lemmy.world IS NOT a general discussion area. find another community.
my bad…
-manitcor
I think that anyone who’s been around reddit long enough knew this was coming. Reddit isn’t a free and open platform, and never was. The admins allowed moderators free reign just so long as they didn’t do anything that reddit didn’t want.
@manitcor Wtf!! What an asshole CEO
So far Spez’s legacy includes, in no particular order:
- Changing other peoples’ comments
- Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn’t nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
- Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
- Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn’t agree with
- Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you’re taking it all away from them. I’m sure this won’t backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Never even heard about this. Why haven’t they been sued by the surviving family members or some pro-bono representative?
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc’s founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Is your comment threatening him? Why are you blackmailing him, man? How is he going to work together with you now that you’ve so aggressively threatened him?
Why is your comment so badly coded? I can’t help you optimize your comment, Google didn’t help me write mine.
Wow I didn’t know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/comment/jnuy0xf/
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made ‘subreddit of the month’. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I’m not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
Andrewsmith is right,
As he often is. That guy knows more about Reddit than Huffman does. Hope he moves to Lemmy.
He let Ghislain Maxwell mod a bunch of subs until she eventually went to jail. It was common knowledge that its was her account but no problem from the pedo reddit admins
It was never proven that the account was hers and it was literally just users automatically claiming that account was Ghislaine Maxwell because that account stopped posting around the same time she got arrested. Nothing bugs me more than that myth being parroted as if it was proven fact.
U/maxwellhill was a monster‽ Say it isn’t so…how could he have known…FUCK spez
While it’s certainly better than actively moderating a community…
Is being the admin of a website that actively hosts jailbait and required a massive media outrage to finally remove it that much better? I get free speech and all, but I mean, the subreddit straight up catalogued which pictures were “fap material” and encouraged people (including parents) to take candid photos of the children around them.
A community like that wouldn’t last a millisecond in a server I host.
It’s not like it was a small sub either, IIRC. I’m not going to google jailbait to find the stories, but it must’ve been a few hundred thousand subscribers I think. At a time when the big subs had a few mill at most.
Even though it was ethically very bad, it was legal. And Reddit had a policy of not removing content, unless it was illegal or doxxing.
The fact is that they wanted to follow the same principles as the government, and allow complete freedom of speech. And if you are following freedom of speech, the ethicality of content is irrelevant.
Reddit never approved of r/jailbait. They simply allowed it.
Ahhh, ty. It did seem even worse than expected for him to have been actively running that sub.
Forced promotion
He did not
Yea this will kill Reddit. Maybe not right away but soon.
I mean, look at what it’s taking to kill twitter and influencers are still all over it.
Because it’s actually not the same thing, “Twitter” = “influencers”. Without celebrities, Twitter simply dies. The same cannot be said about Reddit.
hi, just happened to see you in here lol
Changing other peoples’ comments
Wait the guy changed someone’s comment?
Yes. I believe it was people on the donald subreddit, which could be seen as funny, because most sane people (myself included) don’t agree with them politically, but it’s still a huge misuse of admin powers and proof that he has no integrity. Can’t let other peoples’ rights be violated if we want to keep our own.
Yeah he changed one comment saying: “Fuck u/spez” by replacing “spez” with one of the r/the_donald mods. This was also done silently so no * to indicate the comment had been edited.
Yeah, he got busted for it and wrote a half asked apology claiming he would change. Claimed he was just trolling…
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez
Yes, its even listed on the Wiki page for reddit under 2016 controversies
Has it been removed? Seems to jump from him becoming CEO to the banning of loli?
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
Further down the page under “Other Controversies”
Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
This one is a lie, he was added as a moderator by another mod, at a time when anyone could do so. Lets please stop spreading this.
Maybe he did not moderate it actively, but it was allowed to continue and even promoted by reddit until media got a whiff of it.
At the time, there was a lot of popular sentiment, on reddit itself, that the internet should be free and it should allowed to continue so long as it was legal.
No one is forcing you to apologize for pedophiles on reddit
WAIT. Spez was a mod on fucking r/jailbait??? WHAT???
He actually moderated jailbait? I always assumed he was the type of person to have an alt for it, but to actually use his real account? What a scumbag.
He was briefly added without his knowledge. He removed himself after he noticed.
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Fuck u/spez
lmao, good fuckin luck replacing dedicated volunteers with one or two shitty ones obsessed with power
They can’t just re-open subreddits and expect it to go over smoothly. These subs will collapse without moderators.
Honestly not too surprising. But good luck moderating the bigger subs without the old volunteers.
It’s an absolute non-starter. The amount of random… I’m a medium fish there and there’s SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you’re constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you’re gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Good summarization. And I am sure it WILL explode if they dont start paying serious mods serious money for something that was done FOR FREE by the community before. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It’s ironic, too, because their entire refrain is “we’re broke”. Well then. Now you lost most of your big subs and a ton of users AND you’re broke. Guess at least we fixed the bandwidth problem.
Meanwhile it was all over ChatGPT training on their API. You’d think that woulda been step 1 to fix.
Right? I’d have talked to OpenAi and told them the situation. OpenAI can probably afford ANY api fee by now so that would’ve been the most logical first step.
Well whatever, reddit needs me more than I need reddit so I’ll stay here for now. I like it here :)
I’ll like it better here when I can set up all my retro gaming communities again, but yeah. Same as when the twitter thing happened and we went to mastodon. Community is much better for being smaller, and full of the kind of people who seek something like this out.
Be the change you want to see and set it up!
It’s definitely gonna happen. I might end up just setting up a server first and doing it that way, it feels like the easiest way to go about things.
Maybe I’m missing something but is there a reason they couldn’t have started addressing all of this with a terms of service agreement for the API? They demonstrated they can make exceptions for some accessibility apps, so if AI is the issue, then why not focus on that? If they wanted to force ads on apps, they can make that happen as part of the agreement too. As much as people wouldn’t like it, this would still be a better posture than now.
The current situation appears so poorly though out to me, but I’m just a guy.
I agree requring third party apps to contain their ads would have been a WAY better move. It’s funny to me though that Reddit claims to be unprofitable but pulls in $456 million and some change per year. Greedy fuckers
How fucking stupid do they have to be to complain about 3PA not paying their way (BS anyway - the net gain of users using Apollo etc is a win for Reddit) when REDDIT are the ones not serving them up? Then they frame it in a way that sounds like Apollo are taking advantage of them.
Why not include ads in the API responses, tagged as ads, and let the app developers implement a way of showing them. If an individual User pays for Reddit Premium - ads aren’t sent in the API responses.
My leading statement wasn’t a question. Reddit and spez aren’t stupid - they think we are. Fuck them.
Reddit even already treats ads as a post type (hence the karma and comments on ads). All they had to do was say “you must show our ads” and if they caught a major app filtering out ads, block their API keys.
I don’t even think paying an API licensing key is that unreasonable. In fact it’s quite common. But the price they’re asking is completely absurd and doesn’t scale appropriately. They also didn’t give app developers time to assess and discuss the pricing before implementation started.
There were SO MANY ways to handle this better, that would have been more profitable for them, and would have left people feeling more good about that things were being handled in a reasonable way. This decision making process screams of hubris. I’ve said it a couple of places, but it gives the impression that Reddit fundamentally doesn’t understand reddit. Reddit’s greatest value is ease of community creation and curation. Many of the decisions they’ve made since rolling out New Reddit have stood to restrict and inhibit this core interaction.
I genuinely wonder how Spez et al view reddit. What do they think the point is? What do they think people are there for?
I was the ultimate freeloader/user. I used reddit nearly everyday for 13 years, never once bought premium or any reddit gold or any sort of rewards and blocked every ad.
They definately could have forced me to pay a subscription or something somehow without just completely shuting down how I browse the site.
It’s so utterly bizarre and stupid.
It’s just corporate accounting. They’re profitable but they essentially cook the books to get the tax benefits of being “unprofitable”. This is why amazon is still occasionally “unprofitable” even though they’re growing year over year. You can’t just keep taking out loans to buy and build new warehouses if you’re actually unprofitable.
Huffman is just a greedy piece of shit. He, himself, made a comment when talking about Apollo that implied this developer is sitting on millions and he deserves a cut of it. API calls in terms of cost to the company cost fractions of a penny and plenty of large companies make money off their API. They could charge the base cost and add 10% for the profit. The problem is a realistic and reasonable cost for reddit’s API would probably cost the apollo dev maybe a few grand a year. Like I said above, Huffman thinks there’s a lot more money to wrangle out of developers there, but I’d bet the apollo dev was barely making a fraction of a percent on Huffman’s net worth.
I was invited to become a mod on r/daystrominstitute a few years ago and within about a month realized that I didn’t have the time or emotional capital to invest in that job. It’s challenging, especially in a sub like that where there are pretty serious rules governing discussion and it burned me out really fast. The people who do it (well) have a passion for it; plucking some rando to be a head mod is going to kill a sub.
the thing is – none of that needs to exist! this is why reddit started to get so shitty, no one can keep it all straight; it’s simply too much considering how meaningless all the stakes are. i as a user never asked for constant review of threads for rule violations nor gave a shit about css or anything.
TBF a lot of the backlash against the protest on reddit also boils down to “it doesn’t matter to me, so it’s not needed”. Fact is if moderation is done right you don’t notice it. I add new t-shirt bot spam sites to auto-mod the second I come across them, for example, so they only ever get posted once.
Reddit has had css since before the Digg migration.
This is like how some companies view their IT teams:
- Everything’s working, why do we pay you?
- Stuff’s broken, why do we pay you?
The “backlash” is from the users who want no moderation so they can say whatever shit they want with no repercussions, and those are the ones who will be the most active once the mods leave and the decent people after when the assholes chase them off. Not a good way to attract advertisers.
as a user never asked for constant review of threads for rule violations
You might not, but us very satisfied users of the shining beacon of magnificience in reddit’s cesspool, /r/AskHistorians, did and that was (is?) a model of the contribution to civilisation and human knowledge can be made in a well regulated space on the internet. But those very erudite and busy professionals and scientists moderating there will in all likelyhood throw in the towel and I am afraid anything that comes in its place in another medium would stuggle to reach the same level.
If you want to see what a forum site looks like without any of that stuff, look at 8kun/8chan. I don’t think you realize how unusably terrible reddit would be without mods.
Looks like reddit is about to hire 1000 unpaid interns
Interns using chatgpt, we’re gonna see such a firehose of shit
Imagine the seo blogspam grade comment threads it will turn into
Everybody knows that it was bound to happen. Reddit is hopeless and the blackout on its own won’t do good in the long run.
That’s why I’m trying to kick this out:
If you’re EU you canAll those in EU can ask reddit for the entirety of your data as a GDPR request, much easier than downloading it yourself, especially since some apps have limits to how many posts they can fetch.Asked for mine last week and still hasn’t arrived, but I’ve been an active user for 17 years so yeah, might be taking a while to get those tape backups from the basement or something :P
Poor intern is in the basement writing it all down with a quill and ink. Expect the pony to arrive with your parcel in 10-14 months.
They say it can take up to 30 days, so I think you have a bit more waiting to do :D
No, no. They say it can take up to 30 days, yes.
But that’s not the correct wording. It legally needs to be done under 30 days (well, one calendar month), if you’re a EU citizen.
If they do not, I highly encourage you to contact your country’s data regulator and complain about it.
Oooh, thanks for the clarification! It wasn’t clear to me it was a legal constraint.
I haven’t submit mine yet, I was waiting for the blackout to end, but I’ll sure check my calendar and report to my data regulator if they don’t comply.
p.s. yes I’m a EU citizen
Well, just a heads up, I might have wrote total bullshit (sorry about that!).
I tried to find a reference to the “one calendar month” rule in the EU’s legalese, but I didn’t find anything.
What I found is that depending on your country, the data regulator might require services to give you your data in 30 days or less, but this might not be the case everywhere in the EU. The relevant legal article for this can be found here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
I am not a lawyer anyway, so your best bet would be to message an organization that fights for personal data protection to ask them about your rights in your home country.
Sorry about the confusion once again, as I might have been wrong!
It’s ok :)
I’ll start by sending my request and see if they respond within 30 days, if not, I’ll search my government website to know what to do.
Your post has been useful anyway because it made aware there might be other legal obligations than just sending your data.
@satouru @ulu_mulu The one month rule is in article 12(3):
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679#d1e2182-1-1
“The controller shall provide information on action taken on a request under Articles 15 to 22 to the data subject without undue delay and in any event within one month of receipt of the request.”
I have a feeling they got a massive number of those,ni am one of them as well.
You don’t have to be in the EU to make a GDPR request, right? If I understand correctly, they can’t actually check.
They do know which country you’re from unless you use a VPN all the time, tho I personally wouldn’t lie (fake my IP) for something as serious as this.
They would know what country I’m currently in, but I could still be an EU citizen using a VPN or traveling outside the EU. IANAL, but I’m pretty sure my data would still be protected by GDPR.
Granted, I am not, but the request worked anyway lol
They could check, but that’s more expensive than just compying
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I’m in the US, but thank you.
I’m in the US and I got mine, but it took a couple days. I would imagine they’re quite busy these days servicing those requests.
Same
ok :) editing my comment in case other people are EU .
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I did this back when the Apollo shutting down post when out from Christian. It took a bit of googling to find out how to do this so thanks for putting it all together for others. I had 10 accounts spanning all my time on Reddit since the Digg days and did a fully scorched earth on it all, because you know, fuck u/spez.
For someone who has a really small subreddit, isn’t much of a computer person and mainly uses mobile, how would I go about importing my content here?
I love how you advice to generate gibberish through zompist.com
You are translating all your content into a new conlang!
I PDSed my acc yesterday but i should’ve edited with “We are having issues loading this comment. Please try again later” lmfao
Data/Content/Information now is very important (indispensable). In the Age of Information (Actually to me, the Real Cultural Start of IT upon the advent of Artificial Intelligence AI), keepers (companies of holding) of databases (such as Reddit databases) have finally found the value of it for metabolic profitability (
extreme exploitation) with the help of AI, greatest ever analyses. It will be my best (after nothing happens in Reddit decision) that I will painfully LITERALLY delete all my Reddit posts, comments and even my info about myself (or why not archive on my storage for future migration and then delete on the platform itself) on the day before Reddit make undesirable changes (to not only mods+devs but also the real clients, Reddit users enjoying Reddit), so that they won’t exploit information about me further for their sinister abuse soon probably.
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way I’m going back.
The experience has been a lot smoother than I expected.
Agreed. Feels like reddit but 15 years ago, before the dark times, before the Empire - Loving it so far, and reminds me of how the internet used to be this huge frontier before Corporations, Shareholders, and Advertisers moved in and ruined everything.
These Communities are smaller and some of the more niche groups aren’t here yet but that will change with time. Give it a year or two, and I’m sure those obscure, hilarious groups like Greendawn will migrate over, over.
It’s funny how relaxing Lemmy feels. It’s like I’ve been the frog in the slowly heating pot over the years and had no idea how harsh Reddit had become. Right now Lemmy feels like I thought Reddit has always been. But the idea of Reddit now feels so ugly. It’s the same feeling as getting away from bumper to bumper traffic and finally being able to set the cruise control and enjoy the ride.
That’s my hope for the Fediverse. We’ll get that frontier feel back while also having the giant easy-access network we’ve come to appreciate in the 10’s and 20’s (over).
Super smooth. Just need the content levels to pick up a bit but that will improve over time as more people catch on
I was talking about this with a friend - reddit doesn’t have many unique features that folks want, and generally speaking the only thing reddit has of value is the community.
Hoping folks start migrating to alternatives
It’s all a bit janky, but I feel like a real pioneer. This is how the pioneers must have felt lol. It’s a good feeling, making my way across uncharted lands, watching it all unfold and grow…
Same
A lot of these people volunteered their spare time to manage communities for no pay. Wondering how far downhill a lot of these subs will go with Spez putting himself in charge of everything.
Is it just me or is this going directly against what Reddit once aimed to be?
Corporations and Shareholders ruin everything
This post seems somewhat disingenuous. One of the mods Cedarwolf posted his side of what happened 2 hours prior to this post appearing, and if we were to believe his side of the story the top mod who hasn’t been active for a year just decided to join the blackout against other mods wishes.
Yes, it’s two conflicting stories but he claims to have evidence that he’s been inactive. Basically, people should look into this more than assume truth in the headline.
Both /r/tumblr and /r/AdviceAnimals had shaky mod teams. Even though I completely disagree with the admins on everything else this made perfect sense. Plus out of the 8k subs that blacked out only 2 had admins intervene which makes me think it really was just mods fighting and the admins stepping in.
I’m in a number of subs with an inactive top mod who can’t be removed because they threaten to demod people from larger communities where they also hold high up inactive positions…
def link and ill put it in the body, i just posted it as i ran across it this am
It feels reassuring being here in Lemmy away of that shit show.
This is why they need to link an alternative like Lemmy and encourage to share it around.
Reddit doesn’t disallow mods from posting “Join us on Discord” and this will create a slow and steady move to a new platform.
I’ve been posting about lemmy in r/modtools and a couple of the niche subreddits I follow that didn’t shut down. I’ll be sticking with lemmy no matter what happens over at reddit, the people in charge over there have shown utter contempt for the users and moderators.
I was skeptical at first. Decided to give it a shot and, while obviously not perfect, I like it a lot so far.
I think my biggest issue before is actually a feature rather than a bug. I used to think, “federation is too confusing for the average person, it’ll never take off”.
But considering how hostile the average comment is on Reddit, keeping the “average” user away might be the best thing about Lemmy.
While the idea sounds great in the short-term, sites like this need a huge community to actually become useful. It’s cool as a little nod back to the old style of internet communities, but without a large following it’s too easy for stuff like this to just fade away. Losing a single server like lemmy.world wouldn’t shut down the entire system now, but imagine what would happen to the average user if their endpoint for news/media just disappeared and they were forced to make a new account and find all of their old communities again.
It’s still neat, and I intend to give it as fair of a shot as I can, but we’re ultimately going to “need” an influx of non-contributing-cat-picture-lurkers to push a few of the top servers up to the levels of involvement needed to support a persistent community.
The idea behind this place is pretty cool but I’m with you. Neither this place, nor are the users, ready for migration “today” to flip from Reddit to this experience.
It actually takes effort to understand what to do here. I deal with idiots at work all day, the first hint of effort or difficulty with anything, especially entertainment, people will walk.
It’s like how the internet was great when it was mostly nerds. Sure, there are plenty of asshole nerds, but I’ll take a smart asshole over a dumb one - especially since a lot more of them are dumb than not.
Sadly, many people I have recommended it to have acted like it was the most difficult thing in the world to understand. The initial learning curve really wasn’t that bad, IMO but it seems like a lot of people want to be spoon fed.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not that bad, just that it’s harder than staying on reddit.
It may or may not take off to the point of replacing reddit, but I think the exodus if people now and especially after the end of the month will lead to it having at least the same amount of users as Mastodon. Maybe more, since the average reddit user is probably more tech-savvy and more willing to migrate to a different platform than the average Twitter user (since they follow subreddits rather than individual users). And a roughly Mastodon sized lemmy is more than usable to replace reddit imo
Do you know what the user population of mastadon was before and after Elon’s takeover?
Before Elon, it was about half an million, now it’s about 4.5 million, though about a million of the new users made an account and then immediately went back to Twitter, so it’s more like 3.5 million
Still, nothing to sneeze at. Glad reddit is going through the same thing right now. If peertube or whatever other YouTube fedi analogue takes off I think we could see federation of social media take off and really become its own bubble.
Do you know what the user population of mastadon was before and after Elon’s takeover?
I’ve been considering recommending this to a few friends, but I’m worried about a response like this. I definitely recognize there’s a learning curve, and I’m still picking up a lot just a few days in, but man it took me maybe 15 -20 minutes max to figure out enough to sign up to an instance, find some communities, and post (I think all those words are right…).
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just the way they wanted it.
I know “seize the means…” has been made into a dirty phrase in the US, but yeah… take back our forum, people. this was never going to end well with a centralized, corporate entity like reddit. every mod knew this. time to build anew on our own land.
Is this internet feudalism?
Oof, not a good look. We’ll have to watch more of the larger subs to see if this happens to them too.
