I mean I don’t see much activity outside politics. Edit: As you all mentioned I’ll try blocking some political and news communities and try to find some new communities.
I mean I don’t see much activity outside politics. Edit: As you all mentioned I’ll try blocking some political and news communities and try to find some new communities.
Unfortunately, Reddit has learned from their mistakes and restricted the ability for moderators to lock down their own subreddits. So any protest actions will not be as effective as 2023.
And just recently, Reddit announced that you can no longer generate your own API keys and will need to request permission from Reddit themselves. This is the final nail in the coffin for 3rd party apps, as back in 2023 you could still generate your own API keys and continue using 3rd party apps. The silence in the public outrage against this is deafening.
Instead of taking drastic actions affecting the most amount of people, Reddit is taking smaller actions that will slowly kill off things they don’t like. This will limit the outrage, and at the same time, they get to achieve what they want.
Don’t forget giving accounts the ability to hide their activity on the profile page, making bots and corporate spam accounts very easy to hide.
Making it functionally impossible to track bot activity.
Reddit, like Facebook, has the advantage of inertia: most people are on Reddit, so other people patronize Reddit, making Reddit even larger. And just like Facebook, it takes something particularly egregious from Reddit to get enough people to walk out at the same time. And you’re correct: Reddit has learned to slow-boil the frogs to avoid this.
But - maybe I’m naive - I’m banking of the Fediverse offering consistently better quality and less drama than Reddit to slowly attract people who want something better, and I’m trying to do my part to increase the S/N ratio on here.
2023 was such a wasted opportunity because the moderators chickened out. For about a week, almost every single sizeable community was blacked out. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.
A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.
The mods who left were quickly replaced.
The ones who stayed but didn’t comply were replaced too.
Some just liked being in power too much.
Most mod teams didn’t leave. They made an example of a handful of especially rebellious mod teams, albeit I believe in most cases they had a quisling near the bottom of the mod list contacting reddit to tell them they would happily take over.
But there’s a difference between doing that dozen times, and having to do that a thousand times.
The subreddit mods had all the power. If the top mods of all the communities that blacked out just removed all mods and shut down the subreddit, it would’ve been chaos on Reddits end. Most people are not well-suited to moderating.