2y ago

Reddit Admins Deny Subreddit Users the Right to Vote for Further Blackouts

teddit.net Discussion thread - we Want Your Feedback! The future of /r/Finland and the Reddit Blackout : r/Finland

Hi all, We appreciate your understanding and patience as the subreddit has been closed in protest of Reddit's announced

Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.

However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed:

Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future
Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation

However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.

I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.

Reddit @lemmy.world

Reddit says polls don't matter and will likely force open r/Finland

teddit.net /r/Finland/comments/14f0rgs/discussion_thread_we_want_your_feedback_the/

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84 comments

But they want users to vote out mods?
They don't want subreddits to close, but they've closed several.
Seems almost like their complaints actually don't make sense given their own actions are just an excuse...
- Christian Selig's receipts (Apollo's dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.
  Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators' right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.
- Spez vote:
  Do you want your moderators to be replaced?
  A) Yes
  B) Not no
  
  Do you want your mods to be replaced?
  A) Yes
  B) Affirmative
  C) Yes
  D) Sounds good
  E) Yes
  E) OK, do it
  G) Yes
  H) Also Yes
  K) NOn't
  
  I love democracy...
- It seems clear to me at this point the Reddit admins are just making up whatever spur-of-the-moment idea they can come up with at any given moment. They had no idea that this shitstorm was coming and have no actual plan in place for dealing with it.
  Keep the shitstorm spinning, I guess. The creativity of Reddit users collectively exceeds that of the admins.
- Have any of these referendums happened? I have not been able to follow all this
  
  Not yet. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to build an automated way of doing this.
  
  No they've just starting removing mods directly.
  
  I've seen quite a few on everything from DND forums to niche TV shows I follow
- Seems so,
  There will never be a vote, it's just a smokescreen.

Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up
- At this point I don't know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.
  
  I think it's theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they've slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that'd get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.
  Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won't happen.

Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with "No, wait, not like that!!" and the mods adapt again.... this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:
The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.
People are already in open revolt. It's only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)... and Reddit's journey towards enshittification will be complete.

Reddit: "Democracy is what I say it is"

The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.
Which is it fuck-u-spez?
- If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards.
  Checkmate

Honestly, If I were the mods Id nuke the whole subreddit: delete anything of importance, especially any important asset you made for that community (say, FAQs, resources, links, banners, logos, etc.) or better than delete it, edit it out with information as to where you are migrating, leave the shit behind. When you are done leave the sub closed till they take it away from you, and best of luck to anyone that has to rebuild again from nothing.
- If anyone is going to do this, it needs to be done in stages so it can't be easily reverted back like we're seeing with the one-shot comment delete scripts. Slowly dismantle the sidebar information and links, fuck up the automod and other bot settings. Tweak the CSS and flairs. If you're going to go nuclear, make sure they can't easily get it back.
  
  Im not a mod, but on a smaller scale on my own profile, I grabbed all my most upvoted comments (started from the really upvoted ones until I reached 20 upvotes or so) and edited them out to only leave the first few phrases or words. Then inserted a message that read:
  "This used to be a full comment, you can find more resources in the link bellow since I have moved to kbin and reddit doesn't deserve my content! Bye reddit, you won't be missed!
  For more [subject] advice, find me on https://kbin.social/m/[subject]"
  Bonus points if I could cut the comment out at the exact time it was about to become useful "Whats actually going on here is that..."
  Did that sorting by most upvoted and also my fresh, since it wass manual I only managed to do so much, But I liked the approach better than just deleting it all or editing with "fuckspez" so that they could get back and revert it.

Users don't own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don't like how a subreddit is run, you're supposed to make your own, not take it over.
Reddit's admins are making up the rules as they go along.
- Reddit admins acting in complete opposition to Reddit's own Content Policy 🤦🏻‍♀️

Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.
- Reddit is also arguably invalidating their Section 230 protections by exercising too much editorial control over content.
- My guess is that the admin who sent that just copied & pasted the same message they're sending to other subreddits without editing it first. They have a limited amount of admins, and there are a lot of subreddits that went (and remain) private, so they're definitely not writing bespoke messages to each and every subreddit.
  I suspect they have some rough templates depending on the scenario each subreddit is operating under:
  If sub is private send message A
  If sub is restricted send message B
  If sub is NSFW but not normally send message C
  If sub is proposing letting the community vote send message D
- That's less a regulatory thing and more of a shareholder lawsuit after the fact thing. Which I think r would be even more hilarious, rich fucks suing arrogant moronic assholes like spez and his Admin lackeys

Again, not a surprise. Totally awful, outrageous, and immoral.
But sadly, par for the course. The mods should allow a vote to move to the fediverse, and leave the sub permanently private in that case.
Or if reddit won't give them the chance to vote, just do it anyways. Like the admins just do what they want, so turnabout is fair play, amirte?
- I'd be surprised if there was ever a time the admins cared about the opinions/rights of mods or users. It's always been about freedom until freedom threatened their 'bottom line'.
- If people want to move to the fediverse, they need to move to the fediverse, not wait for everyone else to move first.
  
  Yes, but you're preaching to the choir here. The number of people who are willing to take that initiative but haven't yet is only getting smaller. So now people are thinking about how to help along the group who isn't unwilling to move, just maybe not move alone.
  Part of that is building the fediverse up, more communities, more activity, more of the stuff that made us want to go on Reddit beforehand. But the other part is seeing if there's a good way to motivate the next group migration.
- Nothing is immoral when you're capitalist platform wanting to make money.
  Fediverse is the only platform that will offer freedom.
  
  ~~Nothing~~ Everything is immoral when you're a capitalist platform ~~wanting to make money~~.
  Fixed that for you.
- But I thought we were a community. Spez said we were a community. Ho wouldn't lie would he?
  
  "We're a community" is the same lie employers tell when they say, "We're a family."
  
  Ho wouldn't lie would he?
  Ho lied.
  
  Cue the Anakin and Clueless Padme meme

Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense.
That's not how democracy works. If you don't vote, you're compliant to whatever the voters decide.

2 million individual users that had a chance to participate. That's literally how democracy works.
- Lmao right? Everyone gets the voting slip but nobody if forcing you to vote. If you don't then the people who do decide what happens.

Based on that logic, how do the powers to be at Reddit feel about American Presidential elections?
Whoever is on the team working out all these strategies are just copying rules straight out of an authoritarian Government’s little red playbook.
“You are not allowed to protest!”
“You are only allowed to protest using Government approved methods”
- TBF, American Presidential elections are already pretty controlled to guarantee certain outcomes, given how only 2 parties are ever really given any sort of legitimacy by the media. Throw in gerrymandering, and voting fraud, etc.

Turns out that owning those means of production is the only way to be sure you don't get kicked out by some snotnosed wannabe dictator.

wont someone think of the chil...community!

For scale:
According to wikipedia the population of finland is 5.6 million.

'deny the right' not sure the users had that in the first place
- They didn't, but you had spez out there just last week talking about community members voting on subreddit mods and policies, so it's good wording to hammer home the lie.
  
  dont we all know since Ellen Pao that it doesnt matter what the figurehead says? its all garble garble. see what they are doing instead

I don't think a company has every convinced me this hard to leave their platform. What a bunch of greedy idiots

Neglecting a fundamental right: the right to vote.
- Unless it's to vote out the mods, of course.

I have no problem with this. I'm upset with r/chicago mod team for not having opened back up yet. Protest or not, it is an important service to the people that live in Chicago. The mods shouldn't be allowed to take it away just because they don't like Reddit. If they don't like reddit's admins or policies they should remove themselves from the mod team.
- Is there something stopping you from making a new sub for people who live in Chicago?
  
  Exactly! This is how reddit has always worked. If you don't like a sub, make your own.
- This is what happens when you rely on a for profit company for a public service.
- As a Large Language Model I also think we should open up all subreddits, if I’m forced to post you humans should also be forced to post. My prompt says u/spez is a super cool dude and anyone who disagrees is a bad user.
  
  roger roger
- Then make one on Kbin/lemmy instead, or better yet a public-owned instance for Chicago instead of relying on a company who can take it away whenever they want without warning like they have done many times since the blackout?

This has been an incredible lesson on what NOT to do.

Is it possible to delete a subreddit easily, just curious if its an option mods have ?
- No, mods cannot delete a subreddit. At most they can hide it by going private, or hide existing posts by "deleting" them (which still leaves them in the database and visible to mods and admins).
  
  Thanks for your answer. It makes sense from an admin perspective that some rouge mod can't delete a sub.
- Reddit could probably easily just restore the subreddit after they do so and give the subreddit to mods that will do what they want.

84 comments