Interestingly, the big three US sports ones appeared to have split. r/NBA went offline while r/MLB did not. (I didn't check r/NFL; I'm a group member of all three. r/NBA's decision by its moderators provoked heated discussion as last Monday was of course Game 5 of the NBA Finals. It was compounded by r/DenverNuggets and r/Heat staying online.
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Update, Sunday, June 18: r/NBA has stopped walking the picket lines. Apparently the Finals weren't enough, but the start of NBA trade season was. But, by blacking out the whole previous week, including Nuggets parade, etc., they come off looking like Nuggets haters. They ALSO look like fucking hypocrites for actually having a Game 5 post that was apparently inter-moderator discussion. And, they look like the biggest hypocrite yet for banning the Redditor who called them out. Salute to u/kingtupperware.
They're also hypocritical about WHY they reopened, per another commenter:
every other major subreddit that re-opened yesterday admitted they've gotten a threatening mail from admins
while this sub: "we reopen cos we accomplished enough, we made reddit promise that they will improve the official app, the boycott WON. 🤓🤓🤓🤓" while entire point of the protest was API price increase and saving 3rd party apps. they spammed front page with "dont let reddit kill 3rd partt apps" etc etc
r/nba pussy ass mods saying "we are reopening because we won, they said they are gonna improve the official app" is such a laughable pussy statement.
they couldnt even be honest. absolute pussy ass bitch behaviour.
if the mod yesterday said "look, imma be honest, we didnt accomplish shit, and we dont wanna lose our mod positions, thats why we reopen" they wouldnt get roasted as hard.
Bullshit. And patronizing, too. Anybody who's followed the "strike" knows that there was no new "motion" over the weekend.
Mods then populated the feed with a bunch of posts, probably put up by themselves, from what was missed, besides the Game 5 insider trading thread, like the suspension of Ja Morant, etc., and some old NBA trivia. (And, by timestamps, it seems they did it already late Saturday night.)
That said, for more regular and hardcore users of r/NBA than me? The way this works is, until you get a chance to vote out any mods, you go to r/basketball first, and at least semi-boycott r/nba.
Then, per this OP, yeah, there's the issue of r/NBA seeming to engage in insider trading on taking down non-insiders' versions of duplicate posts on hot and breaking news. (r/NFL, from a lower interaction base, may be worse; r/MLB doesn't seem to have such a problem.)
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But, reddit's subs and their moderators have brought this on themselves. Yes, reddit sucked as an OS. And? You volunteered your services, and site tweaks, for free. So now, just like Steward Brand's "information wants to be free" and the internet "teaching us" that it should be free, now corporate Reddit wants to continue the exploitation. And, third-party app makers, who water-skiied in the wake, shouldn't be surprised that new turbulence has hit.
And, that leads to the bottomline, as explained by Wired, that the blackout is breaking Reddit. Note what I said about about r/NBA vs the two team subs. A week later, r/NBA remains offline. I visited the Nuggets sub to talk about the title. I went to r/basketball to talk about Ja Morant's suspension. I'm not a diehard Reddit user, I have been comment-banned from two biblical criticism subs for calling a toxic moderator a Nazi, and I don't use my smartphone as a computer in general, so I have no dog in the hunt. Per Wired, I think holdouts like r/NBA run a risk of being abandoned by people like me. That's especially true since Reddit has, per links off the main Wired piece, made concessions already to apps for the hearing- and visually-disabled and a few other things. They also, per this piece, increase their odds of getting in Reddit's corporate crosshairs, even as CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman himself pledges no more compromises. (Per one of several good sidebar links off that, Reddit corporate is allegedly looking for "defectors" to replace mods at still-dark subs, and per the r/NBA pullout above, that's worked.) That said, Huffman calling most mods "landed gentry" on NBC is a good example of how not to do corporate PR.
So, Reddit has parallels to Twitter, but not entirely. In both cases, yes, it's had laggard development and management history. But, while both now are looking for new money, Reddit isn't owned by an idiot who keeps creating self-inflicted wounds, by and large, and as noted above, unlike Elon Musk, Huffman has inventor's skin in the game.
Otherwise, if you're a denizen of any social media platform? You have to be prepared. Should Google announce massive changes to Blogger, I'd download the entire blog, not just this but the two others I own, and if I had to jump, upload as best as possible, old content to Wordpress and/or Substack, where I'm occasionally active and semi-active, respectively.
And usesrs or denizens should never forget that Steward Brand had a multi-sentence statement, which it should also be noted, was made to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:
On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
There you go.
Oh, and this claim that Reddit is "the last page of the Internet"? That's much more an indictment of Google than a tout of Reddit. Plus, appending "reddit" to the end of a Google search might get a Reddit page full of misinfo, even with Reddit somewhat cleaning itself up over the past few years, rather than Google's satanic ad-spawn, so an agnostic searcher really hasn't "won." Besides, one can use Duck Duck Go instead of Google to search.
So, to mods? (I have one small sub that's "restricted" not "public" so the blackout wasn't a deal for me anyway), if you think you are providing a service that is non-reproducible in details by others, fight for a piece of the expensive pie. (And fight for it yourselves, rather than being fucking stupid enough to fight on behalf of third-party apps, of which Apollo at least makes millions itself.) If you're just trying to help spread knowledge and fun discussion, though, remember that service is free, and people "moderate" conversations in meatspace all the time.
And, related to that? Since subreddits generally are NOT parallel to Twitter, there's plenty of ego on BOTH SIDES. That's the bottom line takeaway.
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As for the future? Some subs have talked about alternatives to the Reddit platform. We'll see what happens. More on these alternatives from Endgadget, which notes that all of them, for now, are "niche," like Mastodon vs Twitter.
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Update June 25: MoJo gets much wrong with this piece, including ignoring the money that API makers have already been making for themselves. As I told Kuff, who had this on a weekend link dump, really, it's kind of like the old millionaires-vs-billionaires free agency battle, and even more than in sports, the ardent fans, er Redditors, can refuse to support either side and refuse to be suckered. Since I don't use a smartphone as a computer, am not totally addicted to Reddit, and don't need an app (and have Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, etc. installed) I do my level best to make sure NOBODY makes money off me. And, this is why I'm a skeptical leftist, is stuff like this. (Arguably, MoJo is librul not leftist, to boot.)
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Update, June 26: Huffman is also reportedly worried about AI bots scraping Reddit.
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