Hi all,
/u/OBOSOB of /r/ErgoMechKeyboards here.
On 12th June we decided to join the API strikes happening across reddit both because of personal convictions; and a few posts from the community requesting us to do so. Those posts were also met with broad agreement from the active members of the community. Many users (no I don’t have numbers) suggested at that time that we don’t limit ourselves to 48 hours.
Once I finally got around to announcing our participation less than 24 hours prior to the start of the strikes, again there was support from vocal members to keep it down indefinitely. I was already keen on this course of action.
Over the course of Monday and into Tuesday it became clear that reddit were not going to capitulate with a mere 48 hours of disruption, even stating as much, and I solidified my position to keep it down.
To be absolutely clear, this decision was made UNILATERALLY by myself and myself alone, I did not poll the community in any semblance of a representative manner to do this, no other people were involved. For better or worse, that’s the decision I made and I am sticking to. I have been on reddit for over a decade and have used third-party apps to do so for that entire time, this issue is just too important to me personally to give up over.
The above point is important, for a long time I have ultimately moderated /r/emk alone. /u/ijauradunbi, the creator of the sub, made myself and /u/HardAsMagnets (Germ of gboards.ca) mods at inception and that is how it stayed. Germ went AWOL after some difficult life events and it transpires that she has basically quit the Internet at this point. /u/ijauradunbi has, likewise, not been seen in over a year, I’ve met him in person so I know he’s real, just I think he’s busy starting a family. That just left me, alone, moderating the sub.
/r/ErgoMechKeyboards has always been very easy to moderate, you all are very well-behaved, there was rarely “spam” in the strictest sense and most of my modding activities involved approving comments and posts that linked to aliexpress (reddit automatically spam filters those). As a result I never really felt I needed “help” and I have a light-touch approach to moderation when it comes to content, believing instead to let the upvote/downvote buttons do the talking in anything but a clear breach of the minimal rules to keep things on-topic.
However, I’m ever aware that whilst I don’t personally feel I abused my position in any way, the lack of accountability and capacity for abuse of power that comes with moderating alone is, in and of itself, a problem. I kept meaning to get around to asking others to join as mods, but never did. I had some candidates in mind.
I won’t flatter myself in thinking that /r/emk was big enough for that “power” to mean much on the grand scale of things, but still it is a community that matters to us and having good and accountable community leadership is important.
Likewise, I have no illusions that a 42k member subreddit will have any real impact on reddit’s bottom line by continuing its protest, this is about the principal of the thing to me, and that’s why I won’t relent despite that fact. People are free to petition the admins for control over the sub and bring it back online if they wish.
So what’s next?
If reddit make comprises on their policy regarding third-party apps’ access to their APIs, especially for those that are free and open-source. I’ll make it public again. Maybe this community will look at this incident and gravitate instead to here or elsewhere anyway, reddit are exposing the vulnerability of centralised control of a platform so even if they back down, that might not be enough. However, we’ve seen this before, and it is rare that these big migrations stick. Reddit itself was the benefactor of a migration away from Digg and Slashdot when they made decisions the community didn’t like, so it can happen, but more often than not, it doesn’t. The network effect is strong and the community with the critical mass of users will always be the bigger attractor than the theoretical threats posed by centralisation.
If reddit does not, I will eventually make the sub restricted and make sure it’s archived by the wayback machine, since it has a lot of useful information in there. I have received lot of modmail from people finding the sub via Google and finding they don’t have access. I want to look into solutions for migrating the sub’s wiki, since I put some work into that and I think the information there is useful, I’d also like to expand it and as such will try to make it easier for people to contribute to, that’s if someone else just doesn’t beat me to the punch and do it first. If you have the time and are willing, please do.
Hopefully in the event that reddit fail to capitulate then this will become EMK’s new home, rather than someone making an alternative subreddit or resting control of the sub. I doubt I’ll use reddit much or at all if I can’t use RIF to browse it.
I want to thank the community for the support, I have been replying to as many of the join requests as I can and of those who have replied to my reply, the sentiment has always been positive. I think I have only had one user deride /r/emk’s participation in these strikes, that’s pretty impressive.
See you all around. Embrace the jank. Keep it ergo. Eschew rectangles. Fuck spez.
obosob
Your reticence to wield sole power reassures me, and as a reddit user for 16 years, I support this decision you’ve “unilaterally” made.
The network effect is real, and centralized services are simpler to use than federated ones. But “vulnerability” is the right word for this centralization of content, and I’m glad to have moved here.
As a further fix to that vulnerability, #razit recommends replacing all comments and posts that one owns on Reddit with gibberish, because if we don’t: (1) this repository of centralized content, and the votes indicating its quality, will be exploited for large language model training; and (2) if the content remains, future users will interact with it on Reddit, rather than finding another place, cementing the network effect.
I’ve already read exhortations, months ago, before this flap, to avoid handing one’s quality content to a company like Reddit, and to post on one’s own blog or somewhere similarly less-centralized. And the longer my posts, the more I’ve thought about that while writing them.
I don’t see any tidy “export” function on Reddit, and I haven’t been that active, so I doomscrolled my entire comment and post history, and downloaded it as a giant 4MB html file. (Users who have been more active on Reddit may not be able to do this.) I’ll have to use BeautifulSoup to extract my comments out, but then I can post them on my blog or something.
While I don’t see the large language model deal coming for Reddit, I didn’t see GitHub Copilot coming either. I don’t really like the idea of snubbing (both of the) real people who need to read what I wrote, just to stick it to companies monetizing the content I’ve given away; but if there is an archive for people to read, and language modellers have to crawl web pages like the rest of us instead of getting the refined data, that seems more egalitarian.