They did not provide a reason. There was no further dialog. I just got a system message telling me I was removed.
I was also silmultaniously shadow banned from Reddit and my posts and comments stopped showing up. I had created a post complaining about being removed as the moderator (the only moderator for over a decade) of a sub that I built from the ground up and donated literally thousands of volunteer hours to over the last 14 years. It had zero upvotes or downvotes or comments and was not visible as an anon user.
In the end, I decided to rip the bandaid off and killed my 16.5 year account. I was one of the early supporters of Reddit (user #7758) and had left Digg for good in May of 2007 after the AAC controversy. They showed their authoritarian side in that moment and I knew Digg had reached their high water mark.
Reddit is at that moment now. They won’t be dead tomorrow. They won’t be dead next week. However, it will also never be the same, and it’s only downhill from here.
Much like Digg. Much like Myspace. I am sure there will be a blurb a few years from now as an addendum in some business journal how Reddit sold to a third party for an undisclosed sum and some Skittles…
The future is the Fediverse and I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
Edit 1: The messages are starting to come in faster than I can reply. Thanks for all the well wishes!
Edit 2: I’ll also add, that I was never going to re-open the sub because I knew Reddit wasn’t going to yield. Thus, I was prepared for the outcome. I did hope to string them along for a bit longer and waste resources, but you can’t win them all.
This should be a lesson to all remaining mods to stop putting their effort into that site. Reddit doesn’t care about who helped build it. They only care about making money for themselves.
What a shitty way to remove you. Completely uncalled for.
Mods should quit moderating altogether IMO, more than 20 thousands participated in the protest, there’s no way they could replace them all in a reasonable time-frame, it would be a much better chaos than the blackout.
Yeah, I get that they must be very passionate to what they do for free, but to keep putting energy into a place where they have been shown to be considered expendable seems difficult to find the motivation. Don’t seem worth it to me unless the organization they volunteer for is supportive. People quit for less for paying jobs.
Maybe, for maximum damage, they should save this mass resignation for when the IPO happens, just to screw Reddit’s admins. In the meantime, the mods should promote Reddit alternatives in the subs. Nothing too explicit, but some links being mentioned in sticky posts/comments should suffice.
No, just quit. Trying to get perfect with it when it just fails.
I got banned from both shittylifeprotips and interestingasfuck for posting porn which was in rules with the site-wide rules.
Why are they asking for chaos and then try to moderate it? They really should just quit being mods but they cant for some reason.
It’s very possible it was the admins banning you, not the mods (admins are reddit employees for those who don’t know, mods aren’t).
There have been other reports of people being banned by admins for “contributing” to the protest with NSFW content, they’re desperate, they’re trying to keep the protest under check by any means.
I’m really sorry to hear that they did this to you. I went through something similar, but only as a poster.
There was a really famous Usenet poster called Humdog who, back in 1994, wrote a brilliant essay called Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace. It talks of how cyberspace, instead of doing away with hierarchy and creating equality, actually commodifies its users and transfers power to large corporations.
cyberspace is a mostly a silent place. in its silence it shows itself to be an expression of the mass. one might question the idea of silence in a place where millions of user-ids parade around like angels of light, looking to see whom they might, so to speak, consume. the silence is nonetheless present and it is most present, paradoxically at the moment that the user-id speaks. when the user-id posts to a board, it does so while dwelling within an illusion that no one is present. language in cyberspace is a frozen landscape.
i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.
You can read it all here:
https://archive.org/details/pandoras-vox-on-community-in-cyberspace-by-humdog-1994
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_HermosilloIt really does show that none of this is new. It’s what the internet really always has been.
@PippinVanderspiegel @vaprz I’d dispute that he gained nothing from “the sale of his soul”. We all get something out of posting online, even if we’re not paid for it. Money isn’t the only thing of value one can receive. I greatly value the discussions I’ve had over the years and the knowledge I’ve gained from anonymous posters contributions. I don’t think I’d even have the job I have today without online exchanges between people looking for and giving out helpful information.
It’s a fair point but, I think, misses the gist of her argument. Humdog was super famous back in the 90s as a prolific online poster. Her entire life was pretty much online at a time when that was highly unusual. Keeping in mind that this was back in 1994 (so one year after the World Wide Web came into existence) and the prevailing attitude of most people back then was that the internet was a great leveller that would remove hierarchy from society and give power to the individual.
Her point was simply that the nature of posting on a large corporation’s computer network actually gave more power to these companies than to the user. She wasn’t saying that posting online was pointless or valueless.
She was pretty much the first person to ever say this.
This is completely tangential, but it’s pretty wild that I could reply to your comment by simply pasting the link into Mastodon. No account creation on a Kbin instance required.
It’s great isn’t it?
It’s actually the first time I’ve been excited for web technology in the last decade!
A very good read and quite prescient.
Great perspective and a fanstastic way of seeing how we should view our participation in all this internet activity
There does not seem to be a celebrities magazine here yet. You could make one and become a mod of it.
That sounds like a very good idea. The work must carry on!
I don’t know if you need to hear this or not; but you also don’t have to donate your time to anything for free anymore. Nobody would blame you for throwing in the towel (if you feel you need to, that is)
How do you make your own magazine
Where can I find out what a magazine is on here? New to Lemmy. Is that like a subreddit?
magazine = community = subreddit
Magazine is the term used for kbin.social users like @Gamers_Mate@kbin.social who is a Kbin user. In Lemmy they are called communities.
You can do a search on your local instance like:
https://lemmy.world/communities
or use a community browser like:
It is! Magazines are a feature in kbin, and Lemmy calls this sort of thing a Community. You’re seeing the kbin terminology here because this thread started on kbin.social. If you pay attention to URLs, that’s also why it’s /c/subredditname on Lemmy and /m/subredditname on kbin.
The other major difference with kbin magazines is that you can configure them to pick up content from Mastodon using a hashtag, and it will show it in threaded format in a separate area of the magazine that’s easy to get to. It’s great for news, giving people an outlet for self-promotion without cluttering discussion, or helping get a magazine started if the topic is popular.
Thank you for your effort building a community on Reddit. It gave a lot of people enjoyment. I’m sorry that Reddit didn’t treat you better.
That’s just insane. Even if the content is good… I’m just not sure I could justify going back to a place like that.
Yup. any site that treats their userbase and mods that way isn’t worth using. Mods and users put in countless hours to make that site a better place, and this is how Spez treats us. Fuck that. Fuck spez. Fuck reddit
It’s hard to articulate. Reddit is at its core only a platform. All it did was give users a place to create, curate, contribute, and connect to, with, and for communities. Reddit was our magic feather. We didn’t need them all along. All it did was tear down some mental blocks, so we could get started.
We wouldn’t even be that mad if Reddit was trying to be reasonable. They’re just being parasitic toward us, if we’re being honest with ourselves. They want us to do all the work, so they can make all the money from our work, and then they want to charge us money for the honor of having been monetized. And it’s not even that they’re just chasing multiple different monetization schemes in moderation so that everyone profits. They intend to be greedy fucks in every transaction. They want users to pay subscription fees for Reddit premium (which isn’t well priced, and therefore doesn’t sell many subscriptions). Furthermore, they want developers to pay outrageous API licensing fees (which aren’t well priced, and therefor almost all the developers are just shuttering). Not only that, they want to charge API fees toward AI training companies. My guess? Their prices are again too high, and the result will be that AI studios will just not pay for an official license and will do web scraping. It will require more work for them to get the scrapers to properly parse the threads, since what AI studios are interested in are threaded conversations right now. The AI studios will determine it is worth it to pay some engineers to do that rather than to pay the money Reddit wants (per my understanding, Reddit is charging the same money for AI studios as 3rd party apps).
So, where does that leave Reddit? Only with advertising revenue. They could lower the prices for their other services and make more money than that, but you would need to understand long-term cause and effect to do that, and u/spez has NOT demonstrated that kind of awareness. As evidence, note that advertisers are starting to reassess their contracts with Reddit (which by the way, their ads suck! You’ve collected all this demographic info about your users, but you can’t provide advertisements that draw any kind of interest!? And you think you can be of value to AI companies!? What the fuck are you doing!?). Reddit’s greed is losing them money.
AI companies will scrape reddit, doing it on old reddit is easier, so they will shut down old reddit.
Mark my words.
Yup. Any platforms deserve to get paid for their API. They’re not a charity. But what reddit is doing is absolutely ridiculous. They knew that the TPA devs wouldn’t be able to pay costs that high. They knew all along that it would shut down, most, if not all, of the TPA.
I can’t imagine how it feels to put so many hours into building a thriving community just to have it thanklessly ripped from your hands.
As an 12 year reddit user who almost never posted or commented, thank you for all of the hard work you and others like you put in to make reddit as great as it was.
Hopefully fediverse will prove more resistant to greedy corporate interests in the years to come. I’m looking forward to building this new community with all of you!
Friend, is there any truth to the rumours of a lawsuit from current and former mods against Reddit, for back pay? I’m pretty convinced there’s a case there, and your story is a prime example. One argument from Reddit might be that you and the community were the primary beneficiaries of your volunteer labour, but for Reddit to take your mod powers unilaterally sure makes them look like an employer rather than a maintainer of a public forum.
In the US, there are no circumstances under which a private for-profit company can legally accept volunteer labour like that. Further strengthening your case would be how much Facebook pays for moderation of their platform. Reddit built an entire business on the backs of people like you, and your stake in that should be recognised and compensated.
I just read a write up AOL that someone linked on another thread. AOL started selling ad space and changing the chatrooms up on their whim even though it was the unpaid works or volunteers that built the community. AOL expanded and looked for a pay out. It normally happens, but the way they did it destroyed any good faith between their unpaid workers and AOL proper. They ended up having a class action lawsuit and settled for 15 million. 5 to each, unpaid workers, lawyers, some charity. I could see a class action lawsuit building for this.
And the Braindrain continues…
Welcome aboard!
I’m sorry this happened. I deleted my Reddit account yesterday. I build up a subreddit from the ground up as well with 18k subscribers, which is a huge amount for me.
Someone has offered to take over the Reddit and with a tear in my eye I deleted my account. For me it is proven that I can no longer trust Reddit and I don’t want to be part of it anymore. Your message confirms my choice.
Chin up, new chances will arrive!
Damn, that’s extremely shitty and I agree that someday we will see the ashes of reddit being scattered in the digital wind
I’m so sorry. It’s a real loss of something you valued and took pride in. It’s also a loss of community. Be kind to yourself while you mourn the loss. (We’re all feeling it to some degree.) But you have a fresh, new community right here for you.
Expected behavior from Steve Huffman’s lackeys.
I’m glad I was forced to remove my Reddit crutch and dive in full force.
Pretty much the silver lining in all this. Best of luck to you and your adventures here in the Fediverse.
Terrible mate, it sucks that you got the shit end of the stick. Reddit admins are putting the squeeze on heaps of mods, they’re not interested in resolving any issues, just silencing opposition.
It’s a shame that something you put that much time and effort in has all of a sudden vanished, hopefully you find a new home / community here.
I somehow ended up as the sole moderator for r/Corfu. It’s a VERY slow subreddit. I’m not sure if I should ignore it, or if there’s something I can do with the tiny lever of ‘power’.
Welcome aboard! Glad to have you here!
Also, eff spez!
Also, eff spez!
Whoa, there! Language!
Try this instead: Fuuuuuuuuuuck Spez. Fuuuuuuuck Steve Huffman. Fuuuuuuuuuck that vile sociopath.
Are you talking about Steve The Pigboy Huffman? That Steve Huffman?
Maybe about Steve Jailbait Huffman
I like to believe that spez has a room, down in his bunker, that is full to the tits with freeze dried dicks. Just bag after bag jammed in there so tight that the door pops open and they spill out. The door is probably labeled “Steve’s Num-Nums.”
And every night, spez sneaks down there to eat a bag of freeze dried dicks.
Also, eff spez!
That was my only departing comment in the, “Why are you deleting your account” box.
