SNOOcalypse - document, discuss, and promote the downfall of Reddit.

cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/221160

I wish I had the skill to make a cover.

A few highlights:

• As usual, u/ModCodeofConduct messages outright distort the moderators' position, as if it was unwillingness to moderate.
• r/firefox opened up again. It's now about literal fire foxes aka red pandas. Mods worry that the sub might [ipsis digitis] "fall into the hands of someone who would undo the good work we have done or would even foster an anti-Mozilla community here."
• "ModCodeofConduct also argued that switching to private in protest is a violation of the Moderator Code of Conduct." - isn't it funny how users are expected to believe that the moderator code of conduct is more than just convenient excuses for Reddit Inc.?
• roughly 2k/8k of the subreddits joining the protest are still private. Even if Reddit Inc. plants to replace the mods with sycophants, the later will likely beeline towards the larger communities. I expect the smaller ones to go unmoderated, overall reducing the platform's diversity of communities.

Plenty Google Search users were appending "site:reddit.com" to their searches to avoid SEO and get actual human answers. This became less useful with the blackouts, and Google is actually addressing it - through a new feature called "Perspectives". Allegedly the feature highlights forums and videos from social media (TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora).

This means that those search users won't beeline towards Reddit anymore. Instead there's a reasonable chance that they end in Reddit's competitors, including Youtube (owned by Alphabet, the same parent company as Google Search).

Given that 47% of the traffic of Reddit comes from organic search, this is going to hurt. A lot.

TL;DR: say hello to our friend u/ModCodeOfConduct, disguising threats behind feigned politeness, yet again!

Archive link, original link. I'll copypaste the contents here.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Feedback

As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits. Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.

We want to thank you for all the feedback and discussion you've participated in in past changelog threads. You are of course welcome to post unofficial update threads going forward, and if you want to reach the team with feedback about the game, please visit our feedback site at feedback.minecraft.net or contact us on one of our official social media channels.

The text is rather polite and professional, but at the end of the day it boils down to "we'll GTFO of this place. Keep discussing Minecraft here if you want, but you won't get official content through Reddit."

And who's "we"? The one posting the text above was u/sliced_lime aka Mikael Hedberg, a game developer at Mojang and interim tech lead for the Minecraft launcher. Odds are that his position represents Mojang AB's position. That is, the position of a subsidiary of Microsoft.

Yup - a subsidiary of one of the GAFAM companies is refusing to deal with Reddit.

Watch Reddit Die on Saidit

What do you guys think?

In this blog post I explore Reddit's downfall and my search for something to replace it. I'm finding no perfect solutions but lots of interesting pieces of a solution.

Got the infamous nsfw form letter today. Did my usual long winded rant in response, and signed off with a hearty "fuck spez" lol.

I dunno, I've been trying to make it a slow retreat, setting things up to be as annoying as possible. But gods damn, the shitty little form letter just got under my skin.

Told the u/modcodeofconduct account that if they were going to take the sub over, to do it and stfu because my ass doesn't get paid for this, so their orders and threats have no meaning

Still had to offer the person behind the account the usual willing ear if they needed to vent or whatever.

I mean, can you imagine having that job? Having to spam those form letters, catch blasts of shit in return, and all for a boss as deplorable as huffpig? I mean, yeah, you can quit, but the employees didn't get much more warning about this crap than the 3rd party devs did. Takes time to find new employment. And it isn't like reddit is HQd somewhere cheap to live, so unless they work remotely from a much lower cost of living place, it's extra difficult to make that decision.

Anyway, I just needed a vent tbh. It isn't like this kind of thing is new lol.

The upvote system is greyed out and you can only reply. What is going on?!

After many days i finally received my GDPR data request, which i supplemented further with reddit-user-to-sqlite, so i have a nice full local copy of my account. Now I'm torn on whether to fully shred the data of the account or just delete it:

• On one side, i highly dislike the idea of willingly contributing to a Wisdom of the Ancients scenario, although it might be a moot point anyway since it looks like Spez wants to wall off Reddit after all
• On the other, fuck Spez and i don't wanna contribute a single cent to their profits
• And as an additional point, it's rather unsettling the amount of info you can gather of somebody from their Reddit posts, just from a privacy point of view

What are your opinions on this?

Edit: Just deleted my RemindMeBot reminders, somehow that felt like it had almost the same finality as deleting my account somehow...

Edit...

Several subreddits had begun allowing porn and not safe for work content to protest Reddit. In response, the platform has removed entire moderator teams from the affected subreddits.

My gift to anyone who wants to self-host.