Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.
We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.
Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.
Edit to include source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/13/reddit-ceo-blackouts-no-revenue-impact/
Yeah this is why I think the 48 hour time limit is unfortunate. I don’t think it’s going to have much long term effect, and the only real difference is going dark indefinitely until demands are met or just migrating elsewhere.
Thing is, ultimately people do have a choice as to whether they want to continue using Reddit without third-party apps.
I agree that regardless of any blackouts, Reddit will be fine in the end - most people simply don’t mind using a Facebook-ified version of Reddit, and that’s fine.My hope isn’t that Reddit will fall, it’s that alternatives (like Lemmy) will rise, for those of us that do care about these issues.
There is a list of 300+ subs that are staying dark indefinitely. Some have tens of millions of subs. I expect that list will grow as more of this stuff comes out.
I’m sure many will go back to Reddit but some wont. I for one will be staying on Lemmy as I’ve found it a breath of fresh air.
Honestly I’m just waiting to see if short story communities move over. I liked to pass the time reading things like nosleep stories, and if those communities move over here I’ll delete Boost and only use Lemmy, but so far I haven’t seen much.
Same boat, and I made a decent commission off writing short pieces for people off Reddit. Hoping a similar community pops up here eventually
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I’d appreciate that, thank you
Yup I’m staying here too. It’s already feeling like home.
Once June 30th hits, I’m wiping my reddit account and moving over here. Seems much nicer here
already wiped my account :D
Same here, the engagement level is well worth the transition and I’m tired of corporate silos, federation FTW!
I’m so glad to not see ads all over the place. I’m also glad to not see low-level top comments; so far the conversations have been of higher quality, they’re more thought-out. I haven’t been back to Reddit since Monday, and although it’s been a learning curve and a little tough without the amount of content, I’m enjoying lemmy quite a bit.
I’m in the same club as you…better quality content here as I’m figuring out Lemmy and Jerboa too. No more Reddit
Same. Already moderating here, but I doesn’t even have to, really, because everyone is nice for now
I was able to make an account on here finally, I’m never going back now! Woohoo! Gonna go use one of those reddit data deletion tools this afternoon.
Do you have such a tool? What does it do?
I’ve two accounts: 1 at 14 years and the other at 8. I’d love to be able to remove my presence from that website.
Shreddit deletes your comments but you still have to go delete your account
Do you have a link to such a tool? I’d love to get rid of all my contributions to reddit.
https://shreddit.com/ Is used for this. But you have to delete the account separately. It only deletes all your posts and comments.
Same! The mood here reminds me of the good old days when everyone on Reddit wasn’t a cynical asshole.
Jerboa is already a better app than Reddit’s official app, so I’m quite happy to give the Lemmy and Jerboa devs time to iron out the kinks.
God why is everyone on reddit a cynical asshole?
In my experience there’s just something about Reddit and many Online forums that just tends to bring out the worst in people.
IMO there’s something about the style of vote-moderated public posting that leads people to want to posture as confident and authoritative, even when they don’t have a lot to add. And cynicism is a cheap way of looking smart (since it undercuts the need to deal with complexity and nuance). So there’s a constant bias towards posting cynicism or framing ideas cynically.
On the flip side, shorter comments are easier to read, and sarcastic/cynical retorts/summaries are more likely to get upvoted when they’re shorter/funnier than effortposts. So there’s also maybe a bias to upvote cynicism.
It’s a reflection of society as a whole, unfortunately.
I think there’s more to it because there are people on Reddit who act like assholes on Reddit but in real life you’d never know since they seem like nice people.
It’s not reddit. It’s the pseudonymity of the internet. I’ve met people who just didn’t understand they were talking to real people because they were just typing at their computers. I noticed that 20 years ago for the first time and it didn’t really change over the years. the only thing one could blame reddit for is “being popular enough to attract idiots”.
Wowzers. No offense at all to the Jerboa devs but this really contextualizes for me just how bad the official app must be.
I want baconreader for Lemmy!
The main reddit app sucked so bad. I loved Joey. Would love it if they moved it to Lemmy/KBin
The official Reddit really is so bad. Using Mlem on iOS for now, but I would die for an Apollo-for-Lemmy client. (Christian, plz)
That would be a perfect outcome, that Sync (What I used on Android) and Apollo (iOS) just rebuilt their apps for Lemmy.
Lemmy is fun pls
If Sync retools to Lemmy/kbin, they’ll have me for life
LJ Dawson said he would look into it but my guess is it would require a lot of work and a whole new app.
I did notice that he killed the official sync subreddit as well as almost all of his comments on reddit. I get why people are killing their content but it just feels like reddit is going to get to play the “victor writes the history” card. Luckily i already joined the sync discord in anticipation of him killing his content for reddit.
The community efforts in the discord are incredible - they’ve already got it largely working
I think there’s a project that allows for apps using Reddit API calls to interract with Lemmy just by changing the URL in the app. Maybe something like that would be useful in making it easier to convert Sync to working on Lemmy instead of Reddit, well that and other minor changes to accommodate Federated features.
Here’s to praying! Happy to even pay for pro again!
Yeah, I’m with you there. I paid twice and will gladly pay a third time.
The official app is terrible beyond belief.
Same! The mood here reminds me of the good old days when everyone on Reddit wasn’t a cynical asshole.
It really was getting bad over there. People were apt to take nearly anything you shared and fill in the blanks with their own imaginary context, then get angry and/or confrontational over it. For example, one of my last interactions was about an elderly uncle of mine who suffered from burns all over his body and gave up living after 50+ days of agony. A sad story with no purpose other than to convey the sad nature of these injuries. Hop on the next morning to find that a guy was berating me, all but certain I was somehow angry that my uncle gave up after 50 days of absolute fucking agony, and assuming I would have preferred the man just suck it up or something. I didn’t know what to offer this person other than a good old fashioned “What the fuck are you talking about?”
This type of thing was becoming more and more commonplace. Just angry people expecting and assuming the worst of everyone else. If it wasn’t some shitty take on an otherwise innocent post, it was unprovoked outrage over my username, even if absolutely nothing in my conduct or post history stands to suggest I’m pro-Stalin, pro-fascist, or pro-Soviet.
Same here. This morning I’ve removed my ten years worth of content from Reddit as I don’t want them to even generate the slightest bit of revenue from it, removed my account and do not feel bad about it in the slightest.
I’m done with the way Reddit handles the community feedback and done with the “don’t you dare to have a differing opinion or we’ll downvote to oblivion” mentality that prevailed in a number of subreddits.
The latter is just human nature. You’re not going to get away from that especially as lemmy grows 🤷
Yeah, as much as people say they’re meant to serve a different purpose, the upvote and downvote buttons will always serve as “I agree” and “I disagree” buttons.
I disagree! >:( downvotes
Yeah, guess that’s true. But for now I’ll just enjoy the more positive vibe I’ve picked up so far.
I deleted 15 years of comments last week. Nothing too valuable lost but it’s definitely the end of an era. Looking forward to something new and not corporate owned.
what tool did you use to delete your comments?
Is there a fast way to delete comments? I found a nuke Reddit extension but only for chrome and it only did posts. I have a shit ton of comments out there still.
I used shreddit.com, you don’t need a premium account to remove all your comments. You can just select ‘all content’ from the dropdown that allows you to select from which point in time you want to nuke your stuff.
I deleted one 11 year account and 3 three year accounts. The amount of absolute repeat garbage bots on all my homepage, and throughout popular was so bad, it just became Facebook, but angrier.
Likewise. Decentralization is the future
I’m not sure how many users will actually stay away. But if even a small fraction of the mods for these big subs stay away Reddit’s gonna have a problem.
Lemmy will pull some mods away, traditional forums will pull some away, and that could really hurt.
However, only time will tell if that ends up happening.
Yeah many people don’t really realize just how bad it is when moderators leave, especially for a platform like Reddit where the mods are unpaid volunteers. On a different platform where they pay moderators they could just hire new ones, but with Reddit currently hemorrhaging money they are very much not going to be able to hire brand new moderators for every mainline sub.
Plus you have to account for the fact that while there are people who might be able to take their place now that number will quickly diminish I say become swamped with work and lack the proper tools to do decent moderation. It does not bode well for Reddit’s future.
Reddit is already due for a problem regardless of what the mods decide to do. Bots are no longer going to be a thing thus multiplying the work required for a mod by an unknown factor
Wait, can you explain this a bit more? I’m not the most tech savvy, but I’m reading this as things like automod and gandolf bot all being gone - the former being potentially worse? (No hate to LOTR fans, of course!)
Most mod tools and bots rely on API access and are just as affected by this change as third-party Reddit clients.
After the outrage started, Reddit has stated that they will make exceptions for mod tools and accessibility apps, but it requires manual approval, and a number are likely to be declined in spite of it. Particularly when considering that a lot of moderators made use of mod tools which were contained within these third-party clients that are shutting down, and are likely not going to be spun off into separate tools.
I’m fully committed regardless of how good the replacement is. I paid for Reddit premium every month since 2016 to try and support the thing I loved. I gave out 65+ gold before premium to also support a thing a loved.
I cancelled premium after the AMA and deleted Apollo. No going back period.
This might be why they have not seen a monetary hit yet, it won’t be until people’s premium cancellations hit that Reddit will see a cash flow issue.
The Humanist Report on YouTube lost monetization last month and he slowly saw his subscriber count drop day by day as people’s subscriptions got canceled instead of renewed after 31 days he was somehow still at 9 subscribers. Fortunately he did a video and called out YouTube and people went on his patreon to fund him instead of him relying at all on YouTube. He got monetization back but you can never trust YouTube to not screw people.
Google has been evil for a while now
“Don’t be evil”
They won’t see much of a monetary hit from most of the people that were using the free API. It will be like YT since 2017; a slow decline and complete loss of technical utility. It will be another zombie garbage platform because this is all the company is focused on. It is a massively oversimplified perspective of where value is created in reddit. I believe the entire house of cards is anchored by the most niche and obscure places that have useful information and support. Monetizing the types of users that make up these communities is completely counter productive. These are the true influencing anchor users that everyone is grounded to all the way down the intellectual pyramid (plateau). All the other social stuff is peripheral to the technical utility of knowing you can find an answer to a super obscure question by asking on reddit. It is just like how you used to be able to find the answer on YT; now you can’t find that one video posted by the expert that had 3 uploads 10 years ago. This is the change reddit is making. It will take time for this utility to errode away but this outcome is guaranteed.
Yeah, I’m sold on Lemmy too.
You didn’t have to buy it, it’s free. /S
Dad, stop it! Mom said to remind you the the roof still needs fixing…
I think Lemmy will definitely be able to serve as a suitable replacement for Reddit, the wacky Reddit comments everyone knows and loves won’t die out with Reddit, they’ll live on here on Lemmy.
Yeah I agree, honestly I just get real sick of corporate assholes and get unreasonably angry, so I don’t want to “give-in”. I’ve been going back on RIF to spread word of Lemmy to see what I can do, but come July 1st, that won’t really be an option anymore since I’ll have to navigate through their ad-ridden app and will eventually give them money.
I think I’ll comment here but mainly lurk there at times. It’s still good if I’m looking for something that has to do with my hobbies, unless this booms than that will change things.
@Pixlbabble @Oxff I’ve hit the front page 6 times in 6 years. I don’t think I will ever again. Hello lemmy and Mastodon
Honestly there’s nothing reddit offered me that I wasn’t already finding on my own. Maybe I’m in the minority but I would rarely search reddit specifically for info as it often got me unanswered threads or nothing specific to my situation or need. I usually figure out most of my own stuff so my needs are very specific.
TBH i didn’t know there’s something like lemmy in the fediverse before reddit did what they did to shut down subreddits.
But I’m really glad that they did this and that I found lemmy because of it. The whole tech behind it and the decentralization is very fascinating and I’m happy that I can see how it all will evolve over time, hopefully keeping the imo very good and positive course. :)
Maybe I’ll look at reddit every now and then, but at least my intention is to stay here and use lemmy more often than reddit. ^-^
Yep. I have no ties to Reddit, other than the name. Lemmy has proven to fill the void the last few days, so this is where I’m staying.
Well they say that:
"As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,000 subreddits remained inaccessible and in private mode after what began as a two-day voluntary shutdown. The blackout includes popular forums such as r/aww, r/videos and r/music, each of which claims more than 25 million subscribers on the platform. "
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/14/tech/reddit-blackout/index.html
I work on a corporate team and often companies will allow team members to wear anything to work as long as it’s branded. This, employees have an incentive to spend that money to customize their look at work, if that’s important to them. It is to some people.
My company has a code that brings all items down to cost, and I have bought some uniform items that way to mix up what I wear at work.
The company that I work for is a small business with a great local reputation; wearing my company’s logo is a positive for me. Can’t say that would be the case if I worked for Reddit.
That honestly sounded terrible until you said they were selling the work branded attire at cost. I suppose that’s not too bad a situation.
The Meta Twitter-clone is allegedly going to have ActivityPub connectivity. That may be just the tip of the iceberg.
I just hope Meta doesn’t get it’s claws into activitypub at the roots. The whole point of this thing is to avoid corporate domination and I don’t want them to turn it into a charade.
I don’t think its a bad thing tbh as long as it is in the fediverse. Think of it as email. Google, Microsoft and many others are in the game but email stays the same
New guy here: What’s “activitypub”? Thanks in advance awesome human!
My understanding of it is that its the software that federated services use to communicate with each other. Now, I don’t know if i’m even right so take that with a grain of salt, i’m sure eventually someone 1 level higher than me on the techie tier list will give a more thorough answer.
it’s a standardized protocol for creating decentralized social networks. basically if everybody who wanted to create a social network agreed to use activitypub, they’d all be able to talk to each other, just like anyone can send email to anyone else, even if they aren’t on the same email server.
this is why i’m against bluesky even though a lot of my friends are on it… it’s just another walled off single-entity-controlled property. didn’t we learn anything from twitter and now reddit!?
this too shall pass
I believe there’s going to be a moderator exodus. The flippancy with which Steve has handled this, and how he responded here, is going to stick in the craws of their enormous unpaid workforce. These are the people who have been there a decade plus, have seen the ebbs and flows, and are probably no longer willing to be unpaid servants to their clearly demonstrated monetary interests (at the expense of its users [product]). This was a turning point. They have way bigger problems to address than a 48 hour boycott.
Plenty of them will do that simply because they are currently using 3rd party apps, bots and other tools to moderate and won’t be able to do it nearly as efficiently afterwards.
The question I’ve always wondered is… how many mods are already paid? Not by reddit, but by other media companies that pay them specifically to tilt the scales and suppress or promote particular viewpoints. Those people will want to remain part of the community - so supporting the blackout, but also if their paycheck comes from having power on reddit, they will also support reopening.
Saddens me that while the community could muster a great effort, the short 2 day time limit of the blackout wasn’t enough.
I don’t think a larger timeline would have been accepted as easily, 48hrs was very approachable and will result it many subs continuing after having ripped the bandaid off.
Yep, that’s how lots of strikes are organized. Start with the initial demands, give a timeframe, and if unaddressed escalate further
I don’t know if I’d take his word at face value. This reads like he’s talking to potential investors, not Reddit’s user base. Of course he’d want to assure them that everything is okay and they should still give him money.
It’s an internal message to employees of Reddit. As someone who’s been in the corporate world for a long time, I’ve seen some variation of this message many times. Economic downturn, bad press, low sales, losing expected incoming cash… there are a lot of catalysts for this style of message.
Most messages we’re seeing are from users, who want Reddit to crash and burn or just do what the masses want, or whatever. But, on the other side is a bunch of people who may be worried about how this whole thing will affect their livelihood. Even if Reddit stays up another 20 years and not everyone loses their job, what scale will it be? Will Reddit fire some amount of their workforce to make up for lost income? Will I be someone who gets fired?
These are the thoughts that this message is intended to address.
At this point you know all memos will be leaked.
It’s an internal message to employees of Reddit. As someone who’s been in the corporate world for a long time, I’ve seen some variation of this message many times. Economic downturn, bad press, low sales, losing expected incoming cash… there are a lot of catalysts for this style of message.
Most messages we’re seeing are from users, who want Reddit to crash and burn or just do what the masses want, or whatever. But, on the other side is a bunch of people who may be worried about how this whole thing will affect their livelihood. Even if Reddit stays up another 20 years and not everyone loses their job, what scale will it be? Will Reddit fire some amount of their workforce to make up for lost income? Will I be someone who gets fired?
These are the thoughts that this message is intended to address.
Got it, I didn’t realize it was internal. Though they likely also knew it’d get leaked.
As for the workforce, I feel for them, though any business that is highly dependent on unpaid labor is something I personally wouldn’t apply to.
In the corp world as well, and I can say with a lot of certainty that spez knew and likely hoped this would be leaked publicly. It was written both with the intention of assuaging current staff and angling their optics for the watching public. My company had a minor recent PR issue and our CEO drafted and sent something very similar.
Here’s the source article from The Verge
"In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass.
The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company’s increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they’ll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes…"
I hope this response further pisses off the subs who decided to do a fixed time blackout. The user base cannot be taken for granted. Reddit is only good as the content and the creators along with the mods.
“be mindful of wearing Reddit gear”??? this doesn’t feel like this was said in good faith at ALL.
Judging by other high-profile people who do something that people don’t like, he’s probably getting a fair amount of death threats so is feeling the hostility. Not sure why he thinks the average employee would be targeted though.
Why is this motherfucker acting like a victim?
Between this and the fact that r/AdviceAnimals is apparently back with Reddit moderators, I think Reddit will go on. They own everything and can re-open every subreddit whenever they want. Many of the more technical/informed Reddit users will remain absent from the site but the bulk of casual users will likely remain. Whether the content that’s left will satisfy them remains to be seen.
Agreed. Any big migration won’t be felt until looking five years in retrospect.
I dont know if we have to wait that long. We have seen how a shake-up in some mod structures has changed the quality of a subreddit. Imagine that over multiple big subreddits. It could go really fast within a year.
I’m OK with that. I don’t need a “forum” with 500 mio users. I need one with 100k. That is enough users to get subject matter experts from most fields and lively discussions on most topics.
When the userbase grows too much it just gets crowded and only the washed popular bullshit gets through.
Lol, what an asshole.
An anagram for Steven Huffman is ‘Tuff Shaven Men’.
Men Stuff Haven
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Human Vet Senff
I wish gold was a thing here because I’d give it to you.
When I moved to Mastodon, I stopped caring about the Twitter dumpster fire. It was great.
I am trying to do the same with Lemmy, to forget about Reddit. It’s gone. We are here now.
So far I’m not disappointed moving to lemmy. The only thing I haven’t found yet is an equivalence to oddly satisfying but I’m sure it’ll pop up someday
Heck just post something oddly satisfying doesn’t even need to be anywhere specific. I browse all. I never really stick to subscribed.
I don’t know where to find them and honestly don’t want to. I appreciate the work that others did to post and will wait till that happens. If I see one I’ll start a sub but till then I wait : P
I am still wondering where all the cat picture communities are. Like cute animal pictures. That is pretty much the only thing that keeps my wife hooked on Reddit.
I’ve seen a Lemmy community for cats at least once
I made this one! https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/cats And then I found this one! https://lemmy.ml/c/aww
In one of the lifeboats, it’s hard not to look back at the Titanic
That’s a noble sentiment but in the words of Dave Chappelle “I’m petty and my family is to.”
