> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.
> [if] at least one mod [...] wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.
Right. I don't really care how the API thing ends. Lower the price, grandfather in some of the big clients for a longer sunset date so they don't have to issue refunds, work out rev-share or per user licensing agreements... whatever. These are solvable problems.
But these antics have me thinking I should find alternatives to the very few subs that actually matter. So if anyone knows a good web community for cooking... so far I've learned I'm too old for Discord.
Damn. I didn’t know it was gone. That hits hard. Obviously I hadn’t been in a while, but back in the day chowhound made eating my way through Chicago such a blast. That’s really too bad. Thank god the home brew digest still lives.
>They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.
The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. Seems reasonable enough. What does it mean to be "interested in moderating" if the outcome is that you do no actual moderation?
>And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.
For the sake of grandstanding you might want them to come out and say "any of you scabs want to cross the picket line for us?", but only spez would be stupid enough to actually do that.
> This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence
It's transparent, sure, but it doesn't mean it won't be effective. They're counting on a few people's greed plus most people's apathy.
reddit seems happy to go all in on the low-effort content mill market, and those users are the kind to get more upset over the protest than losing nice third-party apps or tools.
Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.
Reddit has already said moderator APIs and disability related APIs will remain free. They are keeping their subreddits closed because they don't want to be inconvenienced. Mods don't have the moral high ground.
A lot of folks here will commiserate with reddit's position - Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's, and they didnt have to provide reddit with a single penny in return. Reddit has to do something to prevent the gold rush of data mining that is bound to occur from other companies building their own copycat LLM's.
Reddit wants to make money off user-generated content. To my mind this is like a paper manufacturer claiming it has a copyright interest in any printed matter than ends up attached to its product.
that analogy only works if reddit were charging you for each comment you post on their site. A more accurate analogy would be times square selling advertisement billboards because lots of folks congregate in times square.
They're trying to get money from people using their API, which is like demanding a cut from people selling maps of Times Square (which are better than the official ones).
27k people packed the Oakland Athletics' stadium yesterday (compared to the more usual 7-8k home crowd attendance) to exhort the owners to sell the team rather than move it to Las Vegas in return for a stadium boondoggle. I suspect few of these baseball fans know much of financial engineering or other technical business considerations, they just consider the team owner to be a greedy douchebag who doesn't care about Oakland or indeed baseball, and recognize that the owner has been engaged in playing different municipalities off against each other to see who will cough up the largest subsidy.
Many of the proposed changes directly impact moderators and aren't something that average users will experience immediately/directly, so of course they care more than the average, non-mod user.
> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
The mods, as GP stated, are interested in moderating that community, they just disagree with Reddit's changes. They wouldn't be taking the path of shuttering their subs in protest if they didn't give a damn.
That is absolutely dishonesty on the part of Reddit.
Note that the Relay dev says that there's no way for him to offer a free version of Relay and make it financially viable. That means that user acquisition is going to tank, hard, because no one is going to be able to try the app before paying for it.
> Apollo has 1.5 MILLION monthly active users. With a 10% conversion rate and charging $2.00 a month
In other words, if he's willing to tell 1.35 million people to get fucked, he could turn his app that's widely beloved by many into an app that barely anyone knows about and new users are barely willing to consider trying.
These apps live and die by the same model: the paid users subsidize the free users. Who knows, maybe Christian could just tell those 1.35m people to get lost and it would be instantly profitable, but maybe that's not the app he wants to make. That seems entirely fair.
> To me it sounds like Christian just doesn't want to do the work.
Or, alternately, Christian feels betrayed by Reddit, because even though he's worked very closely with them for years, Reddit suddenly decided that yanking the carpet out from under third-party devs with thirty days' notice is the best way forward for them, and then the CEO turned around and slandered him all over the place, criticized Christian for having receipts, and then just continued to trash talk him everywhere.
Reddit has shown repeatedly through this ordeal that they don't actually want to work with people. Tons of other devs have reported that their e-mails are going unanswered. Christian asked about extensions or some other way to make things work and got no response. Reddit's goal here isn't to be profitable by charging 3p clients for API calls, it's to kill 3p clients and force them into their own terrible app.
Why would Christian want to jump through hoops to work with a company that's gone out of their way repeatedly to treat him like shit?
It's painful to post a comment that otherwise reads as low-quality flamebait. But I tried to defend his actions, and was dragged to the conclusion that he tried to damage Christian's reputation by making up a lie. He even acknowledged it was false during a phone conversation with Christian, then continued to tell the lie publicly.
It shattered my faith in him, and to a lesser degree in YC's "don't be evil" philosophy.
Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.
From what I understood, the problem is less the change itself but more the short notice. 30 days isn't much to redesign your app and monetization, especially if you had many users on year-long subscription plans.
Do try to remember, that they gave him 30 days to adopt this new pricing structure, which also includes trying to figure out how to reneg on the subscriptions he has already sold.
Why should I trust the CEO who was just recently caught in a lie about blackmail despite evidence to the contrary and in the past has straight up edited people’s comments without any notification that Reddit is responsible for the edits?
I haven't been paying close attention to all of the spez/Apollo stuff, was there actually any evidence from either side? Last I saw it was mostly just each party posting contradictory text in replies.
Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
If by "majority of users" you mean users that do not contribute any content and only view the site, sure, you may be right. But a content aggregator that is devoid of content doesn't exactly make a great website.
> Most of these closed subreddits polled their userbase and only participated in the blackout if users heavily favored doing so.
The vast minority polled the users, from what I can see. None of the subs I visited that went dark had a poll. I just decided to check some others - /r/funny and /r/gaming because they're listed as some of the biggest subs that went private, /r/askhistorians because people often use it as "the best of Reddit," /r/outoftheloop because I used to visit it. None of them had polls, either.
People keep trying to push the narrative that this was a democratic decision, but every piece of evidence I can find is that most mods did this without consulting the people that use the subs.
I think the argument is that the impulsive API change will harm many, many subreddits. Does Reddit care about quality content? Or do they care about becoming profitable? I think the mods make a lot more sense than Spez here. And I don't think you can say Reddit cares about keeping subs open if they're willing to watch them all shrivel away in a sea of spam and clickbait bots.
Right. If the users of the sub want to continue the boycott, they certainly can. If the removed mods are beloved by the community, it's easy for them to open a new subreddit.
But I think most people realize that most of the users, who actually create the content, don't want the boycott to continue, and don't have any particular love for the current mods.
[I stand corrected, redacting the rest of the comment]
In a small defense of Reddit:
If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers. If the moderators don’t moderate the really bad stuff, Reddit has historically replaced them. I would think the same applies here.
It’s hard to argue that people who are not subscribed to a sub are community members. People had plenty of warning to join subs before they went private. Going private alone shouldn’t lead to mod replacement.
> If subs are private, they are still accessible to subscribers.
No, this is not accurate.
A private subreddit is only accessible to "approved users", i.e. those on a list managed by the moderators. Subscribing is completely different; it's a private, user-settable flag whose only significant effect is to make the subreddit's content eligible to show up on your home page.
If you can't view a subreddit's content because it's private and you're not approved, then subscribing makes no difference. In fact, subreddit mods can't even see who's subscribed, nor can they prevent anyone from subscribing, even by banning them.
subscribed members cannot access a private sub, only approved members. Approved member is not quite the same thing as subscription, there are some subs you can't even see without being added, like r/CenturyClub. And being on the approved list (sub visible) doesn't mean it shows up in your home either, you can be added or banned by any sub at any time independent of action from you. It's just literally a pick/ban list for that sub and they can build it off your posts elsewhere etc.
Subscription is about curating your homepage, news subscriptions (ugh), etc. Subscription means you want to see and know about popular stuff in that sub. And you can still view stuff you're not subscribed to, if you're an approved member.
The access levels that are allowable are: approved only, public but only approved can submit links, and public. You can also set access on items individually, and lock comments on those items, etc. So it's also possible to just blank or remove all the old posts with a bot (API!) and leave only a "fuck u" thread that's uncommentable.
At that point reddit probably reverts it and calls it vandalism and puts in new mods and starts banning anybody who's tantruming. Like, be disruptive get banned. You have less freedom here than with a TLD registrar (better ask nicely to get a .edu or .mil or .gov cert issued). Their system, their rules, their call. You already agreed to license your content to them. Shreddit could probably even be undone if they have history etc. And there already is a public dataset already on the internet for like... 10y+ now? how does that work exactly?
Who wins in the argument of GDPR vs users having agreed to a perpetual irrevocable license and several other parties already having used those API access to republish those comments under CC (fh-bigquery:reddit-comments, pushift, etc)? Can you revoke an irrevocable license under GDPR as the originator, and if so how does that leave IP licensing in general, just "fuck it GDPR it, it's mine, I don't want a licensee to use it"? I mean probably all social media licenses include something like that, if it's durable then GDPR is relatively meaningless and nobody has to respond to GDPR if they publish their dataaset/API output (interesting outcome perhaps). If it's not durable it kind of fucks up IP law and subassignment in general, everything was always done by an originating creator(s) at some point, then sublicensed to their employer, etc. Can you just be like "patent license revoked, boss, I did the GDPR?".
The idea of Google/etc being forced to publish their codebases under permissive licenses to avoid random "nah fuck you"'s from departing engineers would be an extremely funni legal outcome though, like that would have massive implications for knowledge/creative work in general. Maybe the same thing would happen to social media providers... maybe that paradoxically makes the incentive to publish fh-bigquery:reddit and pushift stronger, because now it's irrevocable. And that's the minimum ask for 3PA tooling more or less.
On the other hand if the CC sublicense holds in any way, most likely it's legal to say "ok this is the vandalism reversion dataset, it's CC, patch it over the api response inside the client" both for the vendor and the others.
I guess to put it another way: would wikipedia have to edit out every line and commit a user has interacted with, if they filed a GDPR? How do you begin to back that out on a word by word basis? Every redditor knew their words were going to be public (for the definition of that subreddit, and potentially public according to future changes of that subreddit). They put it on "wikipedia" knowing the organization ultimately was driving there.
Reddit chooses not to unwind history and revert. But does Reddit have a license to do so? What about Wikipedia? It seems like in this case the answer may be "probably, if they want to, it's just normally not a problem but we can do it if people get disruptive". People licensed their posts to the community, that's why they're outraged that the community is being torn away from them, it cuts both ways unfortunately. But it might also be legal to reboot Reddit using that data, assuming it's all really CC etc.
> Most subreddits doing polls have people voting to remain open, so it really isn't in the interests of the communities to keep the subs closed.
I've seen this oft repeated, but never backed up. The only poll I've seen results from[0] was overwhelmingly to stay shutdown indefinitely.
On top of that, you're probably going to be getting into sampling bias with larger subs, since most users that care are purposefully avoiding the site trying to "starve" them and wouldn't even know about the polls.
I'm a frequent visitor of /r/soccer. The only poll they did[0] had a staggering 88% in favor of the blackout, with 80% in favor of keeping the sub private as long as it takes for reddit to change their mind. I would be surprised if other polls had such different results, as I'm not sure what would make the /r/soccer community so drastically different from the rest of reddit.
I wonder if many of those most upset about the changes (and therefore pro-blackout) have also stopped visiting Reddit in protest. I know I fall into that camp.
I sure haven't seen that. The subs that I participate in regularly which have remained closed, have had polls and/or discussions about it, and the members overwhelmingly agreed with the moderators. Maybe it depends on how strong the particular community is.
That's all fine and well. I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected.
I just don't think mods should be ending the communities, most of which they didn't start themselves. Let other people who don't share their issues take over.
> I mod a couple of large subs but I exclusively use desktop so I'm not affected.
You might be a desktop user (I am too) but Reddit is more than just you and me - it's the communities of people who choose to socialize there. And I have a hunch that Reddit chasing away the kinds of people who tend to use third-party apps is going to have a ripple effect on the quality of the communities contained on the site, not to mention bots that aren't covered under the various exemptions.
> I just don't think mods should be ending the communities
Those communities will only end when Reddit does. The only question is how long it will take to reopen and if there is a new moderation team or not.
> if they are no longer interested in moderating that community
They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.
> [if] at least one mod [...] wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over the subreddit for yourself? And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.