this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023

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Technology

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105

Reddit mods are organizing blackouts to protest against API changes (www.reddit.com)

submitted 2 years ago by anji@lemmy.anji.nl to c/technology@beehaw.org

158 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Was thinking perhaps subreddits could just stop moderating and auto approve everything en masse... that would create a spam hell more beautiful than anything we would have seen before...

Unmarked NSFW stuff highly upvoted on the front page, crypto bullshit in every sub, every subreddit doing a "If this gets 2 times X votes, I post again" making the frontpage useless. It would be total anarchy and cause Reddit to implode on itself before you can say "What Snoo".

I doubt this will happen in reality because people actually care about preserving their subreddits. Anyway enough pipedreaming.

[–] m_talon@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

If what they're saying is true, that might happen anyway. A lot of moderation is done using third party bots that use the API. Without those, it all has to be done manually and no one has time for that. Even then a lot of the manual moderation is done using third party tools (again, impacted by the API change).

Reddit's about to pull an implosion that'll make Twitter and Digg look like blips. I got the heck out of there and now I'm just sitting back with my popcorn and tea watching it all burn down.

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[–] Humanoid@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

I support the blackouts, and I'm happy to see some of the larger subreddits starting to join, but I highly doubt this will change the API policy. The Reddit administration knew they were committing to a destructive course of action; they are not stupid, they're pursuing an aggressive, purposeful corporate monetization strategy. That said, I do hope more major subreddits speak out, and I think the 48-hour blackout will open some users' eyes to Reddit's questionable philosophy.

[–] Suppoze@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Even more so, I agree with @tangentism's thought in this post "It’s great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted."

If Reddit would backstep from this change somehow, then the rare opportunity of change will close shortly. Reddit just needs to push this through and hopefully it'll burn itself down.

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[–] wslagoon@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I hope this protest has a positive effect, but cynically I'm pretty sure it's going to make a small splash, and then fizzle. Any popular subs that go dark too long well get sudo'd back online I'm sure.

[–] zwubb@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My pipe dream is, instead of a black out, all the users come together and spam NSFW content on all the major subs to hopefully piss off their advertisers. Collaboration on that scale will probably never happen though.

[–] soulless@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

If you really want to hit them, just make a concerted effort to request GDPR data for your user. It's perfectly legal, it costs them time and money, and it may also actually benefit you to know what kind of data reddit collects about you.

At some point, it may even become a nice tool, say if someone creates a way to import that data into e.g. the fediverse or tilde or something similar.

For anyone interested, this is the page: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request. Just log in, select GDPR and request data for your "full time at Reddit".

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[–] AbelianGrape@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

This is why the protest is limited to 48 hours at first, because that's the known "safe" duration. See what happened to r/news a couple years ago.

The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.

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[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (18 children)

Its nice that Reddit is promoting Lemmy like this. I just wish they would give us more time to optimize the code so that it can handle all the new users. For now it looks like many Lemmy instances will be completely overloaded from Monday, but lets see.

[–] Kaldo@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

Lemmy only has a day or two of the blackout to grab users from reddit, I really hoped someone would prepare servers for the participating subreddits or something like that. It seems like a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain some traction.

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[–] polaroid@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yup, old time reddit user here. Sad to see this, but excited to see where the change will lead.

[–] Jacob@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight.

[–] Gork@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (3 children)

This is like watching an incredibly slow train wreck. We know what the outcome looks like, but are (mostly) powerless to stop it unless these blackouts work.

[–] mobyduck648@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah it's like watching a drunk man confidently walk out into oncoming traffic in a moment of hubris. Everyone can see what's about to happen except him.

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