r/pics is wide open to all kinds of anti reddit posts, calls for spez to resign, whatever you want with the current rules right now.
all it takes is John Oliver be featured in the image and title and you’re free to post anything (but no porn or gore). go nuts!
the sub is in open rebellion and the mods don’t delete critical posts. they even allowed a post calling out spez’ history with child porn, to hit the frontpage of r/all! until an admin spotted it and had it removed. let that sink in.
it’s because the mods don’t act anymore, unless an admin tells them to, and by the time the admin sees a post on the frontpage, the damage is already done. it’s malicious compliance from the users and mods! if your title doesn’t trigger any bad words, the admins have no idea what’s in your post until it’s too late.
pics has 30 million subscribers and 8k are online. it’s massive, and they upvote stuff to the frontpage, easily. some examples:
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14k8ul7/thank_you_john_oliver_for_protecting_my_post_from/
but the mods can’t post the critical content themselves! they need others to do it, so they can turn a blind eye. that’s how this works, it’s a coop game 😤🤝😤
I deleted my posts/comment history, resigned as a mod, and logged out for good. The best protest you can do is leave at this point. Anything short of private, restricted, or NSFW-abuse only serves to drive traffic for them and allows them to continue to serve ads.
The John Oliver idea was clever but should have stopped after he responded. It is now only driving traffic to the site and giving them classic “haha isn’t the internet funny?” free marketing on news outlets. They’ve even explicitly said in interviews they don’t mind it at all. That’s not a protest. No one is upset to see John Oliver memes on one sub and be in on the joke.
Well… this is not quite accurate. It seems that people who are on only to shitpost and protest make less ads revenue for reddit, see https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/112071/Reddit-protest-plunges-user-engagement-site-activity-and-ad-portal
That’s the blackout writ large. It says nothing about the pics protest specifically. Going private/NSFW has done by far the most damage as indicated by the admins swift and angry response to it. No one on /r/pics has been removed as mod over this. Dozens of others have.
Here’s a better one that points to a connection between protest engagement and lower ad revenue : https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/88139/Reddit-traffic-returning-normal-sort-of
I feel like maybe we are talking at cross purposes and possibly agree but that there is some misunderstanding over my original point.
Both of your articles are showing that going private and other tactics had a depressing effect on Reddit traffic, neither of these articles talk about pics and John Oliver, which is specifically what I was saying is ineffective. The articles are talking about the impact on traffic by subs going private, which means they do not come up in searches and they can’t run ads. I agree with the articles, hence why I said subs should go private/restricted/NSFW if they want to actually protest. In addition, users should consider not participating/mods should resign outside of specific cases such as NSFW abuse and highlighting the API changes.
From my earlier comment:
Anything short of private, restricted, or NSFW-abuse only serves to drive traffic for them and allows them to continue to serve ads.
I feel like maybe we are talking at cross purposes and possibly agree but that there is some misunderstanding over my original point.
Agreed. I think this is the disagreement or misunderstanding.
neither of these articles talk about pics and John Oliver, which is specifically what I was saying is ineffective.
Yeah, my point was that the second article says that regular traffic looks like it’s back to regular levels (which can’t be the case for a private sub), but ad revenue is still going down.
Okay, so maybe traffic is waaay up because of the NSFW stuff? Seeing as some of the biggest subs went John Oliver rather than NSFW though… it seems unlikely to me that growing disparity between traffic and ads is all because of NSFW.
Rather, i would guess that the biggest part of the bump is John Oliver traffic, but that for reasons not clear yet, that traffic is bringing in less ad revenue than normal non-protest traffic.
I’m not the only one to come to that conclusion, see also https://kbin.social/m/reddit/p/528198/https-www-pcmag-com-news-as-reddit-crushes-protests-its-user-traffic-returns-to-normal-lol-we-re-all-great-and-powerful-piggies-aren-t-we#post-comment-934433
Anything short of … restricted … serves to drive traffic for them and allows them to continue to serve ads.
Hmm. They don’t serve ads for restricted subs? Like the old content is still there, so there seems to be no technical reason for this. Odd that the admins seem to hate subs going private but are okay with them going restricted. Then again they’re also recommending subs protest with john oliver so… this very much seems like a company that doesn’t know what’s good for them.
I agree it’s odd but there’s a reason the sub I moderated wasn’t contacted in the opening days by the admins yet smaller ones that went private did!
If you track what the admins reacted to and didn’t it paints a very clear picture of what hits their revenue and what doesn’t.
I agree it’s odd but there’s a reason the sub I moderated wasn’t contacted in the opening days by the admins yet smaller ones that went private did!
Anything short of … restricted … serves to drive traffic for them and allows them to continue to serve ads.Yeah. It is odd. Why would they not go after restricted if restricted means they lose ad money?
If you track what the admins reacted to and didn’t it paints a very clear picture of what hits their revenue and what doesn’t.
That only makes sense if restricted subs earn ad money for reddit.
Anyways they removed the mods of r/TIHI for leaving the sub private, but then shut it down for being unmoderated. Where’s the revenue in that? I’m not confident at this point that reddit has an accurate picture of what’s costing it money yet.
Finally, not hearing about more subs going NSFW but from the second article, ad traffic is still going down. So I think NSFW can not be the only driver of profitless traffic.
That said, it probably is reasonable to conclude that private and NSFW are the biggest revenue losers, and that’s why reddit is coming down much more heavy handed on them. Good on the other protesters for keeping it up, but eventually reddit will come for them too. So I think long term we do agree - moving content to the fediverse and leaving reddit is the only way.
has anyone created a “to Fediverse I go” gifs with John Olliver’s head 'shopped on? cuz… that’s probably the only thing worth it.
…naw you’re right.
The best way to protest is to delete your comments/accounts, and never go there again. Anything else is just clicks for ads.
I somewhat disagree. The best way to protest is to try and get as many people to switch to Lemmy as possible to give this platform the opportunity to take off.
If you have a favourite niche community, create a Lemmy page for it and see if you can get the mods of the sub to advertise it or put it in the sidebar at least.
It’s going to be a bit of a ghost town at the start here until we can get some user growth and those niche pages are huge for it.
Meh… I’m not going to spend any of my time going to whatever that other website is to “protest.” I come to news aggregators to read news. That’s why I’m on kbin now instead of that other website that killed 3rd party apps.
My thoughts when people still want to strike on reddit;
Already deleted my 17 years old account and nuked all it’s comments, plus a couple secondary accounts, not going back there
Don’t. The last thing we want is to associate the fediverse with some kind of anarchist world where everything is trash and everyone insults everyone. Leave the memers to reddit.
I don’t use Reddit.
The best de- endorsement will come from people’s experience on reddit as the quality of user engagement drops. There are people who genuinely will never give a shit and will stay there, but those are exactly the sort of lazy minds who made up the critical mass of the shallow “hivemind.” Id rather we make this a community that encourages independent thought more than bandwagoning.
Don’t waste your time engaging them on that platform unless you’re a child, douchebag, or troll. If your posts are actually good content, it sends a mixed message that good independent thinking redditors are whethering the shitstorm. Your actions will speak louder than your words, and our collective absence from their platform will speak volumes.
My shit is deleted, and I’ll not be going back. That’s the absolute most I’ll do for what’s left that dumpster fire. Reddit was fun (no pun intended) while it lasted, and now it’s time to move on.
They don’t need the traffic, just use the fediverse instead.
If you’re planning on continuing protesting there, then yes. Only dedicate any posts and comments to the protest and for protest purposes. Otherwise, the best thing to do is delete and move on. Like other comments said, it’s all just traffic for them, however if you’re going to be there anyway, you may as well be there for a cause.
Logging out of Reddit for last time today after this stuff.
Only ‘trusted’ users can upload to r/pics. Here’s a pic of John Oliver hiding in https://kbin.social/m/johnoliver
Interesting /u/spez must be too scared of Oliver to take action. If that writers’s strike keeps going, this could be brutal.
I think r/pics is the only one holding the protest or are there others like it?
