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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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I'm OOTL, what's the joke here?
Several image themed subreddits voted to change their rules so that only "sexy" pictures of Jon Oliver were allowed. (in practice, any picture of Jon Oliver) It was intended as a form of protest against subreddits receiving threats from the admins to have their head mod role transferred to any mod who was willing to reopen the sub.
This one was apparently too sexy for the Reddit admins to handle...
Basically reddit admins said they will remove mods that don't open the subs back up.
Mods opened the subs and took a poll.
A) open like normal
B) only allows submissions of sexy John Oliver.
I think r/pics and r/gifs both did that. Not sure about any others. The vehement majority voted only sexy John Oliver posts.
So now the subreddits are technically open. And posts like this are what are filling them.
I saw that r/WellThatSucks is only doing posts about vacuums now.
/r/aww and /r/art are now both John Oliver. /r/steam is focusing on water vapor.
Lots of subreddits are being forced / threatened to open back up so that Spez can fix his IPO valuation and stop these mean mean moderators from hurting his feelings
Some subreddits are opening up and changing their rules so that only specific exact content is being allowed. For example the r/steam subreddit for the steam gaming platform is now discussing literal steam, the idea being that the subreddit is open but it's either a joke or crap content
It's a good enough solution, opening these things in name only and forcefully moderating thing to ensure the conversation and engagement is boring, there's not much else mods can do when admins are being a bunch of dicks.
Ehh, if Reddit is getting traffic from people going to see the trolling, then Reddit is still making money.
Not if I view them using those third party apps they apparently need to charge an arm and a leg for.
OK, true, but that's why they want to charge 3rd party apps.
And I’m fine with them wanting to do that.
The protest was less about them wanting to charge a price, it’s that in a time frame of 6 months reportedly went from “the API won’t have changes anytime soon” to “we’re going to pivot to a paid API soon” to “we’re charging you advertiser rates per x million API requests, starting in a month, and you cannot supplement with your own ads”.
There was no time for these apps to adjust their pricing models. Most were on yearly subscription models or ad-driven. Having that large a pivot in the rules with no time to adapt the business model is just shitty partnership on Reddit’s part.
Also the fact that they were involving the third party app maintainers at all. There's no technical reason that REDDIT couldn't put the payment mechanisms in place to block USERS from making API calls through Oauth Apps. If you pay whatever subscription fee your account can make calls through whatever third party app you like.
But instead they decided that they were going to charge the APPS for some inane reason, and put figuring out a user-facing payment mechanism on those maintainers.
I actually do think charging apps is the right way to go about it, rather than charging users for an API key that will let them use the app - but all of that is to say that they went about it the wrong way entirely.
The point is that the sub will be dead in a few weeks, unless the admins double down again, wipe the whole mod team, and seize control to run it themselves or by admin-approved-mods or something. Which frankly as a billion-dollar company they probably should have done years ago in a more graceful manner for their dozen main subs like r/pics, but it yanks the veil off and makes the corporate power-grab super visible.
This is exactly what I'm thinking. I just stopped cold turkey.