[Note: the link is for the archive, to not give Reddit unnecessary traffic. Here's a link to the original.]

Apparently r/pics is protesting through malicious compliance; the subreddit is open again, but all content being shown is uninteresting pictures of... who's John ~~Galt~~ Oliver?

And the moderators decided to actually consult their community, on what they should do. You could vote on two options:

• Upvote this comment if you want /r/Pics to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. As of time of archiving this option was at +51k points.
• Upvote this comment if you want to return to normal operation. As of time of archiving this option was -8k points.

Interesting detail on how the r/pics moderators worded it:

Anyway, we – the so-called "landed gentry" – definitely want to comply with the wishes of the "royal court,"

I personally didn't realise that there is such an implication on what Pigboy said - that if he's calling the mods "landed gentry", he sees himself as a king.

EDIT: as other users are pointing out, other subs are doing the same sort of malicious compliance, so I'll share them here:

• r/gifs (archive link, (original link). As of time of archiving it has +21k points for John Oliver gifs only, and -5k points for returning to normal
• r/art (original link) - as of now (7:20, São Paulo time), votes are still not visible. Same as above, John Oliver vs. normal operations.
• r/aww (archive link, original link) - +56k "to only feature John Oliver, Chiijohn, and their lookalikes bein adorable", -2.5k to return to normal.
• r/showerthoughts (archive link, original link). Voting on the days that the subreddit should be open or closed.

Let's backtrack to 2020. Back then there was some protest in USA about cop violence and racism, it had repercussions in Reddit (with a bunch of subs closing down in protest, as usual). kn0thing used this opportunity to resign from the board of directors of Reddit, claiming that he wanted to be replaced with a black candidate.

Perhaps kn0thing knew what would happen? Not the exact events, mind you; but he knew Reddit Inc. and spez well enough to know that they'd eventually fuck it up, lose a lot of money, and lose face. So he jumped off ship earlier, pockets and reputation unharmed.

What do you think about this?

(u/kn0thing, RL name Alexis Ohanian, is the co-founder of Reddit, alongside Steve "piece of shit" Huffman and Aaron Swartz.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/186895

I just logged in and checked my reddit account, and all my deleted posts have come back.

I'm a fully mobile user, so that limits my options. I don't just want to delete my account but also delete my posts and comments.

I was mostly shitposting but still had some 200k Karma so it could pinch Reddit a bit to remove that but it won't hurt users or Google search since I wasn't doing anything 'productive' or 'helpful'.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1260794

Hello /r/london.

We're back - for now.

I've decided to write something of my own rather than repost another copy of the official messaging and I hope you'll excuse me for it. Funnily enough, I've had a lot more free time than usual over the last couple of days.

I think there is a lot of anger and rhetoric going around at the moment, and while the anger is absolutely justified, it's getting hard to understand what's actually happening due to the fog of war. Background

In May, without warning, and contrary to many public statements made previously by current and former CEOs, Reddit Inc announced broad API policy changes that will price out most commercial third-party apps from continuing to operate.

Already, Apollo and Reddit is Fun have announced they will shutter on July 31st as these changes take effect. Other apps will likely end up joining them.

Reddit has done this for a very simple reason: as a loss making company, they need to a path to profit to successfully launch their IPO this year. One way to do this is to drive people to their official app because that's where they can monetise their users the best through buying premium, awards, showing more adverts, and whatever bullshit they're doing with NFTs. In particular, it's no coincidence that Reddit Inc launched new ad options just this weekend - I'm sure these new forms of ads are in no small part responsible for wanting eyes on their apps only.

Another issue is the rise of the large language models (ChatGPT etc.) which are clearly using social media posts as a large part of their training corpus. So, the social media companies have suddenly decided this is a valuable asset and they should charge for it. Something u/spez

(the Reddit CEO) and Elon (over at Twitter) are no doubt looking to cash in on.

It's not completely unreasonable for a company to want people to use its official apps. It's not completely unreasonable to charge for an API. What is unreasonable is Reddit's timing, pricing, lack of feature parity, and u/spez

's frankly insulting attitude to the community on which his company and its revenue relies. The Timing

Reddit Inc announced these changes in May, to be enforced from July 31st. This is far too short a timescale for apps like Apollo to entirely rewrite their backend to ensure compliance and cost controls with the new API policies. Many of these apps are one-person operations, many of them are part time projects. They cannot get this done on the timescale Reddit proposed.

Feels real like a rug pull man. The Pricing

Christian Selig of Apollo calculated he would have to pay Reddit $20 million a year just to keep Apollo running, which would mean Apollo would have to vastly increase their per user subscription cost. It's also very clear that Reddit's API does not cost them this much to run for themselves, as otherwise the company's total yearly revenue would be losses in the billions.

While they may be losing out on some ad revenue, there's nothing to say they couldn't right this by having an agreement with third party app developers that they must show Reddit's ads. Simples.

But no, they're not doing this. Lack of feature parity

The official Reddit app lacks many useful features for moderators, but most frustratingly, lacks good accessibility, which is a huge problem for users of /r/blind and others with disabilities.

Reddit have partly relented and allowed two accessibility-focussed apps to continue to use the API for free - RedReader on Android and Dystopia on iOS, but under a non-commercial agreement that Reddit can pull with 30 days notice.

This is not a long-term sustainable model.

They have also made exceptions for mod tools but they miss the point that many moderators work on mobile only, and the moderation tools in the official mobile app are not good in comparison with third party offerings that will now shut down.

No matter what you might think of mods, we are volunteers, who put time in for free to manage communities. Each mod is trying to do what they think is a good job in their spare time, for the benefit of their subreddit. Taking away our tools is not helpful, and many mods will likely quit the site or reduce the number of actions they're able to take as a result of these changes.

Boo-hoo, you might say, but without moderation, the subs would be chock full of hate speech, bots and spam (well, more-so than it is now, we do what we can). The only reward we've ever received from our work is to see the online communities we volunteer in thrive and grow, and the occasional t-shirt. u/spez

Spez, supposedly the professional CEO of a large social media company with over 2000 employees, has shown an abysmal attitude towards us throughout the discontent this situation has caused.

Among other things:

Dismissive answers in his AMA about the API changes
Severe mischaracterisation of his interactions with Apollo
Leaked memo shows he believes the blackout is meaningless
Complete refusal to compromise

When Spez returned to Reddit, we were promised a step change in user relations after the Ellen Pao debacle. I suppose ultimately, money talks, and he's been told by his board he needs to take these steps to support the IPO.

If anything it reinforces the point that these kinds of companies do not work for you: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product The blackout

We participated with many other subs in the blackout this week. Some large subs are continuing to stay locked down, but but we have to balance that /r/London is a community resource, not just a fun/meme/shitposting sub that people can do without for a while.

So we're reopening for now, and letting the large subs take the heat as many of them are staying shut permanently.

It's not over though. There's talk of further actions called for, and we may well participate.

Ultimately though, this may not be a fight we can win on Reddit. Perhaps the best thing to come out of this is the reminder that we can't trust social media companies to act in good faith towards their users.

I remember the Digg v4 debacle and the great migration to Reddit - nothing says it can't happen again. . Maybe it's time to find a new frontpage of our Internet. Perhaps it's time to start dipping our toes into alternatives.

Here are some:

https://kbin.social/
https://join-lemmy.org/
https://squabbles.io/
https://tildes.net/

I am not a soothsayer and can't tell you which platform might emerge is "next Reddit", but if we've learned anything from the fall of MySpace, Digg, and Twitter, and the precarious situation of Meta, it's that the next Reddit will come. Perhaps this time we'll learn some lessons about choosing a federated platform or a non-profit to run whatever comes next. Your thoughts

We'd like to hear your views on whether we should. Not running a poll this time, as they tend to get brigaded by people who aren't on the sub, so instead please just voice your thoughts in the comments.

Should we:

stay open?
keep our eye on things and participate in further blackouts if/when they occur?
participate in the indefinite blackout?

Honestly want to hear your opinions.

Credit @davidrevoy@framapiaf.org on Mastodon

It is read-only, no new submissions allowed, but it is no longer private.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/629220

👀

it just passed midnight in EST, and some of the largest subreddits (e.g. r/funny) have just gone dark. goodbye, reddit!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458

Inflammatory picture obviously related.

A lot of deletion/edition tools rely on the API in order to work. As such, they'll stop working on the 1st of July, as the API price changes start being enforced. Better do it now than never.

In my humble opinion, the easiest of them to use would be Power Delete Suite. [See EDIT 2] It allows you to export your content if you so desire.

There's also dessalines' Reddit-History (yup, the Lemmy admin!) that helps you to export your stuff, in case that you want to do it in a more fine-grained way.

There are other tools to do it, however, so pick the one that you like the most.

Should I delete my content? Or edit it?

Up to you. I think that it simple deletion is enough.

However, if you want to edit your content, keep in mind that Reddit likely wants to capitalise on data model training, so pick one of the two choices:

1. Blabber.

Random words, in an agrammatical word order, devoid of any sort of meaning. Introducing noise on the data models makes the data from Reddit considerably less reliable.

If you feel specially uninspired, here's a random word generator. You could also try Zompist's gen, it's a tool intended for people constructing languages, but it's damn good to generate non-linguistic babble.

2. Some message against Reddit.

Don't use swear words, as those might get filtered. Something as simple and short as "potatoes are great because Reddit is a scummy company" goes a long way.

That would also help to pinpoint which companies are doing businesses with Reddit, and pressure them to stop doing it.

Noooo! Think on all the helpful threads!

You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. While it's true that some information will be lost (less if you back up your content elsewhere), overall you're doing better for the internet by not playing along a clearly hostile agent in it.

EDIT:

Thinking about Reddit Inc.'s strategy to get money, perhaps it is better if you replace the content of your comments with random babble than if you simply delete it, if you want them to lose money.

Random babble is not just less useful for those large language models; it's outright poisonous, it's worth less than nothing. I might be wrong but I think that it decreases the value of the platform even further than plain deletion.

(EDIT 2 REASON: replacing j0be's Power Delete Suite link with one for a more updated version, that avoids a bug where posts/comments remain unedited.)

Popcorn, anyone?

A TL;DR:

• Laying out context and background info (API prices)
• Exposing maths on API access prices, in comparison with Imgur ones, to show that they are unreasonable.
• Concluding that Reddit is using the huge prices to intentionally kill third party apps*.
• Talking about the poor quality of the official app.
• How the move effectively deplatforms blind people, followed by a Torvalds style "fuck you, Reddit".
• ~~Cat tax at 7:20~~
• Devil's lawyer point: the fact that we cannot see Reddit's finances, as it is not a public company.
• The "fever dream" of the 2010s, and how many companies of those times were never profitable, as they were focusing on [my own words] on the value instead of the profit [/my own words]
• Mentions on how even the site originally hosting the video [Youtube - NB, the link is from Odysee] lost money in those times, as well as Twitter did, implying that Reddit is probably in the same bag.
• Talking about transparency - i.e. that if Reddit is bleeding money, it should say it, so the users do not assume the worst. That concludes the devil's lawyer point, as he shows that even if it was a necessary action from Reddit's side of the thing (is it?), it's still scummy as fuck.
• On users losing trust on Reddit and saying "we're leaving". Ipsis litteris "the community will remember what you did, and screwing over vast swaths of disabled people is a really, really great way to look like the type of piece of shit that nobody wants to give money or revenue to, ever again."
• Telling Reddit to either reconsider the decision or at the very least give it a damn good reason, otherwise users will outright refuse to use Reddit or do it with the most restricted ad blocking possible.

*personal note: Rossmann didn't mention it, but I will. Reddit is lying that it doesn't want to kill third party apps, and the lie itself makes everything worse.

Remove your content from Reddit.

As a platform, Reddit is only as valuable as the content in itReddit is as valuable as the content in it. So by removing everything that you posted or commented from the platform, you're discouraging its usage. No more suckers being lulled into Reddit by your content.

If you're concerned about the potential loss of internet information, consider storing anything that you feel as "valuable content" elsewhere where other people can access. And, if you're too lazy to do it by hand (like I am!), two helpful tools are u/dessalines' Reddit-History and Power Delete Suite.

It should be obvious too, but don't produce new content for the platform.

Feed the Fediverse. (Or other alternatives.)

If you're reading this, odds are that you're already feeding lemmy.ml with some content. Good! Bring content here to the Fediverse, or to Tildes. It could be your own original content or stuff copied from Reddit (just don't advertise that site when doing it.)

Even building your own personal blog helps, as information found in Reddit becomes way less valuable if it is also found elsewhere.

If you're still using Reddit, do not install their app, and do not consent to their targetted advertisement.

I think that it is no surprise for anyone that Reddit Inc. lives off adbux (advertisement money) and data mining its own users. As such, by accessing the site through an advertisement blocker, and by refusing consent to personalised ads (check the preferences), you're already helping a bit.

Scorch the land, make it unpleasing.

Being obnoxious, mocking users, being abravise, or overall being a jerk is not illegal. You can always do it there, specially in subreddits with large numbers of subscribers.

Evading bans is also not illegal. If a moderator kicked you off, make his work extra hard by coming back and shitposting in the same subreddit.

Derail serious threads with uninteresting content. Noise makes any environment less valuable.

Raise awareness.

Reddit killed the third party apps out of greed, because they want to datamine you through an official app that sucks.

Reddit has been censoring its users since forever.

Reddit used to host the alt group site called The_Donald, and refused to take action against it for too long.

Harassment is rampant in Reddit, Reddit has the tools to prevent it (as the Aimee Challenor case shows), and yet refuses to protect its own users with them.

The Reddit administration is consistently lying to Reddit users, as it expects them to be stupid.

There are a thousand issues with Reddit. You can - and should - make people know them.