Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
I appreciate the effort, but since this is one of the main subreddits the Reddit admins will simply purge these subreddits of their mods, install new ones, and reopen it (they’ve already done something like this before).
The real question is how well will the sub operate then? I imagine not very well since all of the experienced mods and their tools are gone.
This was my immediate reaction too. Reddit will likely replace the current moderator team of r/videos and reopen. Nonetheless I can appreciate and respect the gesture/message.
This is easy to do for one subreddit. And it’s a large one. Would easily need 10+ mods to keep it running. But if a few of these large subreddits revolt, I don’t think reddit can simply replace them all.
Not only that but I think replacing the entire mod team would cause a revolt anyways. Tensions are extremely high
I wonder if Reddit might just end up like YouTube: mostly relying on automated content moderation bots, and the human review being a big pool of low paid people who aren’t assigned to specific subs who just do quick checklist reviews.
It’s gonna be great.
I can see that happening, they’re definitely not going to pay for all the mods they’d need to replace current ones. Sounds like that would absolutely kill a lot of smaller communities, but I doubt they care.
I can’t exactly go into why this isn’t possible in the short term, but it’s extremely unlikely that reddit could effectively moderate things automatically in the near future.
I mean hell, look at youtubes comment section.
And they don’t have the money to pay moderators. As spez said, they aren’t profitable (only thing I believe him on btw). I seriously think that spez has entered a Putin-type situation where he has very few opportunities to keep his job right now.
Yeah I don’t imagine that Reddit has a deep bench of people who have the skills needed to moderate a sub with millions of users and are willing to do it for free
Tin foil hat stuff though: what if they intend to pay moderators they hold on thrall, but they need to get rid of the current ones first.
Spez just admitted they aren’t profitable. I can’t imagine they will pay new people when they could have paid the old mods