As much as Steve has already shown he’s willing to lie outright (especially we characterizing his talks with the Apollo Dev) I really can’t put it past Reddit to lie about the mods “encouraging” porn posts.
r/mildlyinteresting did not encourage it, and Reddit lied about that, and their removal and suspension was revoked by a different admin than the one who removed and suspended them. Here is the post, “The Reddit Admins are lying - r/MildlyInteresting did NOT allow or encourage users to post ANY sexually explicit content, see draft of now-deleted announcement”:
Given how that’s been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it and apologising, it kind of seems like the admins aren’t really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.
EDIT: No Apology, just an explanation.
Reddit has no problems pushing war footage though. Real people actually dying is totally cool!
That’s more a prudish American culture thing than a reddit-specific thing. We went to see the latest Guardians movie over the weekend, in which they foleyed out the line “classy hoes” from No Sleep Till Brooklyn, and showed all sorts of violence, gory deaths, and lots of pretty fucking serious child abuse. And finally dropped the first f-bomb in any MCU movie, in the line “open the fucking door,” which was said not in anger, but in exasperation.
America loves its violence, but don’t you dare make any reference to anything close to sexuality.
It’s crazy how reddit’s run like it’s a 1-2 year old startup still trying to figure out how guidelines, communication, consistent rule enforcement, etc. work.
It’s becoming more and more apparent the site’s success was despite the company running it, not because of it.
I think its going to end up a successful move for them.
They built a platform. The users built the site over the years with minimal interaction from reddit.
They now have a platform, millions of users, and full control of what they want on that platform.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, they want the traffic but don’t want the problems that come with mostly community driven content.
All the profile redesigns, ability to “follow” users, profile pics, awards, all that has been an indication of the direction over the last few years. The last few steps was to kick out the problem users and be left with those who don’t really give a shit and just want to see memes on their phone while they take a shit. The people who hear about reddit and just grab the official app from the store. The people who don’t care about APIs and protests and modding or accessibility tools. Just eyeballs to look at their ads.
Those people will stay. It doesn’t matter if 25% of the community leaves, because the natural growth in the next few months from the eyeballs will claw it back over time.
Once they have an obedient user base who are strictly bound to what reddit want them to see, think TikTok or facebook users, that’s when they will see off. And it will pay off handsomely.
I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.
Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There’s no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that’s going to kill the website.
The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.
Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That’s not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.
If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There’ll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won’t be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.
It won’t disappear, but it certainly won’t be a multi-billion dollar company.
But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it’s just a matter of months for it to die for good.
I think years instead of months, but the rest is spot on. 30M pics users and 50k voted on the Sexy John Oliver change. 0.16% engagement on one of the highest traffic subs. So much of the front page has become tiktok it just a matter of time before people get their content direct from the source. The rest are news stories with the same arguments over and over again (ChatGPT and comment repost bots are already driving those) and reposted videos and memes from the last decade.
I’m still convinced that Google is driving a great deal of traffic to the site due to the depth of problem solving in old posts. I got a comment or DM every week or two thanking me for a solution I’d posted 3, 5, even 7 years prior. Those are all deleted now, and I’m keeping my account to regularly purge any restored content. If the top 100k-200k posters deleted their content, many google searches would lead to a dead end. Eventually it will end up like pinterest - you’ll put -site:reddit.* in your search (or add an extension to do so) just to avoid getting the useless results.
A site a large as reddit doesn’t die overnight, any more than Digg, Twitter, Usenet, or any other platform that is past its prime. But it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future value or IPO success.
And the mods are the ones that fight the phishing scams, disinformation bots, t-shirt spammers, etc. If reddit were capable of automating those away, they wouldn’t still be so prevalent.
I straight up don’t believe reddit staff is as technically competent as those at Meta/IG or TikTok. They can’t pull it off without a volunteer army filling in the capabilities gap.
Well, whether Reddit likes it or not, mods were a department of specialists working on some unique aspects of their business.
That whole department got told to get bent, in essence fired, but they don’t even have contracts in place preventing “disgruntled employee” stuff.
This is what happens.
If Reddit had just kept their mouth shut, 2 days after the blackout most subs would be back online and the others would eventually follow.
But no Spez had to open his mouth and take actions, forcing subs to open again, telling lies about the app creators.
Basically turning all of Reddit against him.
I mean it’s not just reddit. While investors probably don’t care, the fact that he lied about easily disprovable things that did or did not happen doesn’t bode well. I don’t think it’s going to hurt their bottom line any time soon, but that kind of spinelessness isn’t exactly liked.
He’s panicking. His biggest lie is that this protest doesn’t matter and hasn’t and won’t impact Reddit financially. It already has and will continue to do so. You can tell that the people who actually post content worth viewing are here and not there, despite the smaller numbers over here.
I can’t blame reddit admins on this one. I support the protest and users shifting to Lemmy. But the sudden NSFW content is clearly going to get reddit to take action. Just the obvious response in my opinion. Just like killing third party apps causes a user base to leave. 🤷♂
But admins had previously said that reddit should be for the communities, and the communities voted to allow NSFW.
The unfortunate thing is that in a lot of cases, the “Big Stick” approach actually worked. Many reddit moderators that were “leading” the protests caved under threats of replacement from the admins. Maybe it’s because they’re addicted to the little bit of power being a moderator over a reasonably sized community gives you. Maybe they’re just set in their ways and expected reddit to roll back their API changes. I can’t say. The one that really pissed me off was r/selfhosted. Like, your entire thing is autonomy and a very technical microcosm of DIY culture, but the second you’re faced with the possibility of just migrating to one of a million different other, self-hosted options, suddenly it becomes “too much of an inconvenience?” Totally pathetic.
