I’m not sure they understand Reddit.

Did you know they also silently censor users?

Reddit has been shadowbanning users (making it so their accounts don’t publicly hold data or karma, but allowing them to continue making comments) without telling them they’re shadowbanned for many years now. The idea that Reddit is silently going and removing the content from some users is really not a surprise.

Same thing I play every week. Coral Island and RCT3.

Coral Island is in Steam Early Access and is as yet unfinished, but is making steady progress and the devs are doing great at keeping everyone up to date on progress. Coral Island is frequently compared to Stardew Valley. Frankly, I don’t enjoy SDV. I’ve tried and tried and it just doesn’t do it for me. Coral Island is everything I was hoping SDV would be. It’s game play is similar, but I find the whole thing much more enjoyable.

I’ve been playing RCT3 off and on since I first bought it on CD a million years ago.

Officially? Yes, it’s all against the rules. It’s against the rules to harass moderators. It’s against the rules to go attempt to rile up others to cause problems. It’s against the rules to have subreddits dedicated to trying to convince people to go to other subs and harass moderators.

In reality? It has to be very persistent for the admins to take real action. There have been cases where subreddits have been cautioned or (rarely) sanctioned for allowing or encouraging their users to go visit other subs to harass. There have been cases where harassers eventually get their accounts banned, but not before Reddit has smacked them on the hand and said, “No, no! Bad Redditor!” 3-4 times first. More likely, reporting this kind of crap gets you the response, “We don’t see a problem.”

Part of that problem is that a lot of report responses are automated, and you have to know how to appeal and get the attention of humans to even have a sliver of hope that one of them might take action.

It’s a case of too many problem children, not enough human staff to deal with it.

It’s against the rules to create account after account to follow and harass a moderator for over four years but 8? 9? of his alt accounts later, they still haven’t been able to stop this one nutbag from Australia who gets his jollies by following me around Reddit to disagree with everything I say.

I see it as Reddits obligation to educate the community about moderators and what they do on the daily.

Reddit thinks moderators are as disposable as napkins.

You keep repeating that. Just how many times have you been banned on Reddit? I’m guessing a lot.

This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.

What moderating is really like, part 1

What moderating is really like, part 2

99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).

Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.

I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.

Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.

Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)

The ADA only requires accessibility in websites if it’s a government site, or if it’s the site of a company providing a “public service,” such as a bank or a hotel.

Here’s the ada.gov page about it: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

I use NewsBlur. It’s sometimes clunky adding an RSS feed but the way you can organize things and do 101 settings is terrific. It’s for-pay though (around $30/year? I think) so that may not interest you. But I find it does far more than the free stuff that I tried.

Redditinc.com’s fact(oid)s about the API changes.

Includes such BS as

100,000+ active communities

Technically true. But it’s estimated that between 1/3 and 1/2 are NSFW. That is, the subs they don’t want shown at their (mythical) IPO.

Supporting these apps is not free for Reddit; they incur both infrastructure and significant opportunity costs.

Technically true. But so does the official app, and web browsers. API calls are not some sort of special magic that causes extra wear on the systems. If the users never had the third party apps they’d be using something else, causing the same traffic and usage - or using nothing at all.

Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use from our API.

Again, third party apps are no more of a drain on data use than anything else. It’s been proven, but Spez keeps pushing this lie.

Many other platforms have chosen to stop supporting apps like these altogether.

Objection! Facts not in evidence.

more than 98% of apps do not pay and will continue to access the Data API for free so long as apps are not monetized […].

Emphasis mine. This is the real story.

Our pricing is based on usage levels comparable to our own costs

Either this is an outright lie or Spez is admitting that the official Reddit app is an inefficient, data monching, piece of garbage.

We’re working to improve the mobile mod experience

Spez has been promising rainbows for years but all we ever get is poop. Or just the smell of poop. That the mobile apps were released without proper moderator tools tells you what he thinks of moderators.

We have a unique system of checks and balances, and we respect the communities right to protest.

Clearly a lie, given that Spez is going to change the rules to force out moderators who choose to follow their sub’s wishes to protest.

r/nottheonion is asking users to vote, including a fun option that encourages people to take Tuesdays off

The “fun option” is an official means of joining the protest. Can he stop lying for 10 seconds?

We conducted an accessibility audit with an external consultant and have been working on improving accessibility on the site and in our apps.

Yes, much smarter than actually TALKING TO YOUR OWN USERS AND SEEING WHAT THEY WANT. Oh, they want what you refuse to do? Gee, what a surprise!

Nothing says ableism more than telling people with disabilities that they have no agency in how or if they get accommodations. (Sadly, the ADA does not apply to Reddit as a website.)

In summary, Spez needs to be fired. Preferably out of a cannon, into the sun.

The audacity. The bullshit. The outright lies.

Spez is an embarrassment and I have no idea why the Reddit BoD hasn’t asked for his resignation.

Most of what he’s been saying about this whole mess has been either outright lies or half-truths with facts conveniently not mentioned.

Another for Ublock Origin

Youtube Enhancer

Imagus [enlarges images, great for my old tired eyeballs]

Ad Observer (run by Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, it examines any ads you DO get to look for patterns in how advertising is being used to influence people on social media.)

To Google Translate (Highlight something and send it straight to a Translate page)

NSFW posts weren’t the primary reason why /r/all got limits. /r/all was littered with hate and bigotry and general garbage. If /r/all had been left alone, Reddit would have continued on the path to becoming Voat.

Not modifying, to some degree, what subreddits appear on /r/all would have made trying to remove the bigotry off the site that much harder. (It will never completely go away; the site is too huge at this point.) While they should have used the idea of quarantines long before they started out with flat-out removal of these subs, these weren’t just “[racist slur] are dumb” type of stuff. These were subs that outright called for the violence and death of people who weren’t them. These were places for racists and bigots who had no qualm about doxxing people with hopes that bad things would happen to them.

You can argue “Well, then, ban the people who do that kind of thing!” Sometimes when the pool gets full of scum, you have to recognize the point where spot cleaning isn’t the cure and you have to drain the pool to stop the scum from gathering.

THE HORRORS

I don’t think so. I think that’s a whole other mess.

Ah. Thanks!

I’ve been playing games on computers since 1977, at that time non-video games. Although I did play Pong on tabletop box (a TV screen embedded in a table, with knobs on the table top) in a hotel, sometime before that, probably around 1975 or so.

There’s already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about “What if this fails? What next?”

I don’t think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven’t figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn’t cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.

OTOH, I do like Lemmy.

Oh, yeah. Moose senses cause anxiety and ADHD to run wild. They chase me around the coffee table until I sit on the floor and lick my leg.

No, wait, that’s the cat.

But you’re Apathy Moose. Shouldn’t your senses tingle but you just kinda don’t care?

Reddit has an annual “moderator summit”, a rah! rah! yay for moderators! event for moderators, mostly of large or super large subreddits.

At last year’s summit, Spez gave his ‘keynote’ talk where among other things he claimed that they were researching ways to pay moderators for their work, by giving them a cut of … something. It was all sort of wonky and nebulous and likely just something he thought of that morning in the shower.