Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.
However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that’s not allowed:
Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future
Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation
However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.
I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can’t let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they’re explicitly saying that they also don’t care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.
Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up
At this point I don’t know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.
I think it’s theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they’ve slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that’d get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.
Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won’t happen.
Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with “No, wait, not like that!!” and the mods adapt again… this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:
The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.
People are already in open revolt. It’s only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)… and Reddit’s journey towards enshittification will be complete.
Again, not a surprise. Totally awful, outrageous, and immoral.
But sadly, par for the course. The mods should allow a vote to move to the fediverse, and leave the sub permanently private in that case.
Or if reddit won’t give them the chance to vote, just do it anyways. Like the admins just do what they want, so turnabout is fair play, amirte?
If people want to move to the fediverse, they need to move to the fediverse, not wait for everyone else to move first.
Yes, but you’re preaching to the choir here. The number of people who are willing to take that initiative but haven’t yet is only getting smaller. So now people are thinking about how to help along the group who isn’t unwilling to move, just maybe not move alone.
Part of that is building the fediverse up, more communities, more activity, more of the stuff that made us want to go on Reddit beforehand. But the other part is seeing if there’s a good way to motivate the next group migration.
I dunno man. I just jumped over today. Bummed about the way things went but I’ve been in denial about what Reddit has become for a while. There are more coming.
But they want users to vote out mods?
They don’t want subreddits to close, but they’ve closed several.
Seems almost like their complaints actually don’t make sense given their own actions are just an excuse…
Spez vote:
Do you want your moderators to be replaced?
A) Yes
B) Not noDo you want your mods to be replaced?
A) Yes
B) Affirmative
C) Yes
D) Sounds good
E) Yes
E) OK, do it
G) Yes
H) Also Yes
K) NOn’t
Have any of these referendums happened? I have not been able to follow all this
I’ve seen quite a few on everything from DND forums to niche TV shows I follow
can you link to any? I am v curious about how it looks
Christian Selig’s receipts (Apollo’s dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.
Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators’ right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.
Users don’t own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don’t like how a subreddit is run, you’re supposed to make your own, not take it over.
Reddit’s admins are making up the rules as they go along.
Reddit admins acting in complete opposition to Reddit’s own Content Policy 🤦🏻♀️
This has been an incredible lesson on what NOT to do.
The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.
Which is it fuck-u-spez?
Honestly, If I were the mods Id nuke the whole subreddit: delete anything of importance, especially any important asset you made for that community (say, FAQs, resources, links, banners, logos, etc.) or better than delete it, edit it out with information as to where you are migrating, leave the shit behind. When you are done leave the sub closed till they take it away from you, and best of luck to anyone that has to rebuild again from nothing.
If anyone is going to do this, it needs to be done in stages so it can’t be easily reverted back like we’re seeing with the one-shot comment delete scripts. Slowly dismantle the sidebar information and links, fuck up the automod and other bot settings. Tweak the CSS and flairs. If you’re going to go nuclear, make sure they can’t easily get it back.
Im not a mod, but on a smaller scale on my own profile, I grabbed all my most upvoted comments (started from the really upvoted ones until I reached 20 upvotes or so) and edited them out to only leave the first few phrases or words. Then inserted a message that read:
“This used to be a full comment, you can find more resources in the link bellow since I have moved to kbin and reddit doesn’t deserve my content! Bye reddit, you won’t be missed!
For more [subject] advice, find me on https://kbin.social/m/[subject]”Bonus points if I could cut the comment out at the exact time it was about to become useful “Whats actually going on here is that…”
Did that sorting by most upvoted and also my fresh, since it wass manual I only managed to do so much, But I liked the approach better than just deleting it all or editing with “fuckspez” so that they could get back and revert it.
That’s a great alternative to the scripts for your own content! Thanks for the suggestion!
Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they’re approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.
Reddit is also arguably invalidating their Section 230 protections by exercising too much editorial control over content.
