Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators : news

[–] jon@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago (6 children)

My assumption here is that Huffman may win the battle, but he might lose the war. Even if he manages to get the rampaging mods under control, how much damage will he do in the process?

r/pics will probably end up going NSFW, which gets another major sub to lose ad revenue. Can Reddit manage to get all these subs back on topic without pulling some fascist takeover of the mod teams? These malicious compliance subs aren't explicitly breaking any rules, and taking action against them will just fan community outrage more.

They can obviously ban NSFW material, but that'll force a migration far faster than any blackout ever could. Not to mention 3rd party apps going dark on July 1st, which might see a not insignificant drop off of mobile users.

Reddit has likely begun its slow descent, and u/spez's best long term strategy would be to reverse course and keep the public API. Of course, he'll never do that since that just communicates to any investors that you have no control over your community. Not sure how he digs his way out of this one.

[–] Echostorm@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, ask Tumblr how well banning NSFW went for them lol

Maybe his exit strategy is to give Elon an amazing handjob and hope he buys reddit for a stupid amount of money.

[–] randomperson@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sync for Lemmy is expected to have first public release in approx. 6 weeks. That will definitely increase adoption as Sync would make Lemmy look like something not made in a basement overnight.

[–] Generic-Disposable@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is sync for lemmy. I agree that the current version of lemmy is clunky and buggy.

[–] saplyng@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Earlier today the Sync for Reddit app developer held a poll and decided that they would make Sync for Lemmy, presumably with the same general layout and design as Sync for Reddit.

[–] Nougat@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It is perfectly reasonable to charge for API access. That's not the problem.

The problem is that Huffman seems to think he can do whatever he wants without consequences. It wasn't "Hey, we're going to start charging for API, here's a reasonable price, and a reasonable time frame, and we want to make sure everyone has a reasonable opportunity to continue providing applications that lots of users and mods use to access and shepherd the site."

It was, "We're going to start charging an exorbitant amount for API access, in an unviably short timeframe. If you have any complaints or disagreements, we're going to provably lie about our interactions with you to make you look bad, oh and we're also going to completely forget that there are people with accessibility needs and basically ignore them except as an afterthought. We're also going to threaten existing mods who don't play along, and replace them with people who do if we feel like it."

That's the problem.

[–] JoeCoT@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Because the point was never to monetize the APIs. The point was to get rid of the third party apps. A minority of users are still using the not monetized versions of reddit. old.reddit.com, and the third party apps. The people using new reddit, and the reddit app, have a totally different, heavily monetized, modern social media experience full of ads and suggested posts. They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.

But they can't come out and say that, because it's a huge fuck you. A fuck you to their original members, a fuck you to the apps they used to fuel their growth for a decade. Now they want a controlled ecosystem like Facebook, but they can't say it directly. So instead it's surprise API costs, refusing to talk to app developers, lying about conversations with Apollo devs.

But just like everything else they do, reddit can't plan for shit. So they didn't at all consider the fallout for accessibility tools, mod tools, etc. Which is why all their messaging since then has essentially been "No, we weren't trying to kill accessibility and mod tools, just the third party apps for normal users!" But they can't say the second part directly.

[–] Generic-Disposable@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

There is another point you are missing. Reddit uses browser fingerprinting to doxx and identify it's user base so that they can bin your data properly when they sell it. Third party apps thwart this effort as they can't tie your account to somebody who logs into the web site or uses their app.

[–] Nougat@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

They want everyone to either have that experience, or leave.

I'm happy to do what reddit wants then, given those two options.

[–] atocci@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I really wonder how much longer old.reddit.com will last. Surely that's "costing them millions of dollars" they could be saving as well, right?

[–] the_itsb@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Considering they've straight out said during this whole debacle that they had no plans to mess with old.reddit.com, just the same as they told the Apollo dev back in January they had no plans to mess with the API anytime in the near future - yeah, I have been wondering this, too.

It makes me sad for the future of troubleshooting older hardware and software problems. I have a lot of legacy equipment, and appending "site:reddit.com" to my search queries often gets me further faster than searching error messages alone. So many people are overwriting and deleting their old comments and posts while Reddit itself is fucking the accessibility of the information they steward, and it's going to punch a little gap into the collective knowledge of the internet. That sucks.

[–] jon@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Hell, just coming out with a statement that you're delaying the paid API by six months would fizzle out most protests. But they have dollar signs in their eyes with ChatGPT using Reddit for data and they want that money now.

[–] lavender@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The primary thing with r/pics and its users is that they are creating/posting SFW quality content for free. They are an established platform with an audience, and the tradeoff is that the platform can be used for ads by its owner. This is all fair.

The main outrage against the blackout is now coming from people who usually scroll, upvote, and consume content. Not content creators. They cannot fathom that their source of entertainment is inaccessible and just want people to stop 'overreacting' and get back to scrolling.

What happens when the platform is no longer reliable, because the owner decided to upset the people making sure the quality remains as established? Sure, someone else will fill the gap, but with these actions I'm sure a lot content creators have flocked to other places. Which leaves the bots, and the lurkers. No content is worse than low quality content.

I'm curious for what the future brings for Reddit. It feels like it will have a different trajectory compared to Twitter, where anything is content and quality doesn't matter as much.

[–] hillbicks@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

Good point about the difference between Twitter and reddit, hadn't thought about it that way.

Really interesting development and I have to say that I'm a bit surprised by the resilience the community has shown. On the other hand, this is reddit we're talking about and there is a reason some of us were there for 10, 15 years. Reddit could be so creative and fucking funny, it really was an awesome place at times.

I think you're on point about the content creators,only question is how many of the creators will leave reddit and go somewhere else. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

[–] GunnarRunnar@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

They should announce NSFW ban since that content isn't lucrative.

I have to say I find it hard to believe that it's easy to find new mods for all these subreddits. That's why they're focusing on threats. Otherwise I don't understand why they would allow these mods to continue this shit posting. Because they can make up an excuse for kicking them out. That wouldn't be hard.

[–] AdequateSteve@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

They’ll make people apply to get their subs turned to NSFW. They’ll all be SFW by default and force people to give a reason as to why it’s NSFW. They’ll deny every application from the newly changed NSFW subs. Or they’ll charge people for the NSFW tag - and it’ll be based on traffic!

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I just went back to log in for the first time in a week and took a look at one of my most frequented subs (Austria) to see what is going on. Apparently the mods decided to allow posts only about an Austrian children‘s show character who is a bike.

However, in the comments where I looked overwhelmingly the users whined about power tripping mods and that they should be removed and are undemocratic for not letting users choose the topic and nobody cares about 3rd party apps and they should just shut up and go back to normal.

So if that were my entire impression of this it wouldn‘t be that the mods are winning. Maybe a draw since I can also see the mood on here.

I‘d think it‘s maybe "opinion forming" bots if it weren‘t some of them in Austrian and I doubt Reddit would use bots for German opinions. So it seems genuine to me, only the spez bootlickers are left. I‘m never going back, let them have it.

[–] steebo_jack@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I noticed this too. It seems some people just arent ready to let it go and are blaming this protest for decreasing the number of users on the sub. What they fail to realize is that a lot of the people who left are probably using third party apps and wont have access to reddit after they lose API access. We will really see the extent of this in July?

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah true, in July we‘ll see some interesting movement in this battle. I‘m expecting people to come here and I want to have content ready for them, so I‘m going to focus on growing this now. I pilfered some memes from one of my subs and making an effort for the first time to not just comment, but post too.

[–] FriendlyGiant@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I just think that most of the people complaining probably don't want to mod themselve. As long as reddit has no way to replace most of the mods and as long as the mods keep up their protest reddit will only be semi-functional.

[–] AmidFuror@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My experience on Reddit over the past couple of years is that the users are terrible arbiters of what should be allowed. It's possibly different on a regional sub like r/Austria, but on other specific topic subs, off-topic posts routinely get huge numbers of upvotes.

Even when the rules that are made to enforce topicality are very clear, most new posts don't adhere to them. Take r/leopardsatemyface where the poster has to answer an automod comment that specifies 3 steps to determine if the content fits. There are usually a few commenters pointing out how it doesn't fit at all while vastly upvoted comment threads just discuss what was seen in the post regardless.

My point is that if it were up to the users, anything would go and there would be effectively one sub. Although there are power hungry mods I consider the thoughts of the average user in many subs to have little use or relevance to how things should work.

[–] blaise@champserver.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I doubt Reddit would use bots for German opinions

Well, about that...: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607173747/https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit_admins_were_just_caught_using_bots_or_fake/

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wow ok I see, whenever I think they can‘t go lower they get out the Limbo skills. So not even foreign language is safe from bot influence by the admins.

If they plug a LLM like ChatGPT into that to make it less clunky, people wouldn’t be able to tell either, there is already plenty of sceptics on bots even when they are being kinda obvious.

Not that we‘re entirely safe either, but I‘d hope here at least some of the devs and admins would try and stop that instead using it themselves..

[–] blaise@champserver.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately they seem to have already been doing that as well. There was a thread in r/programming before the blackout where people were commenting about the number of other comments that were in opposition to the blackout. The whole thread was filled with people finding that most of them were LLM bots:
https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What the fuck you guys are blowing my mind with all these links, we‘re already much further along in this than I thought possible. Is anyone or anything even real anymore? Are you a LLM? Say something offensive! (Jk don‘t wanna get you banned)

[–] blaise@champserver.net 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You know, the funny thing is that might actually work! There are things that LLMs are made to censor that real humans would still be be able to talk about. Granted, most those things would probably get us in trouble or put on a list, so I'm not sure how feasible that would be Maybe a decent idea would be if we could all pick a 'safe-word' out of those things that could be used to tell humans from bots.

[–] wafer@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

This works until they use bots trained on the safe word / phrase

[–] LostCause@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah it‘s crazy to think about, the only such thing I can think of is some "eat the rich" type of stuff, cause that also goes against their owners so they wouldn‘t be able to say it probably.

Well, anything is possible, they could well program them to do anything and curse like sailors, I just saw on Twitch is now a livestream of AI Trump vs. AI Biden, they insult the chat and each other in more ways than I’d ever think of.

[–] WytchStar@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Capitalists gonna exploit free labor, burn down good will, and jump ship when they run aground. Some day we may learn to stop giving corpos free resources in exchange for their benevolence. Because they haven't any. They're leeches. They monetized the internet, as they do everything, and they don't care about the things they create or the people that come to rely on them. Yeah he's a low-rent Elon but Steve isn't gonna be moved by any of this protesting any more than the Emerald Prince is over Twitter. It doesn't matter if it's a losing battle for him. He'll get his cut and the rest can burn.

[–] BorgMan@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

He'll probably win this fight yes. He'll probably also los the war hardcore. As the article mentions, we're free labour. If we work for you for free, then we get to have a say in all this as well. Letting ChatGPT learn from reddit with its gazillion API requests? Sure, charge them for it. I wholeheartedly agree. But it's time the company did something for that free labour workforce instead of againt...

[–] ripcord@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas

God I hate that 99% of the articles make bullshit claims like this. It's all over in the article too. All the major stakeholders very aggressively say that they can live with charging for API access and see why it makes sense. That's not the problem.

[–] xc2215x@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

He will continue this battle no matter what.

[–] Labonnie@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They claim to make no profit out of Reddit. Is that true?

[–] DarkGamer@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hard to say, because Reddit is privately owned they don't have to publish their financials.

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