What it says on the tin, really. I think this is going to be an issue when they get around to the smaller communities… It’s going to suck majorly, as most people’s default will remain with reddit for community discussion like this…
The “sacking” of the current moderator volunteers that I’ve seen in some news articles this morning leads me to the next step, which is if a moderator can be tossed, that’s a chilling effect for the next moderator and then, all the people who remain subscribed to that subreddit. I don’t know if that will actually happen this way, it will at least be a fascinating exploration to see how this all unfolds. Someone on Mastodon mentioned that Reddit makes no content of their own, it’s all volunteers, the public, and their 3rd-party toolset. That they are burning all of it and maintaining that everything will be fine in the end. Smells a lot like bravado and big-talk.
I think this is a important take - as far as users are concerned Reddit merely hosts the content and the community, but as far as Reddit is concerned it owns the content and wants to monetise the community.
The problem for Reddit is the moderation is done by users who do it for free, mostly because they love their communities and want to keep them going. Those people are not easy to replace - plenty of communities shut because no one wanted to moderate them, and plenty of users just aren’t interested. So if they lose the moderators, there is a small pool of people to replace them and many of those may not be motivated in the same way. There will also be bad actors amongst those untested moderators.
Lose the moderators, and the communities fall apart as bad content, rule breaking and negative behaviour takes hold. The “content” becomes lost and the value of what reddit things it owns falls massively. An archive of old reddit comments is actually not worth much - sure people google things and find answers on Reddit - but it’s the current active users and daily content that draws people in.
I think Reddit is doomed as it is failing to understand it’s own business and what made the site successful.
Yup. An opinion writer in the Washington Post had a weird analogy yesterday, but it works — Reddit’s business model is almost the same as a thrift store’s. People donate stuff (clothes and furniture to Goodwill, analysis and humor to Reddit). Volunteers sort through it and throw out the bad stuff (volunteers at Goodwill, moderators at Reddit). And the business sells it (Reddit has one extra step here in that it sells ads, so it uses the donated-and-sorted stuff to build an audience to sell).
If the donators and the sorters walk, what do they have to sell?
That’s a good analogy, makes it easier to communicate Reddit’s business model and how messed up they are right now. Thanks for sharing!
That opinion peace helped me to understand what was different about this situation vs Twitter. The business model at Twitter is different. Twitter didn’t require communities with tremendous user investment to create a community, and by not realizing community was the differentiating aspect of Reddit, they didn’t understand how passionate people would be.
I read a pretty great write up on Mother Jones about the inevitable enshittification of reddit. Seems like all social media sites are doomed to turn into hot garbage eventually.
Oh, reddit will survive, it’ll just be even shittier than before. And maybe it’ll bounce back to somewhere close to what it was, but in the meantime, there’s now a growing viable alternative.
My recommendation for anyone who decides to visit reddit adopt a comment signature promoting startrek.website along with a link to a new user tutorial and a quick explanation of why we left. Keep picking them off and make our existence common knowledge over there.
Most likely, they’ll make a way for people to take over subreddits that went private and have no activity for a while, if there isn’t one already. r/StarTrek might get special treatment, or it might just be shunted over into a new general policy like this.
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Eh it’ll happen. Either the mods will want to see the subreddit continue or they will leaveike us. One way or the other it will be back.
Just gotta make this place fun a d engaging.
hey um, /r/startrek is reopen now lol
Open it back up and change the rules to only allow pictures of starships, encourage discussion’s over here.
I’m loving the malicious compliance arch
All pictures, videos, and discussion must have John Oliver in them somewhere.
That would be unfair to the people who stayed behind and want to stay with reddit.
That’s their choice.
Just because some users decide to stay with reddit does not mean they deserve to have their community destroyed.
Beg to differ there. Reddit has shown it’s hand. They want to profit off free content while giving nothing back to the people who create that content. Back them at your peril.
The actual users or the community I should say, is not profiting off of anything. Don’t conflate the users of the service or app that is Reddit with its management.
Let’s be clear on one thing: as with any private social network, Reddit’s users are the product, not the customers.
They are the community, just like we users are here. Punishing them for something the Reddit management did, would be unnecessary vindictive, IMHO.
I didn’t conflate them. I never said the users were trying to profit. Reddit is trying to profit off user generated content that is free given and moderated while whining that others are using the api they gave away for free to do the same thing, except those developers actually provide better user experiences and accessibility than Reddit does. Reddit has shown that the only thing that matters is the money they can extract from the free labor of others, so staying on that platform is acceptance of those consequences.
I know what Reddit is doing. What I’m saying is that the users and the community in many of the subreddits are not to blame and should not be blamed or punished by users who decided they no longer want any part or reddit.
Reddit is making it much more difficult for the moderators to build and maintain communities. They’re also cutting off accessible apps for using Reddit, eliminating a portion of their userbase.
Brass tacks, the community will come back (or another one will form, like r/Star_Trek or something) if people are willing to do the work. This requires them to be okay with doing unpaid labor for Reddit even while Reddit is making that labor harder. They also have to be okay with crossing a picket line.
I’m not defending reddit as a corporate entity, I “defending” its users and the community and argue against punishing them to punish reddit.
That’s a fully general argument against strikes. We shouldn’t punish Piggly-Wiggly’s customers by striking; they might not be able to get their groceries somewhere else. We shouldn’t punish drivers by striking at the auto shop; some people won’t be able to get their cars repaired.
The big difference is that r/StarTrek is nowhere near as important as a grocery store or auto shop. People need to eat to live. People need to get places. People don’t need to discuss Star Trek online at all. Much less do they need to discuss it specifically on Reddit. So the argument is more like: we shouldn’t punish customers of Sam’s Nail Salon by striking; they might have to go to Pat’s Nail Salon a couple blocks over instead, and that’s just not fair.
If you were to protest Piggly-Wiggly grocery store, you would do so by not going there and not by tampering their products or blocking people from entering the store. And your second argument can be turned around to the actual reddit protest itself, like you said reddit is not important so it is equally unimportant, technically speaking, what they are charging for their API. Fact however is, people use reddit, so we are back at the beginning. Protest is fine, put to punish users who still want to use reddit is not.
Oh No!!! It would be UNFAIR!!!
Thats part of the point.
That is a bad and vindictive point then, since the reddit users are not the ones who wronged you.
You do realize that if a protest doesn’t inconvenience people its worthless right? A protest that makes everyone happy is just a rally.
Who are you protesting? The users of reddit or reddit? You are here and I am here, we are protesting reddit with our actual feet so to speak. The ones who want to stay behind, that is their right and who are we to punish them?
Splinter the community, I’m going to stay with the people who went through the mess of setting up a new place that isn’t beholden to Reddit. It may be forever smaller, but of the 600,000 subscribers, how many of them contribute?
It may be forever smaller
I would honestly consider this a feature, not a bug.
eh, it is what it is, and i’d say not really either. For now, probably nearly everyone that’s staying here is probably a contributing member, but if we continue building and promoting this community, then it will get to a sizeable number of lurkers. As long as we don’t attract bad actors, or bad actors are dealt with swiftly, it’s all good.
yeah we gotta grow this community. And wait for reddit to make the next mistake that will drive people here.
For sure. If this community stagnates, it will eventually die of attrition.
Most social media runs by the 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users lurk, 9% of users post, 1% of users produce content.
I’m hoping that this house cleaning changes those numbers up some.
I know that a lot of people are afraid to post. They may not believe that they have anything interesting to say. And they may not trust their ability to write coherently. Some of you folks are intimidatingly good at writing insightful posts and making it understandable to everybody.
Maybe with a smaller community we can encourage more people to take part and, paradoxically, become more diverse.
I’d also like to encourage everybody to attempt to post something interesting. A pet theory. A reinterpretation of a scene. It doesn’t really matter. You can only get better by doing and we all benefit from new ideas. Don’t be afraid to sound like a fool. It’s kinda my default state and I’m still here.
I’d also like to encourage everybody to attempt to post something interesting. A pet theory. A reinterpretation of a scene. It doesn’t really matter. You can only get better by doing and we all benefit from new ideas. Don’t be afraid to sound like a fool. It’s kinda my default state and I’m still here.
How about we post some of our favorite quotes from the series? Here’s some of mine :p
“Use the force, Kirk.”
“Help me, Spock. You’re my only hope.”
“Beam me up, Skywalker!”
“This isn’t the Data you’re looking for. Move along.”
“To boldly go where no Jedi has gone before”
“You’ve never heard of the Enterprise? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”
“Set sabers to stun!”
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As much as I support the protest and no longer want to use Reddit, people with that opinion are probably a small minority. If people want to stay on Reddit despite everything, that’s up to them in the end. Reddit won’t be the same, and some subs will be a shadow of their former selves when they lose the mods, but people are allowed to stay if they want.
It seems to me mods should be resigning and moving elsewhere if they want to. Reddit is not going to change tack. By all means do everything to let them know how shitty they’ve been (delete your account and all posts if you want). But also let people try to take over and keep things going if that’s what they want.
Federated social media is the future (I hope). Unless the community controls the platform, similar problems will keep happening.
I think it won’t be overnight, but there’s probably a sea change coming where more and more people are getting fed up with gigantic centralized platforms and all the manipulation and trolling that the companies operating them are all too happy to let go on. I seriously doubt the mods are going to get their way on Reddit, but I suspect it’s going to get even less worth visiting from here on out.
I agree with the sea change. The reason we started an instance as opposed to just joining another is that we wanted to help that change along by providing a familiar community to a group of people statistically more likely to be both nerdy and optimistic about the future.
Yeah, and I think it was a wonderful move. Star Trek is nerdy but also approachable to a wide range of people so I think it is a perfect early adopter of lemmy.
Star Trek was very over-represented on usenet boards back in the 90s, so it seems appropriate that it would have an early presence on this new frontier.
I would love to read an article about this, that would be a cool article, connecting the vibes of usenet startrek to fediverse star trek!
@porthos I couldn’t agree more! Been a fan of S T since the TNG days. Proud to be one of the #Blind Trekies out there among said federation/threaderation!
Posting from Mastodon, though shall sign up over on said enterprise to further show my appreciation.
PS. Although TNG is my favorite series, DS9 is my mother’s favorite. She’s always looked up to major kira.Good choice on your mom’s part, kira is badass. Seriously, I don’t know why everyone isn’t terrified of getting in her way sometimes hahaha, she is a freight train of willpower.
Sign up for an account here at startrek.website! Even if you don’t use it as your main account you could pick out a funny star trek related name and use it for comedic purposes on comments… not that I would ever do that of course.
But you’re using your real name right…?
give me a slice of cheese and you can believe anything you want
