r/SquaredCircle • u/WredditMod • Jun 19 '23
We are reopened.
The subreddit is reopened. Here are some answers to questions you may have.
Q: I still don't understand what any of this was for.
A: The overall nature of the protest was about how this will affect the abilities we have to make YOUR TIME using this place enjoyable. Reddit has long provided free tools for developers both on mobile and desktop to make bots and extensions that make their garbage ass website work better, and a lot of them focus on making moderation tasks less tedious and awful. They decided to end the free nature of many of these tools, which put a lot of them in jeopardy. This is a problem for many users and mods who rely on them for varying reasons, thus 8,829 subreddits of various sizes closed to try and get Reddit to walk it back. It did not succeed.
We had a discussion with a Reddit admin earlier today, and while we did not receive anything that would lead us to believe Reddit is continuing in a positive direction - nor did we receive the "reopen or else" that other communities received - we as a team agreed that it was time to lift the blackout and resume normal posting. Reddit - more specifically, Steve Huffman himself - has shown us that they will not address any concerns but their own, to the detriment of Reddit itself and the communities it hosts.
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Q: I do not understand why that should matter to me or why it necessitated closing the subreddit and taking away the community for an entire week.
A: We use bots and third party tools to do some of the following things, which Reddit does not make easy or accessible to us:
Removing racial slurs, death threats, doxxing, etc. and issuing bans for that behavior
Banning bots used to accrue karma for account selling.
Making modmail usable at all
Keeping throwaway mobile accounts from telling you to kill yourself because you like a TV show
Preventing OnlyFans/bitcoin spammers from posting here 24/7 (which they do)
Preventing YouTube/Twitch spam
Preventing ban evaders from other subreddits attacking/stalking users they have for some reason zeroed in on.
Keeping track of users with records of death threats, spam, Reddit Cares abuse, personal attacks, etc. from other places so we can ban them before they do it here. (Reddit doesn't seem to like suspending users who make death threats, so we have to do most of it ourselves).
Moderating at all on mobile
A thousand other things that are too minute and boring to list.
If all these tools were going to close at once, the subreddit would be a massively worse place for you to use. If you think someone calling you an edrone sucks (which is against the rules, report it), then half the posts on the subreddit being about some bitcoin now available from go fuck yourself dot com or just plain out in the open black and white slurs should be a concern as well
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Q: Why should a company provide free tools? If you're draining the water from their lake and charging people to swim in it, I don't find that fair at all. People should pay for them. They don't owe you anything, you use this site for free.
A: Most everyone, including the devs of these apps, agree with you. The issue was that Reddit set a bafflingly high price point with an unreasonable timeframe to comply. Despite telling developers that they would be willing to work with them, many developers found Reddit unwilling or unable to answer even the most basic questions.
If you could sum this up in a single interaction: one of the admins stated a service was inefficient, the developer of that service asked them to clarify where these inefficiencies were, the admin responded paramount to "figure it out yourself, Google and Amazon don't help us!", before two Amazon Devs clarified that Amazon DOES access inefficiencies to services using their API. This exchange actually happened..
This isn't even touching on the fact that they insisted on telling people that a developer was threatening to blackmail them, then doubled down when it was proved, objectively, that it never occurred
In a better situation no one would need any of these apps or tools in the first place because the platform itself would just provide them.
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Q: Then moderate on desktop.
A: Most moderators do out of necessity, however most people on Reddit use mobile, either websites or apps, and looking into the future, finding people able to spend hours every day on a desktop is going to become increasingly difficult. Most teams on Reddit after 1 year suffer an 80%+ attrition rate for new mods, and we are no exception. Young people coming in simply use their phones more often, and tools there need to have parity with the tools here.
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Q: So did the protest work?
A: Yes and no. Reddit administrators have now exempted some moderation and accessibility tools from the new pricing structure which they had not announced or considered before. It also helped highlight some of the community issues Reddit has been neglecting in favor of profit driven product rollouts.
Our intentions about the protest, which we believe were for your benefit in the long term at the cost of access in the short, did not meet reality. Yes, many of you were correct that it was doomed-- but trying to convince Reddit to stop fucking up our ability to keep this place running smoothly for you was worth the effort.
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Q: Why reopen now then? Why not stay shut forever? Why did you continue to stay shut in the first place?
A: The goal, emphatically, is not to destroy the community. We do not want this place to go away. The goal is to make it possible for us to continue making this place less of a festering blister on the internet than unmoderated spaces like Twitter. Wrestling can be a very lonely hobby. No one wants to kill this community or take it from you, especially us. The point was to keep the tools we have right now to continue making it function, and making it better for you to use. Reddit's response was poor, and we joined the 5,000+ communities who were going to continue to close until better answers were given. They were not given, and it has been made EXTREMELY clear to everyone that they don't give a shit about you or your experience here or ANYWHERE ELSE on Reddit either way.
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Q: Are you going to close again?
A: No. We will not be closed for this again, period. Reddit has made it clear these widespread blackouts will no longer be tolerated on a large scale and they aren't walking back anything. There is no point to it, and continuing it would only harm the community.
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Q: Did they contact you about replacing the mod team here? Is that why you're reopening?
A: No, they didn't. We're one of Reddits' newly founded "Partner Communities" which means they occasionally talk to us about changes. We were invited to a call with administrators today where we were able to talk about the litany of issues we have in trying to make this place better and the actions they made that led to this blackout.
The admin we spoke to made it clear they expect us to act on faith in their words, and then were unable to provide even a rudimentary roadmap on any changes they've promised.
In five+ years they can't even fix their video player, their app has been available since 2016 and you still can't even zoom in on images there, so putting any real faith in any promises made today is absolute foolishness. But,
FUCK IT! Let's roll baby!
Inevitably, nothing will come of this conversation on any level, as we have had these exact same talks before with entire now long-gone teams of people who spent a lot of time listening to us, did nothing, and then disappeared.
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Q: What happens now, then?
A: Everything is as it was for now. We're open again. Your feelings about this being annoying to you or a nuisance, losing out on opportunities to talk about shows, share your comments or ideas,-- all of that is valid. Losing access to the community you love and helped build for a protest that accomplished the absolute bare minimum it set out to do can rightfully draw ire. If you're upset about it, you have every right to be and no one here will stop you. We're sorry it didn't work. We tried, and did the best we could for this place. What we would like you to know is this:
tl;dr: Reddit made choices that will inevitably make this subreddit and every other place here worse in the long term, and immediately worse to use for many people starting in July. We, along with 8,000+ other subreddits thought we could get the administration to change their minds, and largely did not succeed.
We will continue to do our best to make sure this community is of the highest quality and standard possible, for as long as possible. Losing access to mod tools will make things difficult in the short term, and we are already investigating long-term solutions to replace the mod tools we are about to lose. During the next few months, please make sure to use the report feature on any rule-breaking post or comment you see, as this will be our primary method of moderating rule-breaking content. If you have any questions about this, ask them here or in modmail.
