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Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
For those wondering... TamperMonkey browser add-on with RedditHistorySanitizer userscript (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code). It's kinda slow, but much faster than doing it manually!
Or they're just, you know... children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I'm willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don't see the need to be involved in this because they weren't on the site when there wasn't an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don't think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don't understand the effects here because to them "third party" isn't something that they knew existed. "API changes" isn't something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn't care, because in their minds, they don't need to. It's "not their fight". Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We're in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit's users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It's not a simple "with us or against us" situation as some like to believe.
Yes. Mods form a very important minority.
I've seen statistics showing that most of the traffic returned. I wonder, how long will that last without good mods?
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I'm (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn't matter if it's new mods or old ones. They'll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they "lost the protest" and the new ones "don't know what they're doing and only want the power".
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it'll rise up to similar levels once people are "fuck it" and use the official app. That's what reddit's counting on, and they're not wrong. I'm guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who "just want to use reddit".
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it'll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there's probably going to be "waves" in which a portion ditches the site. They'll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It's funny because I'm guessing a bunch of people who right now are all "don't know why you're complaining" will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing "don't know why you're complaining". Cycle continues.
I'm not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into "I heard about....."