Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past initiatives. Many mods feel Reddit has been unwilling to make meaningful changes to address their concerns like more accessible API pricing or exemption for accessibility apps. After a tumultuous few months, moderators have very low expectations that Reddit’s latest efforts will result in real changes.
I really feel for the mods who’ve spent years building and curating communities, only to have them decimated by forces outside of their control. Reddit never listens to its userbase and I’d be surprised if they start now. I mean, they were regularly having calls with TPA developers only to blindside them with the API changes and treat them poorly for having questions. I don’t see how it will be any different for moderators, unfortunately.
Yeah I think this is purely them doing the bare minimum to look like they want to communicate while at the same time doing nothing. See also: app developers who tried to work with Reddit that Reddit absolutely ignored.
This is a shallow PR stunt that anyone familiar with the situation will see through. Its only meant to be seen by investors who only know what’s going on with Reddit from reading Forbes and Bloomberg
Non-apology apology.
Right. Just want to say “we all said some things” without changing anything about their behavior. Like an abusive boyfriend they just want to say “I’m sorry let’s just go back to how things were” and then continue without changing any of the underlying problems
It’s a lot of abuse to take, I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship. It’s so much cozier here on lemmy, I just think maybe redditors have no idea what the water is like over here and so they haven’t even dipped a toe into any alternatives.
Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t somewhat dogmatically against reddit’s shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn’t really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they’re going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.
It’s gotten a lot better in a few weeks.
There’s a lot that can be improved, and people are working on it. It just needs more time as things settle
Yeah, when Digg did the dumb thing all those years ago Reddit didn’t start eclipsing it for another two or three years. This feels very similar to that time tbh. Lemmy will get there, but I imagine it’ll take longer due to its fragmented nature scaring some non-techies so I’d guess four years and we’ll see numbers to rival Reddit. If you care about that, I kind of like the smaller communities, honestly.
Too bad there’s not a RemindMe Bot on Lemmy yet, this would be perfect for that lol
I think you can use the remindme bot on mastodon, although I’ll have to check the syntax. Saw someone use it in another thread
I also like the smaller communities in some cases. It’s a lot easier to participate and have replies to your questions/comments.
For a few communities though they’re still too small to be sustainable and useful. Need more time for those ones. Say LegalAdvice, communities for sales / discounts, or local ones for schools and cities.
Exactly, the only subreddit I still visit is for my local city/metroplex and even then I’ve set it up as an RSS feed so I don’t need to actually go to Reddit. Once enough neighbors are here that RSS feed will be getting cut most likely though. Or until Reddit shuts down the RSS feature.
It’s an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don’t have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)
Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don’t work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven’t felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.
You’re not wrong, but it is definitely getting better. I think the organization of Lemmy takes some getting used to, and as well, I think finding new places to look on Lemmy isn’t quite as easy as Reddit is, which might be an area that the software could improve a bit.
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn’t seem exceptionally high.
I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.
I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.
Same, I’m mostly part of specific communities based around Europe/language/hydroponics which simply don’t exist here and am here mainly out of spite and solidarity.
I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship.
I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn’t want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.
So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don’t think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).
This entire comment almost perfectly describes my experience. I’ve dropped a lot of my other accounts and only really use one or two for school/local stuff
Any good legal related communities popping up yet? I liked reading legalAdvice and was waiting for something like that here
Honestly, it’ll probably have to go the same route that reddit’s communities organically formed. As AskReddit got bigger, the IAMA and AskScience and AskHistorians and AskWomen and AskMen communities started popping up. As Fitness got bigger, the very specific niche fitness subreddits and sport-specific subreddits popped up, too.
For now, I’m guessing political and advice communities will start attracting some specific topics where a few people who have legal expertise will participate, up until there’s enough critical mass to form a more narrowly focused community that specifically relates to legal topics and has a higher threshold for necessary background/knowledge/experience/education to be able to competently participate.
I’ll be honest, that matches my own patterns myself. I use Reddit for some of the niche communities that don’t exist here yet, but eventually they will exist here I hope. I still have two separate accounts here for maintaining the least privilege principle you are doing too.
Have you seen their attempt for 3rd r/place? Lol what a shame!
Then why are they even still there? It’s like they’re so addicted to the small amount of irrelevant “power” they get from the position and they just can’t give it up.
This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn’t be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person’s post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it’s not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I’m-so-successful kind of thrill, it’s like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That’s what’s cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.
Moving to elsewhere isn’t really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment “moving communities” means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.
The operative word being “unified” which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you’d close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.
So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.
This isn’t even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I’d love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other “alternatives”.
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn’t the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven’t even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
It’s easy to look at this from the lens of people just wanting power, but maybe it’s something akin to the grief, honest grief, I felt about leaving Reddit because I had been there so long as just a user. I can’t imagine how it would feel to give up control over something that I had created and curated for many years knowing that it was going to be destroyed. 
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Just f quit, let it all burn. The problem is moderators often enjoy that little power & importance they have & are perhaps addicted to that a little. Am I wrong?
You might be right for some of them, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them enjoying a little power and importance, especially if it’s in relation to a community that they are connected with. But I agree with you that it might be a good idea to at least consider quitting, since it’s likely that Reddit is just going to get worse as it becomes increasingly controlled by dead-eyed shareholders.
but moderatora are still there
