he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.networkNot the CNBC guy but I've got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻
API access has an approval process, and reddit has already been clear they will not just allow users to get their own API keys.
The only way this makes any sense is if there's an active coup against Putin, Lukashenko is in on it, and convinced him to pause while the Kremlin takes out Putin, to avoid him having to fight other Russians.
Facebook being used as a way to keep up with friends has been fading for a while. It's mostly only older people left on it, Elder Millennial and older (I'm an Elder Millennial fwiw).
Facebook's real social media power is in its groups and pages. There's usually local town groups, like you'd have with NextDoor. But there's also giant meme groups. New Urbanist Memes for Transit Oriented Teens (NUMTOTs) is huge, and is basically posts about trains and hating landlords, but it was big enough to the notable when the group endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016. Another huge one is Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends, which is memes about nature and wild animals. Facebook has become a lot like reddit, in that it's what you make of it in terms of weird friends and niche groups.
The current go to joke about facebook goes like this:"Facebook is lame, there's no one on it anymore and it's no fun.""Facebook is still fun if all your friends are gay communists."
Yeah, it's been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.
- Community: reddit, we do not like this thing you are doing. Insert thing here. All of ViolentAkrez's messed up porn subreddit stuff, r/jailbait, r/thedonald, firing the woman in charge of AMAs, Ellen Pao's drastic attempts at monetization (which was just her being the scapegoat for Huffman and crew) and now these API changes. Stop doing this thing that is hurting your community.
- reddit: Here are a lot of words to say that we don't care about what any of you think, and we believe we are making the right decisions. While we understand you are all upset, we do not care and do not plan on changing.
- Community: OK, well we're going to continue protesting this and escalating until you change it.
- reddit: that's all great but we still don't care.
- repeat x5 escalations
- The matter finally hits mainstream media. Gawker, or a major online news site, if we get really lucky, there's a CNN segment on it.
- Within 30 seconds of mainstream media coverage, reddit caves and does the thing the community asked for the entire time.
This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We've done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin's attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit's mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn't going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they'll get to walk with the bag.
But in reality, we should've ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It's not that reddit's admins don't care. It's that they haven't cared in a long time. Huffman doesn't care. I don't think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site's staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there's a problem, there's no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.
This. I was a redditor for 14 years. I was a moderator, I ran reddit meetups in Philly and Jersey. I have a badge on my profile for working with one of the admins 13 years ago to add /r/friends/comments, for use in a 3rd party app for Ubuntu (the kind that will now be dying). I was there for the Digg migration, Secret Santa, Global Reddit Meetup Days, Reddit Gold, Reddit Mold, Team Periwinkle, I was Snapped. I run a subreddit, different_sob_story, that was literally a meta subreddit about bad reddit posts.
Did I have a reddit addiction? Yeah, probably. But it was a large background in my life, for 14 years. If there's a famous reddit moment, I was probably there for it. I had 2 real life relationships, because of reddit. I made a good chunk of my real life friends through reddit. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
So yeah, it's a lot. And some redditors will get over it quicker than others. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.
I had a Hacker News discussion where in separate comments, a guy said:
- all the moderators should go away because they're not needed, and he doesn't agree with their decisions
- but there should still be moderation
- but he's not going to do it because he's not here to do unpaid labor
- but of course he wouldn't pay for there to be moderators
Internet discourse in a nutshell
What it does do is actively highlight that the community is being destroyed, and the protests are actively degrading the experience. All the more to entice people to look around at other social media options.
Given this update I don't think the mods have a real choice on that. The original top mods have been removed, the new ones opened it back up.