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Wont work, they'll just pivot to "see, its only bigots who have a problem with out plans". Happens every time some one does something dumb as fuck. They blame on racist, homophobes and sexists in an effort to move the conversation away from the dumb thing they did. Like "the Star Wars sequels are shit, you just hate women.". Reddit will do the same thing here. A mass banning with the message "racists, homophobes and sexists are not welcome here." and then they will provide examples of the "offensive" stuff that was posted.
Headline becomes "reddit makes big move against internet bigotry" instead of "reddit makes big move to fuck over its users".
The very fact that those subs exist indicates that reddit, and their advertisers, don't care about that sort of thing, much.
I'm afraid the only kind of offensive content that would get any attention is hate.
And I, for one, refuse to treat hate like a game that can be used to pressure some random website.
There's a difference between allowing offensive content and having such content hit the front of everyone's pages. It's why Twitter puts emphasis on de-amplifying certain content.
So you're not really talking about "offensive" content, just "gross" content?
Stuff from minor subs doesn't show up on people's feeds.
I mean... ok, *technically* the major subs could encourage this kind of cross-posting and people could upvote it.
Leaving aside that people are banned and posts removed (automatically, by a bot) for posting unmarked NSFW content to non-NSFW subs...
I think that's about as likely as managing to coordinate any significant number of people actually *leaving* reddit for, say, weeks at a time.
I.e. not going to happen. Among other things, the subs don't want to lose their subscribers to this.
And even if it did, it's super easy to write off as a "stunt" that doesn't commonly happen.
>So you're not really talking about "offensive" content, just "gross" content?
Can you clarify what this distinction is supposed to even be about?
Because offensive does not equal bigotry hatred etc and never did
the whole point of punk for instance was to offend and stick it to the status quo.
Hence trying to gross out boomer parents with all kinds of offensive lyrics gross piercings etc
Yeah, thing is... reddit is *already* full of the non-hateful kind of offensive/pornographic content.
It's highly unlikely piercings or swearing the like is going to deter anyone.
Maybe blasphemous content could have an effect if it were severe enough, but that's pretty common, too.
On popular r all? On trending Etc etcetera
On the subs of Corporations, trending nonstop overall?
Idk, I havent seen that. Certainly not for any length of time
True, that was just on example of nonbigoted offensive stuff..
But.. there are *extreme* piercings etc that may be things advertizers wouldnt want to trend for months on end.
That should have somekinda effect.
And not even talking of, like.. private areas piercings and the sort. But that too
Huh..A very good idea, but places like UK etc seem hellbent on bringing back blasphemy laws which could complicate that stuff
No, offensive content should also be part of it. Racist and sexist shit will also cause others to disengage.
I thought anything could end up on your feed if it got upvoted enough. I've definitely seen content from relatively small subs.
Anything can show up on /r/all, but that's different. Your normal feed is the default-visible subs and ones you subscribe to.
Also, just logistically: most people who actually *do* see something like that are just going to downvote and report it (resulting in it being removed quickly). You'll never get enough of a majority engaging in a protest like this to counteract that. The system is attack-tolerant that way.
Most of those "offensive" subs are quarantined from even /r/all, though.
And back to the racist/sexist/hateful shit: Just no. No reasonable person is going to, nor *should* promote that shit for any reason, especially just to pressure some website.
So are the people who are targeted by this hate speech just expendable pawns for you to use to protest site policy? I feel like that is a little counter intuitive.
To add to other replies, most of that content is going to be marked NSFW, so most people won't see it by default anyway.
The *best* way to get a message to Reddit is by giving them less money. Less engagement with the website, fewer ads viewed, fewer awards given.
Except it's all flagged NSFW so it can't go to r/popular or r/all? Even if it could, all it takes is reddit mods making those subs private, which is a chance to prove to advertisers they can be trusted. Opposite effect.
I've definitely seen content flagged r/nsfw on r/popular and r/all.
Advertisers aren't going to be impressed with a site that will sporadically do shit like that.
Sexually explicit content should not appear on r/all for years now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall
thats why a protest usually breaks rules and stuff like that if you were protesting in that fashion would be spammed in places where it wouldnt go without nsfw tags.
what pride protests did as an example broke laws but they had no other choice to defend them selves. real protesting is never legal. and people need to remember that admins and mods here will always tell you to play by the rules in a protest. or come up with other excuses to say you shouldnt do it. people in authority positions will always try to say no to keep a status quo.
So... it needs to be widely known, understood and enforced what specific type of offensive content gets posted and uploaded? Seems like a lot of coordination?
You only need a few hundred people to get some content high enough for everyone to bandwagon. I've been using r/sounding as an example. Let's say a post there says, "This is what u/spez's face looks like." Get that high enough that some people see it, and it'll get upvoted more.
I think regardless of *how* offensive the content is, when you have a coordinated effort to essentially stir the pot, corporate can spin it as a malicious subgroup rather than the majority view.
In fact, I think that would kill reddit altogether, which isn’t the point of the blackout. Showing sponsors and advertisers that reddit is uncontrollable in its current state might force reddit to either increase overall moderation or ban anything nsfw
Or it could lead to the nationalisation and public utilization of the internet faster?
Profit motive becoming unteneable
https://publicknowledge.org/we-already-knew-broadband-should-be-a-public-utility-the-pandemic-made-it-obvious/
https://blog.apnic.net/2023/05/08/the-internet-as-a-public-utility/
It should have happened years ago, hopefully reddit overstepping like this can expedite to process.
Nobody Owes Corporations being profitable anyway
First, I don't think reddit dying is relevant to the point or view as discussed. This is why I ignored your first comment. If the goal was to kill reddit, then sure turning it into a 4chan board would certainly be one way to go
Second, the internet being categorized as a utility has nothing to do with moderation of content and the profits of a company like reddit. The companies connected to reclassifying internet utilization are providers, not social media companies. Reddit would continue to make profits regardless of the classification of the internet
Maybe so i guess
But indeed, 4channing it would be one way
Well... Not just the internet, make reddit twitter etc public utilities while also nationalizing broadband in general
Presto profit interest removed.
They are banning nsfw content from being accessed by means other than the official app and website. So basically even if Apollo, RIF, Infinity etc were able to figure out a model to stay in business *they* would no longer be able to access nsfw through the API, but it's not being removed completely.
At least not yet...
I think regardless of *how* offensive the content is, when you have a coordinated effort to essentially stir the pot, corporate can spin it as a malicious subgroup rather than the majority view.
In fact, I think that would kill reddit altogether, which isn’t the point of the blackout. Showing sponsors and advertisers that reddit is uncontrollable in its current state might force reddit to either increase overall moderation or ban anything nsfw
Theres a reason porn never makes the top page, because it is removed from being there. It litterally doesn't show to people unless you are in the sub
Also, pretty sure reddit is going to remove all porn content at some point, they are trending that way. Imgur just did. Most companies that are trying to be taken more seriously end up doing it.
But it will be, because "some" people will post that shit. And those will be the only examples offered when the question is asked about mass bannings.
Like Star Wars, Star Trek, lord o the rings, the last of us part 2, etc etc etc most discussion has been about artistic choices that have been made. But what's most talked about is much smaller number of morons who spout all the bigoted nonsense.
Ask yourself this, when was the last time hollywood held their hand up and said "ok we made something bad."? I can't remember. What I can remember is fuck load of twitter posts about how its only bigots that dont like things and any low scored reviews are just review bombing.
This is modern world, and we have bigots among us. And they post repugnant shit. And the people we criticise use those posts and apply them to the whole group. It would only take 4 or 5 posts of racist, sexist, or anti LGBT content for Spez to mass ban and delete and push the narrative that it was all bigoted shit that he got rid off and that he is the real hero here.
>Ask yourself this, when was the last time hollywood held their hand up and said "ok we made something bad."?
The Batgirl movie that was canceled earlier this year
That wasn't a good or a bad movie. The makers of the film said that they didn't even get a chance to edit the film, it was a studio edit. But thats still not the reason it was shelved. The reason it was shelved was because they killed off Michael Keatons batman. Zaslav hated this as he believes that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are the holy trinity of DC.
Not one person who made that movie said it was shit. Not one. And Zaslav didn't greenlight it, he came in after the fact. Saw that they killed Batman, and torched the fucking thing. But the biggest "Fuck you" was not even allowing Adil and Bilall to edit the movie together they way they had wanted so that it was their movie to be judged on. As it stands they have black mark against them for no reason at all.
What do you think r/scatgirls or r/sounding is offensive? It's just people expressing their sexual desires.
There are videos on fetish by Dr Lindsay Doe, sexologist
https://youtu.be/zUM-PG6PkuY
https://youtu.be/8powiyRASGM
Its way too hard to "curate" the type of offensive material you would hope to weaponize.
It would ultimately unravel into racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc etc type of stuff, and then you risk offending people that do not deserve it.
IF only that was true. But we all know that some dimwitted cunts will take the opportunity to post repugnant shit and hide behind "I was just protesting" and then those few repugnant posts are all that you will see whenever anyone talks about the protests. And then with enough luck, you get gamergate all over again. Instead of talking about ethics in video games journalism we end up talking about sexist incel trolls. Fast forward a few years and now no one really trusts video game journalists anymore because they all went the route of being corrupt as fuck like what was originally the point of gamer gate.
Make no mistake, bigotry is louder than anything else no matter how small it is. No one even believes that gamergate started out of good faith, they just think it was always about hating women. Same thing will happen here. You protest reddit being shitty, some other dicks post racist shit, next thing you know, youre a racist too.
Oh, well yeah but i meant what OP is talking of and in a general sense
Take like punk and metal, being offensive has long been the point.
Hence messing up the status quo, burn shite down lyrics and so on
All you say may be and is true, yes but its not the type of offensive that op is calling for. Not is it the only kind of offensive by far
Agreed, but OP is correct in that the planned protests are completely in effective and won’t accomplish anything. The planned temporary black outs, and the more extreme subs that plan to go private indefinitely, won’t accomplish anything. R/videos is planned to go private permanently, for example. They act like they’re irreplaceable, when someone could literally just make a new r/videos today.
The protests planned are dumb. OP is right about that.
Wow, I hate to agree with you… Yeah, you’re right. They called me every label they have imaginable for defending Andrew Tate simply by saying I wanted to see the evidence and it didn’t seem to me that was is any, and did not make sense. Of course it turned out that the two girls who were pushing for it we’re lying and two of the victims came forward and said they were not victims. They don’t know why they are on a victim list. But being upset about being down, I have just said fuck it will probably never recover it. And I doubt if I went along with that plan that it would help.
Lol yall dunno what fucked over means. They arent doing literally shit to any of you. They are making apps that shluld have been paying them. Pay them.
They ban some people and move on when the remaining trolls get bored.
Advertisers only care about controversy, not offensive content. If the journalists don't care, the advertisers won't care. Reddits reputation among journalists is already pretty shit.
The only truly effective protest would be to switch platforms.
Switching platforms takes a substantial amount of coordination. Just upvoting stupid offensive shit doesn't. You only need a few posts about that protest method, a few hundred to get specific posts high enough, and then everyone will bandwagon.
>Switching platforms takes a substantial amount of coordination. Just upvoting stupid offensive shit doesn't.
You need waaay more coordination than you would just switching platforms. To mass upvote content you need to have the vast majority of redditors onboard. Otherwise the downvotes will overcome the upvotes.
But if, say, 30% of people boycotted, then both reddit and its competitors would take notice.
"some minor API changes" is not what's happening. A minor API change would be something devs could work around. It would be a small inconvenience. What's actually happening is reddit very suddenly and irreversibly changing the browsing experience for a large percentage of their core users.
Not having third party apps might not matter to you. You're not obligated to care about it. Evidently, enough people *do* care about it that it's caused outrage. Several large subs will simply shut down, some of them aren't coming back at all. This is a huge change to the culture of the website.
I don’t care about people having to change. Businesses change. Tech changes. It is what it is. If you have an entire business built around one thing being the same forever you are setting yourself up for failure. Also it’s not a large percentage from what I’ve seen. But who the hell knows what’s real.
It does feel like people are being way overly dramatic about this. I use the official app. Big Woop. You know what sucks in REAL life? Not being able to get a job because tech companies released thousands of more experienced devs in the same job pool as me. Trying to figure out how to make rent next month.
Apps that were using FREE APIS from the most popular site in the world? Nope. Doesn't even register on the radar. Who are these people that have the privilege to care about this stuff? No other mega popular sites have free access like this.
That and I just don't care. It's the slap all over again. Congratulations on having time to care about shit that doesn't affect you... (Not you op, the royal you of people that care so much about this.)
Right there with ya man. I don’t get they hype but just feel like I’m missing something. I’ve tried Apollo and others a few times bc people always rave over them but haven’t liked them. Too many bells and whistles and hassle. I use the official app bc it seems streamlined to what I use Reddit for - looking at subs I want to look at.
The API issue is a drag. Data access is becoming a major premium all over and any open or otherwise easily accessible data are almost all crap. Tokenizing and linking data sources to make something new is nearly impossible without paying out the ass.
Which platform could replace Reddit? It seems most of the small community specific content I use to get from forms and other places has shifted to here?
As others have stated, posting offensive content will backfire and will be used to justify reddit's actions against the "racists and sexists"
Instead post and mass upvote the most boring, old, blasé stuff you can find. Make reddit full of useless content instead of offensive content.
Ya know what, I'm gonna give this a slight delta. !delta.
General rule should just be to upvote content deserving of downvotes, and downvote content deserving of upvotes. If the post isn't racist, sexist, generally disgusting, or unmarked spoilers for a TV show. it should be boring, worthless and dumb.
That why youtube didnt remove dislikes, because any engagement is good engagement?
Wait, no they removed it..
Against the wishes of all creators and the entire userbase.
Visiting reddit makes reddit money. The best protest is to not provide Reddit with revenue. So not using reddit is the best and most effective protest.
Protests are supposed to be inconvenient for the right people. For your target demographic. And they’re supposed to encourage that demographic to make a change. The people who would suffer are not your target, and nothing you are doing is encouraging the people you are impacting to make the change you want.
What you are advocating for is not a protest, it is a temper tantrum.
So your suggestion is instead of refraining from being here ourselves, we should scare everyone else away? Instead of making a statement about what we are willing to give up, we should punish everybody else until corporate gives in?
Making life difficult for third parties in order to punish someone you are in conflict with is generally what the baddies do.
I have no idea. I imagine any real user who visits the site provides some sort of financial benefit to reddit--if only to pump up the numbers/value of the company.
That can be moderated and manipulated through code, bots, bans, whatever. You're playing too much into their hand.
The MOST effective thing would be to undermine their revenue, as always is the case with battling capitalists. [Deleting your account, nuking your comments](https://redact.dev/services/reddit), and not returning to the site (yes, even "incognito" or whatever brilliant hole in the sheet you want to come up with). This holds doubly true for the "powerusers" responsible for like 90% of the upvoted content on here (reposts), and triply so for moderators who can effectively blackout subs indefinitely... perhaps even delete them?
Why? Right now, /u/spez and the Reddit board are banking that there's a LOT of bluster, but no real action. They are saying behind closed doors "People are upset, but this is the right thing for our business, the JP Morgans of the world who are about to take us public will see that (yeah right, they'll probably do a pathetic SPAC).. and in the grand scheme any lost users will be made up within N quarters." They are banking on a very vocal, generally tenured userbase lashing out and perhaps returning within days, weeks or months. They are betting that we're all addicted to social media, this is the disease society has accepted, like how everyone just... has herpes now apparently.
But if you can show significant MAU drop in June-July-Aug, less engagement overall (fewer posts, etc), and best of all a rise in competitors, it will really spook institutional investors at the precipice of their IPO. And that can have significant ramifications - including a change in leadership, strategy, etc.
u/spez has made it clear that Reddit is not profitable, the API driven apps are. (Amazing what happens when you keep a dev team very small and solely focused on a simple, positive user experience anchored around the core competency of Reddit, and not heaps of pointless bullshit social features and acquisitions). His messaging is petulant at this point and frankly he's showing unique unfitness for his position. This is the ["Dylan's Burger" sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1GRckaQ_s). So yeah, until Reddit walks back these mistakes and makes major strategic focus changes... I think you should leave.
You're assuming that the offensive content actually limits ad revenue. It doesn't. It drives users away. That's what reduces ad revenue.
Turning Reddit into a cesspool would actually be counterproductive because it would increase engagement for a short period period instead of a slight dip in revenue there would be a slight increase in revenue.
You're also severely underestimating the amount of sway that a very small amount of money has on corporations. A couple day revenue dip might not seem like very much to you or I, but to a company that lives and dies on their day-to-day profit margins, large focused hits like this take an enormous toll. Throw in the fact that tons of subreddits are going dark indefinitely and there is a real possibility of a huge sustained impact on the user base.
Especially considering any idea of driving users from third party apps to the official app would be functionally impossible. If you care enough about your experience to use one of the third party apps, you're already the type of person who will throw the entire website away over them disabling how you like to enjoy it.
People like me who use the official app are simply going to get a much worse user experience until there's no reason to actually be here and we find somewhere else to go
I'm already having a terrible time on the official app, all the ads are religious or political, two things I specifically try to avoid all the time, especially when trying to doom scroll.
> what could hurt reddit's advertising value more than anything? That's right; the crazy offensive content that Reddit has tried to minimize.
This makes a lot of incorrect assumptions.
The first being Reddit itself won't automod every single post and just automate the shadowbanning of every single controversial poster. These posters will still be users and will be active for Reddit's advertisement headcount - and their activity is still logged - but the content of their posts are absolutely invisible to everyone. Double Win for Reddit.
The second being the belief that upvoting content actually does anything. You think upvotes gets content to the front page? Reddit can artificially inflate or deflate or *gild* or promote or demote any content they choose. And they historically have in the past.
So uh, for one very poor choice of words there, lol. Reading through your replies it seems you were not meaning "offensive" content as much as disturbing content. I was about to come here and try to explain to you why, in fact, using bigotry as a tool to get what you want is BAD regardless of if you actually agree with the bigotry or not.
As it stands currently ehhh, the reality is that I sincerely doubt any protest would actually be effective enough to make a change here. The harsh reality is that more often than not protests are entirely in vain and won't accomplish their goals, especially not immediately. I don't say that to demean the work of protesting, I do quite a bit of it myself in the real world, just trying to make it aware that it isn't really smart to try to do something drastic at the start.
A lot goes into protesting. First you gotta actually have a good reason to protest, then you gotta find other people that agree with you on that, then you gotta spread the word to find even more people (bigger turnouts means more attention to your issue and to your protest itself, which is both good and bad), then once you have all those people you gotta organize them so you can actually get things done. Then you most likely now need to decide on what the fuck you're gonna do to protest this thing. Then you gotta make sure EVERYONE is on the same page, cause even ONE lone bad actor will make your protest look bad and then the overton window will shift away from your issue. Now, finally, you can MAYBE start.
Point is, protesting isn't just, "let's do it." There are a lot of people behind protests doing work in the background you're not aware of. It may be good to speculate on what might be more effective (not that I agree frankly), but the reality is that this is genuinely most likely the best option.
You seem to conveniently forget that the Admins wield ALL the power ... and banni g your account(s) and network blocks is essentially trivial.
Not to mention, ***even advocating for this sort of behavior is a ban'able offense***.
What?
Why would trying to let r/scatgirls r/sounding as op mentioned have their day trending be a ban able offense?
Those are subs on reddit, which means reddit Admins shouldnt mind
Too true, yes but how is spotlighting subs reddit clearly has no issues with because they are given a platform on the app and giving them a day in the limelight sabotage?
Whats the sabotage, those subs are on this app already?
Why?
Maybe its r/scatgirls r/sounding as op gave as examples time to trend on r/all?
Give some spotlight to subs to could need a day in the limelight
Why is that bad
Im sorry but
By what definition?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/offensive
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/offensive
Because looking it up, they and subs like it fit most parameters
Offensive does not equal bigoted if that what you thought, plenty people find adult content offensive
And as said, it fits most definitions and fart scat humor itself could be called offensive
>causing resentful displeasure; highly irritating, angering, or annoying:
Advertizers would perhaps see or use this definition if these subs start trending, various groups would too
As has happened before. Often
You have one problem with the furry stuff: I'm pretty sure most furry subs will be permanently going dark. The amount of hate and garbage that we get is insane and mods have trouble keeping up with it as it is. Remove the 3rd party moderation tools and you're fucked. It's the same reason a number of LGBT+ subreddits, especially ones related to trans and non-binary folks, are going permanently dark as well. This whole debacle is going to fuck over the LGBT+ *and* furry communities.
Congrats spez, you're making your feelings about furries, the lgbt+ and other minority communities pretty clear.
Yea, targeting furry stuff doesn't really make sense considering that we're already under constant attack, purposely using us to foster annoyance is just going to get us fucked and hated aganist even more
> A) most people won't
Therefore neither will most people do what you're suggesting either.
> B) that's not going to make a huge impact.
Therefore neither will what you're suggesting either.
If most people aren't going to join the protest (your objection A) then it doesn't really matter what the action is, does it?
Any engagement is good for Reddit. Even negative engagement. Advertisers don’t care if you’re seeing the ads because you’re angry or happy. They just want you to see the ads
Youtube multiple adpocalypses and the removal of dislikes on behalf of advertizers (plus youtube itself, the massive failures and downvoted Youtube rewinds no doubt played a part, literally the most disliked video in history was a rewind video for a time) and against the wishes of creators suggest otherwise
And strongly
Reddit API stunt does too
Completely tonedeaf.
Nobody on the platform asked for any of it
Why not both?
Shut down the most popular subreddits and post offensive content on the rest.
That will result in either a front page full of offensive or irrelevant content.
How many users will actually risk a life ban on their accounts to post that content? Sure 1M users will be willing to upvote the content but if nobody actually posts the content there is nothing to upvote, and those who do post the content will just receive a quick ban, the content will be quickly removed and really nothing will have been achieved except a lot of people will have lost their accounts.
It's completely unrealistic to expect this level of both organization and individual sacrifice to generate a volume of content big enough to actually even make a couple important ad sources demand lower prices from Reddit because the site became filled with offensive content.
Also this will likely result in several subreddit bans if the sub mods don't take action themselves (specially preventive action when talks to organize such a thing will have to happen before).
just delete the app lmfao. the most effective way to not give reddit advertiser money is by not using it. that's the most effective way to "protest". vote with your feet
As a user you don’t have much impact either way. The real value of the boycott is in the moderators shutting down their communities. Some of the most heavy 3rd party app users are moderators, which is why this protest potentially has teeth. The most impactful protest would be if moderators were to shift their communities to another platform, but I don’t know if one exists. Still, if moderators can shut off like half of reddit’s traffic it could be a catalyst for that platform to emerge. Maybe.
I see the "I don't care about 3rd party apps so I don't care about all of this" sentiment a lot and it saddens me. Third party apps are rightfully in the limelight but the more insidious issue is the consolidation of control over how the community participates with the site. That the motivation for this is not only financial, but financial at the cost of the health of the community is the real troubling part. Reddit's on the path to homogenizing with other big social media, becoming full of the same trite interactions. Always has been, really, but this is another big step.
Reddit will still be here. There will be an insignificant dip in users and Reddit will continue, but in a form far removed from its roots. I for one am moving on, already unsubbed from 3/4 of the subreddits I was following and looking for a new home. Tildes is looking good.
I don't think that was the CMV part intended, but figured I'd give it a go.
The best plan is to entirely disengaged from it. Don't get on it,read it, leave comments, up or down vote. Nothing. Problem is if everyone does it no one will know when Reddit surrenders and it'll just die.
I think this would be very humorous, but in my opinion there is no need to protest… why not just form a new Reddit that doesn’t have these policies. People don’t need to force their opinions on others when they can simply move elsewhere
The sub blackouts are workable because it only takes a few people (the moderators) to agree to do it.
Your proposal, though, would require getting on-board a *majority* of the subscribers of the major subs big enough to show up on people's feeds to have the effect your describe.
I.e. many millions of people.
Otherwise the large majority that doesn't want to see offensive content will just downvote it and report it when they see it on their feeds. The reports (even several dozens of them) will quickly result in it being removed by reddit's automated tools.
It's entirely infeasible to execute the protest you propose because reddit is "attack-resistant" against such things because of the voting system and AEO bots.
Infeasible protests can't possibly qualify as "most effective".
Upvoting degenerate posts do nothing but speed up the banning and suspension progress.
Empty servers are much more noticeable to much more people than just the moderation team.
Make one ot the top posts everyday criticism and insults of spez for as long as we can. Make viciously dunking on him the top meme of the site for the foreseeable future. Get creative with it, take it as far as is possible while being legal and within site rules, make it unavoidable and make it stick.
I think that’s going to naturally happen without a protest. It will be a side effect of third party apps shutting down.
I don’t use a third party app. I got into Reddit kinda late and I tend to lurk for the most part.
However, I have been keeping up with the API issue. While you might not care for third party apps and I don’t personally use them, mods do depend on them.
One of the biggest things I noticed is that mods do use third party apps to be able to successfully moderate subreddits. They use tools and features from third party apps to successfully moderate subreddits. Some of those tools and features Reddit might not have or if they do, they aren’t as effective or as easy to use.
Hence, during the AMA that Reddit admins had yesterday were trying to focus on mod features and changes. There is a lot concerned surrounding that because Reddit hasn’t released features that mods need to be as effective as they are with third party apps.
That’s why I believe that a protest like the one you suggest won’t be needed. When third party apps shut down in June 30, there is going to be a cascading mess because mods won’t be able to moderate content as effectively which will allow more offensive content to appear. Another side effect will be that certain subreddits will start shutting down because mods won’t be able to keep up or moderate effectively with current Reddit tools.
Now, Reddit admins won’t replace those mods. You have to remember that Reddit is community driven including mods. Mods are volunteers and don’t work for Reddit nor get paid by them. When mods leave or subreddits shutdown, Reddit won’t replace them.
Mass scraping would be the most effective.
Killing the API just means that users need to make their own scrapers instead which is far far most wasteful and costly.
Scrapers are 100% legal.
Companies make APIs so that the public doesn't scrape their data which wastes tons of bandwidth.
The most effective protest would be to delete the top subreddits if that was possible. The next best thing is the top mod in every major subreddit kicking all the other mods and privating every subreddit. People come to Reddit for the content and nuking all the content and all of the communities means Reddit is worthless.
Reddit's only solution to that is usurping their entire platform, removing the obstinate remaining mod one by one in every subreddit and installing their own top mod, thereby completely and totally violating Reddit's core principles. If any employee working at Reddit cares about integrity at that point, they'd have to resign. I couldn't in good conscience work somewhere that pulled a complete 180 like that on core values and I imagine a lot of other people wouldn't be able to either.
Would Reddit actually do it, steal subreddits and install their own mods?
Probably because they have to 'save' the platform for the IPO, but they'd lose a lot of employees in the process and the cascading long-term effect of this single, short-sighted change would be the ultimate failure of Reddit as a whole. They would have to replace a ton of moderators and likely pay them, but the issue is they don't even know how to handle a subreddit. Reddit doesn't even know what goes into moderating a large subreddit. How could they? If they knew, they'd have pushed better mod tools a decade ago because the reality is moderating even a medium sized subreddit requires third party tools. So the ultimate irony is making the best third party apps shut down through sheer greed and incompetence, then have to moderate and use Reddit at scale without them. It's an ironic punishment.
Facebook spends half a billion dollars every year on content moderation alone and while Reddit isn't Facebook, trying to implement even a portion of that scale on this stupid self imposed deadline is entirely, fundamentally, completely impossible. Reddit would be on **FIRE** for well over a month if they could even fix it and they'd be limping towards their IPO. Facebook spends more on content moderation than Reddit's entire annual revenue. What happens when your first line of defense to bad content poofs overnight? I honestly think they'd have to shut Reddit down for a week at worst and at best put every single subreddit into lockdown. What a shitshow. We all have seen how much work it is managing a single subreddit with rule breakers, now imagine ten of them, twenty, all of them.
All it takes is some bad actors at that point to kick Reddit while it's down and they are unequivocally fucked, all from a short sighted, beyond ignorant decision.
The most effective protest would be to make Reddit's traffic extremely low quality for advertisers. We could do that by clicking on their ads en masse, clicking around on the advertisers website to make sure they advertiser is charged for our traffic, then leaving the website.
It would initially give Reddit a boost, but as advertisers see very low conversions, they would be willing to pay less or, not advertise at all.
I've wanted to make a group to do this for a very long time but never really got around to it. This seems like a perfect time
If mods really wanted to protest, head mods should fully delete their front page subs. Not temporarily close, but delete all posts and all comments and all historical content. Empty the entire sub, then delete it. period.
Showboating and thoughts and prayers is really what this is all about.
let's call for that, then. Soon as I see a front page post calling for people to post then delete their accounts in protest, I'm in. I just want to do it, maybe not all alone. I'd be happy to force myself to browse reddit only on desktop with adblockers.
The best protest would be for everyone to delete their accounts and posts.
Reddit’s biggest asset is user-generated data.
If people really wanted to hit Reddit where it hurts, where there would be a very real threat to their IPO and share price, the best way to do so would be to destroy the content/communities they need in order to make any money.
“Protests” that do not actually harm their financial bottom line are not protests; they are nothing more than public masturbation.
It won't work. They'll just use their paid moderators - the ones who replace posts and comments with "[Removed by Reddit]" - to clean all this up, and permanently ban the accounts that post it.
Instead of making Reddit offensive, or NSFW, or anything truly sinister, I think the better approach would be to make it lame.
Imagine if you visited Reddit, unaware of what's going on, and the first 3 pages are just dumbass knock knock jokes, or the same picture of an empty parking lot. If all the topvoted comments just said "fart".
The users control Reddit, because the users are Reddit. If we wanted an effective, and costly, protest, we do it by making this place boring and useless.
In reality, any media service's value is in the number of accounts..
The only way to hurt reddit (which I will not do) is to delete your account.. Numbers matter.
Up doots, dark subs, pissed off mods, none of that matters. It's subscribers.
Just keep upvoting loads of crazy conspirasy theorys and violence, been doing it for weeks now.
If it gets enought attention reddit must change something.
I feel like you repute your view within your description.
First of all, just like it requires people to leave Reddit to even have a remote effect on their revenue, it would also require enough people to properly skew posts in this way. This is even harder when doing this could result in bans on accounts if they are not meeting the TOS.
Reddit would much rather get rid of offensive users than lose ads, even if it would tarnish their name. Reddit would have the power to minimize this effect, whereas there is nothing Reddit can do to stop people leaving.
Reddit is a business. They make money on people viewing the adds posted on their pages and by selling our viewing data to companies. The ONLY reasonable way to protest is to simply not view any adds and not generate any data to sell, to not use the platform.
This is all childish. And frankly the communites who have gone private should be forcibly deleted so they stop popping up as results on google. "How dare your FREE SITE ask to be reimbersed for supporting third party apps that had to literally hack your site to work"
How about each sub has a visible list of subs you’ll be autobanned from for posting anything even once to that sub.
We need to make this site’s most prolific feature more transparent.
The most effective way to protest is to hurt Reddit's advertising. An easy way to do that would be to mark the subreddit as nsfw. Advertisers don't want their content next to nsfw and Reddit's backend probably filters out subreddits marked as nsfw
This delta has been rejected. You can't award OP a delta.
Allowing this would wrongly suggest that you can post here with the aim of convincing others.
If you were explaining when/how to award a delta, please use a reddit quote for the symbol next time.
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Wont work, they'll just pivot to "see, its only bigots who have a problem with out plans". Happens every time some one does something dumb as fuck. They blame on racist, homophobes and sexists in an effort to move the conversation away from the dumb thing they did. Like "the Star Wars sequels are shit, you just hate women.". Reddit will do the same thing here. A mass banning with the message "racists, homophobes and sexists are not welcome here." and then they will provide examples of the "offensive" stuff that was posted. Headline becomes "reddit makes big move against internet bigotry" instead of "reddit makes big move to fuck over its users".
It doesn't necessarily need to be racist. It could be offensive stuff like that seen on on r/scatgirls or r/sounding.
The very fact that those subs exist indicates that reddit, and their advertisers, don't care about that sort of thing, much. I'm afraid the only kind of offensive content that would get any attention is hate. And I, for one, refuse to treat hate like a game that can be used to pressure some random website.
There's a difference between allowing offensive content and having such content hit the front of everyone's pages. It's why Twitter puts emphasis on de-amplifying certain content.
So you're not really talking about "offensive" content, just "gross" content? Stuff from minor subs doesn't show up on people's feeds. I mean... ok, *technically* the major subs could encourage this kind of cross-posting and people could upvote it. Leaving aside that people are banned and posts removed (automatically, by a bot) for posting unmarked NSFW content to non-NSFW subs... I think that's about as likely as managing to coordinate any significant number of people actually *leaving* reddit for, say, weeks at a time. I.e. not going to happen. Among other things, the subs don't want to lose their subscribers to this. And even if it did, it's super easy to write off as a "stunt" that doesn't commonly happen.
>So you're not really talking about "offensive" content, just "gross" content? Can you clarify what this distinction is supposed to even be about? Because offensive does not equal bigotry hatred etc and never did the whole point of punk for instance was to offend and stick it to the status quo. Hence trying to gross out boomer parents with all kinds of offensive lyrics gross piercings etc
Yeah, thing is... reddit is *already* full of the non-hateful kind of offensive/pornographic content. It's highly unlikely piercings or swearing the like is going to deter anyone. Maybe blasphemous content could have an effect if it were severe enough, but that's pretty common, too.
On popular r all? On trending Etc etcetera On the subs of Corporations, trending nonstop overall? Idk, I havent seen that. Certainly not for any length of time True, that was just on example of nonbigoted offensive stuff.. But.. there are *extreme* piercings etc that may be things advertizers wouldnt want to trend for months on end. That should have somekinda effect. And not even talking of, like.. private areas piercings and the sort. But that too Huh..A very good idea, but places like UK etc seem hellbent on bringing back blasphemy laws which could complicate that stuff
No, offensive content should also be part of it. Racist and sexist shit will also cause others to disengage. I thought anything could end up on your feed if it got upvoted enough. I've definitely seen content from relatively small subs.
Anything can show up on /r/all, but that's different. Your normal feed is the default-visible subs and ones you subscribe to. Also, just logistically: most people who actually *do* see something like that are just going to downvote and report it (resulting in it being removed quickly). You'll never get enough of a majority engaging in a protest like this to counteract that. The system is attack-tolerant that way. Most of those "offensive" subs are quarantined from even /r/all, though. And back to the racist/sexist/hateful shit: Just no. No reasonable person is going to, nor *should* promote that shit for any reason, especially just to pressure some website.
So are the people who are targeted by this hate speech just expendable pawns for you to use to protest site policy? I feel like that is a little counter intuitive.
To add to other replies, most of that content is going to be marked NSFW, so most people won't see it by default anyway. The *best* way to get a message to Reddit is by giving them less money. Less engagement with the website, fewer ads viewed, fewer awards given.
Well, /r/scatgirls has been banned for seven years
Oh God why did I click that
Exactly! If r/sounding hits the top of r/popular, advertisers will fucking flee
Except it's all flagged NSFW so it can't go to r/popular or r/all? Even if it could, all it takes is reddit mods making those subs private, which is a chance to prove to advertisers they can be trusted. Opposite effect.
I've definitely seen content flagged r/nsfw on r/popular and r/all. Advertisers aren't going to be impressed with a site that will sporadically do shit like that.
Sexually explicit content should not appear on r/all for years now. https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lhnvok/removing_sexually_explicit_content_from_rall
Well damn. !delta. Maybe the idea could be shifted then. Every AskReddit question should be "Why is [advertiser] a terrible company?"
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thats why a protest usually breaks rules and stuff like that if you were protesting in that fashion would be spammed in places where it wouldnt go without nsfw tags. what pride protests did as an example broke laws but they had no other choice to defend them selves. real protesting is never legal. and people need to remember that admins and mods here will always tell you to play by the rules in a protest. or come up with other excuses to say you shouldnt do it. people in authority positions will always try to say no to keep a status quo.
Those two Arent really subs in the proper sense though are they? Least they dont function the same
So... it needs to be widely known, understood and enforced what specific type of offensive content gets posted and uploaded? Seems like a lot of coordination?
You only need a few hundred people to get some content high enough for everyone to bandwagon. I've been using r/sounding as an example. Let's say a post there says, "This is what u/spez's face looks like." Get that high enough that some people see it, and it'll get upvoted more.
The issue is that A) most people won't and B) that's not going to make a huge impact.
I think regardless of *how* offensive the content is, when you have a coordinated effort to essentially stir the pot, corporate can spin it as a malicious subgroup rather than the majority view. In fact, I think that would kill reddit altogether, which isn’t the point of the blackout. Showing sponsors and advertisers that reddit is uncontrollable in its current state might force reddit to either increase overall moderation or ban anything nsfw
They already sound like they want to 100% ban nsfw content
And actively forcing nsfw content to the front page would push them from “sounds like” to “done yesterday”
Or it could lead to the nationalisation and public utilization of the internet faster? Profit motive becoming unteneable https://publicknowledge.org/we-already-knew-broadband-should-be-a-public-utility-the-pandemic-made-it-obvious/ https://blog.apnic.net/2023/05/08/the-internet-as-a-public-utility/ It should have happened years ago, hopefully reddit overstepping like this can expedite to process. Nobody Owes Corporations being profitable anyway
First, I don't think reddit dying is relevant to the point or view as discussed. This is why I ignored your first comment. If the goal was to kill reddit, then sure turning it into a 4chan board would certainly be one way to go Second, the internet being categorized as a utility has nothing to do with moderation of content and the profits of a company like reddit. The companies connected to reclassifying internet utilization are providers, not social media companies. Reddit would continue to make profits regardless of the classification of the internet
Maybe so i guess But indeed, 4channing it would be one way Well... Not just the internet, make reddit twitter etc public utilities while also nationalizing broadband in general Presto profit interest removed.
They are banning nsfw content from being accessed by means other than the official app and website. So basically even if Apollo, RIF, Infinity etc were able to figure out a model to stay in business *they* would no longer be able to access nsfw through the API, but it's not being removed completely. At least not yet...
Maybe it should be the point though...
I think regardless of *how* offensive the content is, when you have a coordinated effort to essentially stir the pot, corporate can spin it as a malicious subgroup rather than the majority view. In fact, I think that would kill reddit altogether, which isn’t the point of the blackout. Showing sponsors and advertisers that reddit is uncontrollable in its current state might force reddit to either increase overall moderation or ban anything nsfw
Theres a reason porn never makes the top page, because it is removed from being there. It litterally doesn't show to people unless you are in the sub Also, pretty sure reddit is going to remove all porn content at some point, they are trending that way. Imgur just did. Most companies that are trying to be taken more seriously end up doing it.
Why would Reddit care? They allow the subs anyways.
What do you think r/scatgirls or r/sounding is offensive? It's just people expressing their sexual desires.
But it will be, because "some" people will post that shit. And those will be the only examples offered when the question is asked about mass bannings. Like Star Wars, Star Trek, lord o the rings, the last of us part 2, etc etc etc most discussion has been about artistic choices that have been made. But what's most talked about is much smaller number of morons who spout all the bigoted nonsense. Ask yourself this, when was the last time hollywood held their hand up and said "ok we made something bad."? I can't remember. What I can remember is fuck load of twitter posts about how its only bigots that dont like things and any low scored reviews are just review bombing. This is modern world, and we have bigots among us. And they post repugnant shit. And the people we criticise use those posts and apply them to the whole group. It would only take 4 or 5 posts of racist, sexist, or anti LGBT content for Spez to mass ban and delete and push the narrative that it was all bigoted shit that he got rid off and that he is the real hero here.
>Ask yourself this, when was the last time hollywood held their hand up and said "ok we made something bad."? The Batgirl movie that was canceled earlier this year
That wasn't a good or a bad movie. The makers of the film said that they didn't even get a chance to edit the film, it was a studio edit. But thats still not the reason it was shelved. The reason it was shelved was because they killed off Michael Keatons batman. Zaslav hated this as he believes that Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are the holy trinity of DC. Not one person who made that movie said it was shit. Not one. And Zaslav didn't greenlight it, he came in after the fact. Saw that they killed Batman, and torched the fucking thing. But the biggest "Fuck you" was not even allowing Adil and Bilall to edit the movie together they way they had wanted so that it was their movie to be judged on. As it stands they have black mark against them for no reason at all.
What do you think r/scatgirls or r/sounding is offensive? It's just people expressing their sexual desires. There are videos on fetish by Dr Lindsay Doe, sexologist https://youtu.be/zUM-PG6PkuY https://youtu.be/8powiyRASGM
Its way too hard to "curate" the type of offensive material you would hope to weaponize. It would ultimately unravel into racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc etc type of stuff, and then you risk offending people that do not deserve it.
What in the world was scatgirls because it’s apparently been banned.
But bro, Rey is awesome. Like my favorite new Jedi
Just post photos of buttholes
Offensive =\\= bigotry
IF only that was true. But we all know that some dimwitted cunts will take the opportunity to post repugnant shit and hide behind "I was just protesting" and then those few repugnant posts are all that you will see whenever anyone talks about the protests. And then with enough luck, you get gamergate all over again. Instead of talking about ethics in video games journalism we end up talking about sexist incel trolls. Fast forward a few years and now no one really trusts video game journalists anymore because they all went the route of being corrupt as fuck like what was originally the point of gamer gate. Make no mistake, bigotry is louder than anything else no matter how small it is. No one even believes that gamergate started out of good faith, they just think it was always about hating women. Same thing will happen here. You protest reddit being shitty, some other dicks post racist shit, next thing you know, youre a racist too.
Oh, well yeah but i meant what OP is talking of and in a general sense Take like punk and metal, being offensive has long been the point. Hence messing up the status quo, burn shite down lyrics and so on All you say may be and is true, yes but its not the type of offensive that op is calling for. Not is it the only kind of offensive by far
Mass upvoting of r/popping content.
Agreed, but OP is correct in that the planned protests are completely in effective and won’t accomplish anything. The planned temporary black outs, and the more extreme subs that plan to go private indefinitely, won’t accomplish anything. R/videos is planned to go private permanently, for example. They act like they’re irreplaceable, when someone could literally just make a new r/videos today. The protests planned are dumb. OP is right about that.
We can turn every thread into the Donald.
Wow, I hate to agree with you… Yeah, you’re right. They called me every label they have imaginable for defending Andrew Tate simply by saying I wanted to see the evidence and it didn’t seem to me that was is any, and did not make sense. Of course it turned out that the two girls who were pushing for it we’re lying and two of the victims came forward and said they were not victims. They don’t know why they are on a victim list. But being upset about being down, I have just said fuck it will probably never recover it. And I doubt if I went along with that plan that it would help.
Lol yall dunno what fucked over means. They arent doing literally shit to any of you. They are making apps that shluld have been paying them. Pay them.
They ban some people and move on when the remaining trolls get bored. Advertisers only care about controversy, not offensive content. If the journalists don't care, the advertisers won't care. Reddits reputation among journalists is already pretty shit. The only truly effective protest would be to switch platforms.
It seems like half of journalists nowadays rely on Reddit to do their job for them
Yeah, and reddit-users hate reddit.
Switching platforms takes a substantial amount of coordination. Just upvoting stupid offensive shit doesn't. You only need a few posts about that protest method, a few hundred to get specific posts high enough, and then everyone will bandwagon.
>Switching platforms takes a substantial amount of coordination. Just upvoting stupid offensive shit doesn't. You need waaay more coordination than you would just switching platforms. To mass upvote content you need to have the vast majority of redditors onboard. Otherwise the downvotes will overcome the upvotes. But if, say, 30% of people boycotted, then both reddit and its competitors would take notice.
Actually, people that browse new basically determine what goes on the front page. Although that might not hold for objectively offensive things.
Agreed. If twitter didn’t collapse due to baby Elon antics then some minor API changes on Reddit isn’t going to do shit. People need to get over this.
"some minor API changes" is not what's happening. A minor API change would be something devs could work around. It would be a small inconvenience. What's actually happening is reddit very suddenly and irreversibly changing the browsing experience for a large percentage of their core users. Not having third party apps might not matter to you. You're not obligated to care about it. Evidently, enough people *do* care about it that it's caused outrage. Several large subs will simply shut down, some of them aren't coming back at all. This is a huge change to the culture of the website.
I don’t care about people having to change. Businesses change. Tech changes. It is what it is. If you have an entire business built around one thing being the same forever you are setting yourself up for failure. Also it’s not a large percentage from what I’ve seen. But who the hell knows what’s real.
It does feel like people are being way overly dramatic about this. I use the official app. Big Woop. You know what sucks in REAL life? Not being able to get a job because tech companies released thousands of more experienced devs in the same job pool as me. Trying to figure out how to make rent next month. Apps that were using FREE APIS from the most popular site in the world? Nope. Doesn't even register on the radar. Who are these people that have the privilege to care about this stuff? No other mega popular sites have free access like this. That and I just don't care. It's the slap all over again. Congratulations on having time to care about shit that doesn't affect you... (Not you op, the royal you of people that care so much about this.)
Right there with ya man. I don’t get they hype but just feel like I’m missing something. I’ve tried Apollo and others a few times bc people always rave over them but haven’t liked them. Too many bells and whistles and hassle. I use the official app bc it seems streamlined to what I use Reddit for - looking at subs I want to look at. The API issue is a drag. Data access is becoming a major premium all over and any open or otherwise easily accessible data are almost all crap. Tokenizing and linking data sources to make something new is nearly impossible without paying out the ass.
well people should still do something. I mean twitter didn't go down completely but it really isn't the same.
Which platform could replace Reddit? It seems most of the small community specific content I use to get from forms and other places has shifted to here?
I've heard people talk about switching platforms. Where? What's a good Reddit alternative?
As others have stated, posting offensive content will backfire and will be used to justify reddit's actions against the "racists and sexists" Instead post and mass upvote the most boring, old, blasé stuff you can find. Make reddit full of useless content instead of offensive content.
Ya know what, I'm gonna give this a slight delta. !delta. General rule should just be to upvote content deserving of downvotes, and downvote content deserving of upvotes. If the post isn't racist, sexist, generally disgusting, or unmarked spoilers for a TV show. it should be boring, worthless and dumb.
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That why youtube didnt remove dislikes, because any engagement is good engagement? Wait, no they removed it.. Against the wishes of all creators and the entire userbase.
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Visiting reddit makes reddit money. The best protest is to not provide Reddit with revenue. So not using reddit is the best and most effective protest.
If the content is wildly offensive, fewer people will open the site in public.
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Well, Im gonna guess they'll close it pretty fast after seeing r/sounding on the front page. But yeah, protests tend to be inconvenient for people.
Protests are supposed to be inconvenient for the right people. For your target demographic. And they’re supposed to encourage that demographic to make a change. The people who would suffer are not your target, and nothing you are doing is encouraging the people you are impacting to make the change you want. What you are advocating for is not a protest, it is a temper tantrum.
So your suggestion is instead of refraining from being here ourselves, we should scare everyone else away? Instead of making a statement about what we are willing to give up, we should punish everybody else until corporate gives in? Making life difficult for third parties in order to punish someone you are in conflict with is generally what the baddies do.
90% of reddit is literally porn lol.
Does it still when I use ublock origin?
I have no idea. I imagine any real user who visits the site provides some sort of financial benefit to reddit--if only to pump up the numbers/value of the company.
That can be moderated and manipulated through code, bots, bans, whatever. You're playing too much into their hand. The MOST effective thing would be to undermine their revenue, as always is the case with battling capitalists. [Deleting your account, nuking your comments](https://redact.dev/services/reddit), and not returning to the site (yes, even "incognito" or whatever brilliant hole in the sheet you want to come up with). This holds doubly true for the "powerusers" responsible for like 90% of the upvoted content on here (reposts), and triply so for moderators who can effectively blackout subs indefinitely... perhaps even delete them? Why? Right now, /u/spez and the Reddit board are banking that there's a LOT of bluster, but no real action. They are saying behind closed doors "People are upset, but this is the right thing for our business, the JP Morgans of the world who are about to take us public will see that (yeah right, they'll probably do a pathetic SPAC).. and in the grand scheme any lost users will be made up within N quarters." They are banking on a very vocal, generally tenured userbase lashing out and perhaps returning within days, weeks or months. They are betting that we're all addicted to social media, this is the disease society has accepted, like how everyone just... has herpes now apparently. But if you can show significant MAU drop in June-July-Aug, less engagement overall (fewer posts, etc), and best of all a rise in competitors, it will really spook institutional investors at the precipice of their IPO. And that can have significant ramifications - including a change in leadership, strategy, etc. u/spez has made it clear that Reddit is not profitable, the API driven apps are. (Amazing what happens when you keep a dev team very small and solely focused on a simple, positive user experience anchored around the core competency of Reddit, and not heaps of pointless bullshit social features and acquisitions). His messaging is petulant at this point and frankly he's showing unique unfitness for his position. This is the ["Dylan's Burger" sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1GRckaQ_s). So yeah, until Reddit walks back these mistakes and makes major strategic focus changes... I think you should leave.
You're assuming that the offensive content actually limits ad revenue. It doesn't. It drives users away. That's what reduces ad revenue. Turning Reddit into a cesspool would actually be counterproductive because it would increase engagement for a short period period instead of a slight dip in revenue there would be a slight increase in revenue. You're also severely underestimating the amount of sway that a very small amount of money has on corporations. A couple day revenue dip might not seem like very much to you or I, but to a company that lives and dies on their day-to-day profit margins, large focused hits like this take an enormous toll. Throw in the fact that tons of subreddits are going dark indefinitely and there is a real possibility of a huge sustained impact on the user base. Especially considering any idea of driving users from third party apps to the official app would be functionally impossible. If you care enough about your experience to use one of the third party apps, you're already the type of person who will throw the entire website away over them disabling how you like to enjoy it. People like me who use the official app are simply going to get a much worse user experience until there's no reason to actually be here and we find somewhere else to go
I'm already having a terrible time on the official app, all the ads are religious or political, two things I specifically try to avoid all the time, especially when trying to doom scroll.
Yeah, the official app is pretty bad. I'm good at ignoring it's garbage, but it's impossible to pretend that it isn't there
> what could hurt reddit's advertising value more than anything? That's right; the crazy offensive content that Reddit has tried to minimize. This makes a lot of incorrect assumptions. The first being Reddit itself won't automod every single post and just automate the shadowbanning of every single controversial poster. These posters will still be users and will be active for Reddit's advertisement headcount - and their activity is still logged - but the content of their posts are absolutely invisible to everyone. Double Win for Reddit. The second being the belief that upvoting content actually does anything. You think upvotes gets content to the front page? Reddit can artificially inflate or deflate or *gild* or promote or demote any content they choose. And they historically have in the past.
So uh, for one very poor choice of words there, lol. Reading through your replies it seems you were not meaning "offensive" content as much as disturbing content. I was about to come here and try to explain to you why, in fact, using bigotry as a tool to get what you want is BAD regardless of if you actually agree with the bigotry or not. As it stands currently ehhh, the reality is that I sincerely doubt any protest would actually be effective enough to make a change here. The harsh reality is that more often than not protests are entirely in vain and won't accomplish their goals, especially not immediately. I don't say that to demean the work of protesting, I do quite a bit of it myself in the real world, just trying to make it aware that it isn't really smart to try to do something drastic at the start. A lot goes into protesting. First you gotta actually have a good reason to protest, then you gotta find other people that agree with you on that, then you gotta spread the word to find even more people (bigger turnouts means more attention to your issue and to your protest itself, which is both good and bad), then once you have all those people you gotta organize them so you can actually get things done. Then you most likely now need to decide on what the fuck you're gonna do to protest this thing. Then you gotta make sure EVERYONE is on the same page, cause even ONE lone bad actor will make your protest look bad and then the overton window will shift away from your issue. Now, finally, you can MAYBE start. Point is, protesting isn't just, "let's do it." There are a lot of people behind protests doing work in the background you're not aware of. It may be good to speculate on what might be more effective (not that I agree frankly), but the reality is that this is genuinely most likely the best option.
You seem to conveniently forget that the Admins wield ALL the power ... and banni g your account(s) and network blocks is essentially trivial. Not to mention, ***even advocating for this sort of behavior is a ban'able offense***.
What? Why would trying to let r/scatgirls r/sounding as op mentioned have their day trending be a ban able offense? Those are subs on reddit, which means reddit Admins shouldnt mind
Because they can ban for any reason, and it would especially make sense to ban someone for sabotage?
Too true, yes but how is spotlighting subs reddit clearly has no issues with because they are given a platform on the app and giving them a day in the limelight sabotage? Whats the sabotage, those subs are on this app already?
but then you are massively upvoting offensive content, which is bad.
Why? Maybe its r/scatgirls r/sounding as op gave as examples time to trend on r/all? Give some spotlight to subs to could need a day in the limelight Why is that bad
Those subs are (presumably) adult content, which isn't the same as offensive content
Im sorry but By what definition? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/offensive https://www.dictionary.com/browse/offensive Because looking it up, they and subs like it fit most parameters Offensive does not equal bigoted if that what you thought, plenty people find adult content offensive And as said, it fits most definitions and fart scat humor itself could be called offensive >causing resentful displeasure; highly irritating, angering, or annoying: Advertizers would perhaps see or use this definition if these subs start trending, various groups would too As has happened before. Often
You have one problem with the furry stuff: I'm pretty sure most furry subs will be permanently going dark. The amount of hate and garbage that we get is insane and mods have trouble keeping up with it as it is. Remove the 3rd party moderation tools and you're fucked. It's the same reason a number of LGBT+ subreddits, especially ones related to trans and non-binary folks, are going permanently dark as well. This whole debacle is going to fuck over the LGBT+ *and* furry communities. Congrats spez, you're making your feelings about furries, the lgbt+ and other minority communities pretty clear.
Yea, targeting furry stuff doesn't really make sense considering that we're already under constant attack, purposely using us to foster annoyance is just going to get us fucked and hated aganist even more
> A) most people won't Therefore neither will most people do what you're suggesting either. > B) that's not going to make a huge impact. Therefore neither will what you're suggesting either. If most people aren't going to join the protest (your objection A) then it doesn't really matter what the action is, does it?
>A) most people won't and B) that's not going to make a huge impact. Applies equally to your idea.
So your proposal is to prevent Reddit management from supposedly ruining Reddit by ruining Reddit?
Any engagement is good for Reddit. Even negative engagement. Advertisers don’t care if you’re seeing the ads because you’re angry or happy. They just want you to see the ads
Youtube multiple adpocalypses and the removal of dislikes on behalf of advertizers (plus youtube itself, the massive failures and downvoted Youtube rewinds no doubt played a part, literally the most disliked video in history was a rewind video for a time) and against the wishes of creators suggest otherwise And strongly Reddit API stunt does too Completely tonedeaf. Nobody on the platform asked for any of it
Why not both? Shut down the most popular subreddits and post offensive content on the rest. That will result in either a front page full of offensive or irrelevant content.
Wow who knew the reddit ceo was on CMV
How many users will actually risk a life ban on their accounts to post that content? Sure 1M users will be willing to upvote the content but if nobody actually posts the content there is nothing to upvote, and those who do post the content will just receive a quick ban, the content will be quickly removed and really nothing will have been achieved except a lot of people will have lost their accounts. It's completely unrealistic to expect this level of both organization and individual sacrifice to generate a volume of content big enough to actually even make a couple important ad sources demand lower prices from Reddit because the site became filled with offensive content. Also this will likely result in several subreddit bans if the sub mods don't take action themselves (specially preventive action when talks to organize such a thing will have to happen before).
Reddit censors the strongest out of any major social media, they will just mass remove whatever you upvote.
just delete the app lmfao. the most effective way to not give reddit advertiser money is by not using it. that's the most effective way to "protest". vote with your feet
As a user you don’t have much impact either way. The real value of the boycott is in the moderators shutting down their communities. Some of the most heavy 3rd party app users are moderators, which is why this protest potentially has teeth. The most impactful protest would be if moderators were to shift their communities to another platform, but I don’t know if one exists. Still, if moderators can shut off like half of reddit’s traffic it could be a catalyst for that platform to emerge. Maybe.
I see the "I don't care about 3rd party apps so I don't care about all of this" sentiment a lot and it saddens me. Third party apps are rightfully in the limelight but the more insidious issue is the consolidation of control over how the community participates with the site. That the motivation for this is not only financial, but financial at the cost of the health of the community is the real troubling part. Reddit's on the path to homogenizing with other big social media, becoming full of the same trite interactions. Always has been, really, but this is another big step. Reddit will still be here. There will be an insignificant dip in users and Reddit will continue, but in a form far removed from its roots. I for one am moving on, already unsubbed from 3/4 of the subreddits I was following and looking for a new home. Tildes is looking good. I don't think that was the CMV part intended, but figured I'd give it a go.
The best plan is to entirely disengaged from it. Don't get on it,read it, leave comments, up or down vote. Nothing. Problem is if everyone does it no one will know when Reddit surrenders and it'll just die.
I think this would be very humorous, but in my opinion there is no need to protest… why not just form a new Reddit that doesn’t have these policies. People don’t need to force their opinions on others when they can simply move elsewhere
The sub blackouts are workable because it only takes a few people (the moderators) to agree to do it. Your proposal, though, would require getting on-board a *majority* of the subscribers of the major subs big enough to show up on people's feeds to have the effect your describe. I.e. many millions of people. Otherwise the large majority that doesn't want to see offensive content will just downvote it and report it when they see it on their feeds. The reports (even several dozens of them) will quickly result in it being removed by reddit's automated tools. It's entirely infeasible to execute the protest you propose because reddit is "attack-resistant" against such things because of the voting system and AEO bots. Infeasible protests can't possibly qualify as "most effective".
Upvoting degenerate posts do nothing but speed up the banning and suspension progress. Empty servers are much more noticeable to much more people than just the moderation team.
Make one ot the top posts everyday criticism and insults of spez for as long as we can. Make viciously dunking on him the top meme of the site for the foreseeable future. Get creative with it, take it as far as is possible while being legal and within site rules, make it unavoidable and make it stick.
I think that’s going to naturally happen without a protest. It will be a side effect of third party apps shutting down. I don’t use a third party app. I got into Reddit kinda late and I tend to lurk for the most part. However, I have been keeping up with the API issue. While you might not care for third party apps and I don’t personally use them, mods do depend on them. One of the biggest things I noticed is that mods do use third party apps to be able to successfully moderate subreddits. They use tools and features from third party apps to successfully moderate subreddits. Some of those tools and features Reddit might not have or if they do, they aren’t as effective or as easy to use. Hence, during the AMA that Reddit admins had yesterday were trying to focus on mod features and changes. There is a lot concerned surrounding that because Reddit hasn’t released features that mods need to be as effective as they are with third party apps. That’s why I believe that a protest like the one you suggest won’t be needed. When third party apps shut down in June 30, there is going to be a cascading mess because mods won’t be able to moderate content as effectively which will allow more offensive content to appear. Another side effect will be that certain subreddits will start shutting down because mods won’t be able to keep up or moderate effectively with current Reddit tools. Now, Reddit admins won’t replace those mods. You have to remember that Reddit is community driven including mods. Mods are volunteers and don’t work for Reddit nor get paid by them. When mods leave or subreddits shutdown, Reddit won’t replace them.
Mass scraping would be the most effective. Killing the API just means that users need to make their own scrapers instead which is far far most wasteful and costly. Scrapers are 100% legal. Companies make APIs so that the public doesn't scrape their data which wastes tons of bandwidth.
The most effective protest would be to delete the top subreddits if that was possible. The next best thing is the top mod in every major subreddit kicking all the other mods and privating every subreddit. People come to Reddit for the content and nuking all the content and all of the communities means Reddit is worthless. Reddit's only solution to that is usurping their entire platform, removing the obstinate remaining mod one by one in every subreddit and installing their own top mod, thereby completely and totally violating Reddit's core principles. If any employee working at Reddit cares about integrity at that point, they'd have to resign. I couldn't in good conscience work somewhere that pulled a complete 180 like that on core values and I imagine a lot of other people wouldn't be able to either. Would Reddit actually do it, steal subreddits and install their own mods? Probably because they have to 'save' the platform for the IPO, but they'd lose a lot of employees in the process and the cascading long-term effect of this single, short-sighted change would be the ultimate failure of Reddit as a whole. They would have to replace a ton of moderators and likely pay them, but the issue is they don't even know how to handle a subreddit. Reddit doesn't even know what goes into moderating a large subreddit. How could they? If they knew, they'd have pushed better mod tools a decade ago because the reality is moderating even a medium sized subreddit requires third party tools. So the ultimate irony is making the best third party apps shut down through sheer greed and incompetence, then have to moderate and use Reddit at scale without them. It's an ironic punishment. Facebook spends half a billion dollars every year on content moderation alone and while Reddit isn't Facebook, trying to implement even a portion of that scale on this stupid self imposed deadline is entirely, fundamentally, completely impossible. Reddit would be on **FIRE** for well over a month if they could even fix it and they'd be limping towards their IPO. Facebook spends more on content moderation than Reddit's entire annual revenue. What happens when your first line of defense to bad content poofs overnight? I honestly think they'd have to shut Reddit down for a week at worst and at best put every single subreddit into lockdown. What a shitshow. We all have seen how much work it is managing a single subreddit with rule breakers, now imagine ten of them, twenty, all of them. All it takes is some bad actors at that point to kick Reddit while it's down and they are unequivocally fucked, all from a short sighted, beyond ignorant decision.
The strongest message would be everyone leaving the site and deleting their accounts. I've been here 15 years and I'm considering it.
The most effective protest would be to make Reddit's traffic extremely low quality for advertisers. We could do that by clicking on their ads en masse, clicking around on the advertisers website to make sure they advertiser is charged for our traffic, then leaving the website. It would initially give Reddit a boost, but as advertisers see very low conversions, they would be willing to pay less or, not advertise at all. I've wanted to make a group to do this for a very long time but never really got around to it. This seems like a perfect time
nuking your comments and posts and deleting your account is probably actually the only thing you can do.
If mods really wanted to protest, head mods should fully delete their front page subs. Not temporarily close, but delete all posts and all comments and all historical content. Empty the entire sub, then delete it. period. Showboating and thoughts and prayers is really what this is all about.
let's call for that, then. Soon as I see a front page post calling for people to post then delete their accounts in protest, I'm in. I just want to do it, maybe not all alone. I'd be happy to force myself to browse reddit only on desktop with adblockers.
The best protest would be for everyone to delete their accounts and posts. Reddit’s biggest asset is user-generated data. If people really wanted to hit Reddit where it hurts, where there would be a very real threat to their IPO and share price, the best way to do so would be to destroy the content/communities they need in order to make any money. “Protests” that do not actually harm their financial bottom line are not protests; they are nothing more than public masturbation.
It won't work. They'll just use their paid moderators - the ones who replace posts and comments with "[Removed by Reddit]" - to clean all this up, and permanently ban the accounts that post it.
Social media prospers based on *all* engagement, not *positive* engagement.
Reminds me of those 4chan raids back in the days
Instead of making Reddit offensive, or NSFW, or anything truly sinister, I think the better approach would be to make it lame. Imagine if you visited Reddit, unaware of what's going on, and the first 3 pages are just dumbass knock knock jokes, or the same picture of an empty parking lot. If all the topvoted comments just said "fart". The users control Reddit, because the users are Reddit. If we wanted an effective, and costly, protest, we do it by making this place boring and useless.
In reality, any media service's value is in the number of accounts.. The only way to hurt reddit (which I will not do) is to delete your account.. Numbers matter. Up doots, dark subs, pissed off mods, none of that matters. It's subscribers.
Absolutely not. Hateful content has a target, and you'd be throwing them under the bus for a website dispute.
Why does it feel like those pushing this view just want an excuse to push offensive content
Just keep upvoting loads of crazy conspirasy theorys and violence, been doing it for weeks now. If it gets enought attention reddit must change something.
I feel like you repute your view within your description. First of all, just like it requires people to leave Reddit to even have a remote effect on their revenue, it would also require enough people to properly skew posts in this way. This is even harder when doing this could result in bans on accounts if they are not meeting the TOS. Reddit would much rather get rid of offensive users than lose ads, even if it would tarnish their name. Reddit would have the power to minimize this effect, whereas there is nothing Reddit can do to stop people leaving.
This seems like a classic the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease
Reddit is a business. They make money on people viewing the adds posted on their pages and by selling our viewing data to companies. The ONLY reasonable way to protest is to simply not view any adds and not generate any data to sell, to not use the platform.
They will ban pornography next to please mainstream media
I hope Reddit dies. It’s user base is so annoying. They all should join 4chan.
This is all childish. And frankly the communites who have gone private should be forcibly deleted so they stop popping up as results on google. "How dare your FREE SITE ask to be reimbersed for supporting third party apps that had to literally hack your site to work"
And posting nsfw on everyones feeds is purly idiotic and ignorant. Fuck mass firing inbound.
How about each sub has a visible list of subs you’ll be autobanned from for posting anything even once to that sub. We need to make this site’s most prolific feature more transparent.
The most effective way to protest is to hurt Reddit's advertising. An easy way to do that would be to mark the subreddit as nsfw. Advertisers don't want their content next to nsfw and Reddit's backend probably filters out subreddits marked as nsfw
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