned (10%) by Tencent the Chinese WeChat giant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13027031 "Reddit CEO admits to altering user comments that were critical of him"

And that's just the crap they've been caught with.

But I would like for others to know about this, if for no other reason than to add one more bit of motivation for people to create competitor sites.

Personally, I'd especially like to see a non-free but inexpensive offering with a reddit-style interface that caters to niche communities.

Let reddit have the cat videos and memes that litter their front page; that's what they want anyway. There needs to be another place for hobbyist communities.

It's easy enough to stand up a Discourse server, but there's something to be said for the network effects of a single site with a large user base.

Or PayPal

Or eBay

Or Stripe

(I could keep going but you get the point)

It seems quite different for a payment processor to lock you out of an account.

Unrelated: Does this post break the site for everyone on mobile or just me? It seems to happen with Tell/Ask HN posts sometimes

  1) clone Reddit
  2) must attract users because Reddit's value is in the large user base
  3) the only early adopters are the ones who are banned from Reddit
  4) curious 'normies' visit the clone to find it is full of white nationalists
  5) clone dies

I'm a bit ahead of the curve I think? I don't know. All this talk about the big guys, we are at a tipping point. It's happening now. That's why they are trying to regulate AI IMO. They understand that we are moments away from being able to bridge all of our own resources in a way that isn't siloed.

We can host it all ourselves now. It's fine. The future is going to be weird... but really it's just getting the internet back that got hijacked from us 20ish years ago or whatever.

If you want to try yourself, since I can't recommend my gear because I have to finish the rest of the rollout, KubeSail doesn't get enough attention. Easy to set up on any computer you have laying around, but their gizmo is pretty cool too. I think their app store is neat and I could get my grandma hosting her own K8s cluster to the web with this tutorial.

https://kubesail.com https://codeburst.io/ddclient-c9a6ac1d8f81

Throw Netmaker or an mTLS implementation on top and now you can federate networks, share resources with labels, taints, or tolerations, manage volumes, yadda yadda.

I am sorry for your loss... but you know.... Scrape your subs and host them yourself. Heck, I'm so sick of reddit.... hummm. This could be a good tutorial demo. Mirror a subreddit with periodic syndication on a self hosted reddit clone that shows the old context and creates new with a few commands.

Sure there's still some problems, but it's a far site better than the blockchain web can pull off.

Also, don't try to do cluster to cluster communication with straight wireguard/tailscale. mTLS or Netmaker. They are very easy tools to mess with just with some docker containers too, no cluster needed.

Communities have gravity, and its incredibly difficult to escape those gravity wells. Even if the power-users that produce valuable content move somewhere else, the subreddits they used will just link to that content, but keep the discussion on Reddit.

But I am skeptical that there’s a critical mass of users necessary for truly reversing Reddit’s plans. With the IPO approaching, I feel like the best they can hope for is a temporary stay of execution.

Surely, there is nothing in writing that has been agreed to that Reddit owes anything to the health of communities.

No one could possibly say this about usenet and I don't really see the difference.

Doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me, sounds like anti-spam measures doing what they do.

I say fuck them. I don't get anything out of this subreddit, and they get free labour. Subreddits can't exist without moderators and they know that. The reddit staff are just self-destructive idiots.

If you still want to comment in support of the strike, it is really easy to make another account and not get banned for ban evasion, but remember to never hint that you are evading a ban, because you will be banned for hunting it even if they have no other evidence. If you're gonna delete your reddit account anyway then you're welcome to see whether this is true - comment somewhere (on your normal account) about how you got banned for joining the protest and this is your second account and report back what happens.

If you are evading bans and you want to actually use reddit then make sure to store your account state (e.g. subscribed subreddits) outside of your account so you can transfer it to each new account. And get a GDPR dump of each account, which you can do after it's banned.

It doesn't have to be a fully built reddit alternative, but it should discuss how software is governed.

I think that's what it all lies to.

Software is not like other products. Websites are not like other products.

We've let them own us for almost 20 years now.

But we used them for more than that, in china they had post-walls in the street. We used to simply have community boards in real life.

And now those highroads are being jeopardized by companies in their own interest.

Shouldn't we ask ourselves, is it a benefit to humanity, if ours highway communication is being controlled by corporate entities ?

Can't we make an ONG which sole goal is to discuss and exchange on how those highways should be governed ?

This is a chance for humanity to grow but we are turning this into a pile of disaster instead of grouping up.

I do not think any individual at this point should be "in charge" of those high ways.

It should be an opportunity for all of us to join up, and build a governance framework of sort ; and from there create free tools which are not tied to economic narrow sight. Developers of such tools are all around the wrold, and centralization or decentralization is not the problem, it's either an achievement or a nice-to-have thing ; but in most cases, users don't care.

How do we group up, how do we discuss together like we do on HN, but we keep posting "some new alternative" every few week without realizing that if we group up in a simple github organization, we might be the most impactful workforce of the entire web ?

Do we really have to benefit from this ?

Is this all not above us ?

Not quite Mastodon, more unified singular like Reddit where it is seamless integration and frictionless BUT every user/post is authenticated by a cipher signature and everyone runs their own server pulling down the newest updates every minute.

At most it would be minute behind?

Maybe best comparison is the old FidoNet with the forum backbone, I forget what it was called.

More like usenet? But where there are independent owners of each subforum that can cancel/delete messages officially (of course people can still sift through the deletions unofficially)

Spam is the biggest problem but ultra-fast lightweight message cancelling is the answer to that?

Does anyone have experience in this that might be able to help?

I can see you being banned for that.Try to appeal it, I did a couple of times sincerely apologizing for my actions. My ban wasn't reversed. Mostly read it to keep up with the news and car stuff.

Reddit just does not respect their users anymore. Their content policy is enforced erratically at the whim of whatever current internal political environment is going on inside their company. I gave this company subscription money for years, purchased hundreds of dollars in rewards, and it absolutely meant nothing because of one employee wanting to cover their tracks.

OP logged on from (what would appear to reddit as) public wifi and that posted drastic messages. That's a lot like what it would look like if someone had hijacked a mod account. Deleting those posts isn't crazy, especially if the janitor isn't aware of reddit politics and is just doing their job.

Also, not to nitpick, but OP is lying in the title. He clearly wasn't banned, he was temporarily locked out.

Like, don't get me wrong, reddit is being incredibly shitty lately, but probably not for these specific reasons.

I also made a digg: http://tentacle.rupy.se (unfortunate name)

Also made a reddit/forum clone: http://talk.binarytask.com

FlingUp looks great from a functionality and UI perspective, but in five minutes on the site I'm already seeing outright racism and other problems that kept a lot of people off Voat.

Do you intend to address these types of issues?

But if it's just going to descend into being another Voat, I'm not going to bother encouraging my communities to switch over. We're all familiar with what invariably happens to forums / social media sites that have no restrictions on what type of speech is allowed.

Lemmy is looking like a viable alternative. According to this[0] page running your own instance is pretty light on resources, and they have an official Ansible playbook install option[1].

And, whereas with FlingUp I have no control over their moderation policies, with Lemmy I can set the moderation policies for the instance and defederate any other instances as needed.

0. https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration...

1. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible

How do we move the ownership to where it belongs?

But, I can confirm that the worst part of being put in the HN penalty box is that you basically can't get out. I think that's pretty shitty.

It’s pretty damn disappointing. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised tho.

But.. yeah. Live and learn I guess. It still bothers me that they moderate it like that.