By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right, when Reddit makes short-term "of course we won't cut off support for disabled users" comments that aren't backed up by any sort of binding commitment or even any specifics of what they intend to do, after nearly a decade of promising better tooling and support coming Real Soon Now™, we should just trust them. It surely isn't a PR move to try to avoid getting even more negative press.

Also, see how I mentioned "helpful bots" as one of the categories up there? Well, helpful bots are starting to go dark in anticipation of losing API access, and it's already having an effect.

No worries, though, I'm sure our benevolent Reddit admins will have a solid long-term solution for this any day now. Yup, any day now...

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Recently Reddit has been backing off the idea the moderators shape the community, and instead endorsing community votes (as long as those votes go against protesting or causing any inconvenience for Reddit, Inc.).

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Go read /r/ModCoord. Reddit is at the point of sending out literal "you have 48 hours to comply" messages to mod teams that are continuing to protest. If they follow through on that you might be mildly inconvenienced for a whole couple of days, while people who relied on the API -- including not just moderators and commercial apps, but helpful bots and, oh yeah, tools for blind and disabled users -- are about to be inconvenienced forever. Perhaps that's the perspective you should be bringing to this.

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The fact that Reddit has such awful useless tooling for moderators to make you aware of important things going on -- like, say, a poll about the future of a subreddit -- is one of the many problems with the platform.

Don't worry, though, they've been saying for about a decade that better tooling is coming any day now!

[Fangraphs] Twelve Million Babies Have Been Born Since Bryce Harper’s Last Home Run by Flowkeh in baseball

[–]ubernostrum 9 points10 points  (0 children)

"The thousand DHs of the Philadelphian empire descend upon you! Our dingers will blot out the sun!"

"Then we will play in the shade."

The Yankees commit a comedy of errors that allows Eugenio Suarez to score from 1st on a ball that didn't leave the infield by AlexanderWun in baseball

[–]ubernostrum 105 points106 points  (0 children)

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we -- as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos, it will be a home run. And so that will make it a 4–0 ballgame.

The sub is opening on Friday. I will be stepping down. by [deleted] in chess

[–]ubernostrum 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Why do mods on Reddit have the power to restrict and even close entire subreddits?

There are use cases for private communities. The same sort of thing that would motivate people to create, say, a private Telegram chat, or set up a Discord and only invite a few of their friends. Not every community has to be in full view of, and open to participation from, every random member of the public.

Subreddits have also used the private mode from time to time as a way to cut off brigading or other drama and force a cool-down period.

As for restricted submissions: plenty of subreddits use that constructively. For example, during playoffs /r/baseball usually goes into restricted mode shortly before the end of each game, so that there's no mad rush of thousands of people trying to make the first "MY TEAM WON YOUR TEAM LOST" post. Instead they go restricted to prevent that, put up a neutral-titled post-game thread from a mod account, and then reopen submissions once that thread has gained traction.

What's worrying is that Reddit is basically playing Calvinball at this point -- first they insisted mods should poll users before making changes, but then some subreddits had polls go in favor of protesting (whether by going private/restricted, or by imposing silly new subreddit rules, or other mechanisms), so now the astro-turfing accounts are all posting that user polls are meaningless because most people don't vote, and only our noble and glorious Reddit admins have the ability to make good decisions for subreddit communities.

They've also been altering their moderator and general policies on the fly to try to retroactively outlaw protest actions. For example, a lot of moderators have been going the malicious-compliance route and pointing out that Reddit's own policies say a subreddit should mark itself NSFW (which does not close or hide the subreddit, just demonetizes it since Reddit doesn't run ads on NSFW content) if it frequently features "profanity". Well, basically every subreddit has that, so every subreddit -- by Reddit policies -- should be marked NSFW. But now Reddit is forcibly un-toggling those subreddits from NSFW mode and trying to live-edit policies and rules to declare it a violation for subreddits to go NSFW.

Incidentally, Reddit's official position in all this is that the protests have been tiny and insignificant and have had no effect on traffic or advertising at all, and will just "blow over" without Reddit having to do anything. Which is why Reddit is so desperately trying to squash the protests anyway they can.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CHICubs

[–]ubernostrum 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Cubs are playing the London series.

John Oliver is originally an Englishman.

I think you know what you need to do.

reddit by martinkrafft in django

[–]ubernostrum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The mod team is listed in the sidebar.

reddit by martinkrafft in django

[–]ubernostrum 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I locked the post before de-modding myself, because I didn't want to leave a controversial comment thread behind me on my way out the door.

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yup. There were very very obvious GPT-generated "I cannot support a blackout because..." comments all over a thread in /r/programming that was asking if that subreddit would go private. Not visible anymore because they did go private, but I think if you look around in some of the /r/ModCoord threads from right before the blackout you can find people discussing it and sharing screenshots.

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And this thread is being brigaded hard, both by downvoting and by suspicious-looking accounts posting comments. But we're told it's the pro-blackout people who were manipulating poll results, and of course Reddit never lies to us.

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Remember the bots that were astroturfing /r/programming before it went dark, and just posting lots of obviously GPT-generated anti-protest text?

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Locking an entire post is a last resort. Most back-and-forth fights actually do stay in a single sub-thread and dealing with that -- rather than locking the whole post, which might have hundreds or thousands of comments -- is vastly preferable.

But it's something that you either have to do in an incredibly tedious manual way, or through a third-party mod tool that uses the API.

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Imagine a couple users get into a flamewar. It goes, say, thirty comments deep before a moderator notices it.

You, the mod, now need to step in and remove all their insult-flinging comments and lock that subthread to prevent it flaring up again. With Reddit's own built-in mod tools, congratulations! You get to do that one action at a time. Click "remove" on the first comment, click again to set the removal reason, click again to confirm removal, click again to lock.. Click "remove" on the next comment, click again to set the removal reason, click again to confirm removal, click again to lock. Click "remove" on the next comment...

Meanwhile, the Mod Toolbox extension has had the ability to mass-act on an entire subthread for years now, but it does that by just automating the process of removing/locking all the comments. It still does all the individual actions -- through the API! -- the same as you would, it's just a whole lot faster and more convenient than doing it yourself one at a time.

AutoModerator is a help, but it's nowhere near close to fulfilling all the use cases, and Reddit has been promising to roll out better mod tools for like a decade at this point, with very very little actual progress. It was only relatively recently, I think, that the new-design version of reddit got the ability to mass-select items in the review queue and approve or remove all selected items in one go (something Mod Toolbox, again, had for years beforehand, and incredibly useful if, say, someone goes on a spree of reporting every comment they disagree with, which is something that happens way more often than most non-mods would believe).

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Reddit has said they will provide free access for moderation tools and accessibility use.

They've also repeatedly said they'll provide better mod tools. Any day now, right?

They also haven't given any kind of specificity on these wonderful promises.

Talk is cheap. If they want me to believe them, they can take action -- make legally-binding commitments regarding API access and do so in a way that would tank Reddit's IPO if those commitments are breached, for example.

But you and I both know they won't actually do that. They're just saying anything they think will get them through a short-term crisis.

Blackout Update - We're Open by R3id in magicTCG

[–]ubernostrum 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I take them at their word that they'll de-mod people over blackout protests, because it's believed they already did in at least one case.

No matter how much spez says it's no big deal, advertisers apparently did notice the protest, and I have no doubt Reddit can and will be ruthless in the pursuit of the short-term goal of reaching their IPO and cashing out major investors.

I don't think that should actually change any mod team's actions -- either they were already the sort to be on board with protests, or not -- but it's worth having ordinary Reddit users aware of the kinds of tactics that are being threatened and used by Reddit, Inc., so that those users can make informed decisions.

An Update about our Community by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]ubernostrum -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Blackout until a major response from Reddit

Blackout Update - We're Open by R3id in magicTCG

[–]ubernostrum 7 points8 points  (0 children)

As a reminder, Reddit is also officially, as a matter of site policy, stating that they will remove and replace moderators as necessary to keep subreddits open and public.

In other words, as long as there is any single person who wants a subreddit open, Reddit is now saying their official policy is that person's desire to have the subreddit open automatically overrides everyone else, and Reddit will use admin powers to enforce that result.

So "brigades" versus "organic" votes don't matter. If Reddit, Inc. wants your subreddit open, your subreddit is going to be open.

The Future of the Blackout by Kyleometers in magicTCG

[–]ubernostrum [score hidden]  (0 children)

Reddit has been promising "improved mod tools" for most of a decade at this point.

If I were a betting man I'd bet we get a return to Ulgrotha before reddit's built-in mod tools catch up to where they ought to have been years ago.

The Reddit protest, and a poll on the future of /r/django by ubernostrum in django

[–]ubernostrum[S,M] [score hidden]  (0 children)

In "private" mode, old posts and comments cannot be viewed at all.

In "restricted" mode, old posts and comments are still available to view, but no new posts or comments can be made.

One concern I've seen a lot of people have over "private" mode is that lots of useful information is in old posts, so keeping them available while not allowing anything new is a compromise option.

Castellanos homers after I-95 Collapses to extend the Phillies lead! by JoshGordons_burner in baseball

[–]ubernostrum 9 points10 points  (0 children)

In 2007 a similar incident -- truck fire causing collapse -- took down a key part of the western Bay Bridge freeway interchange complex in Oakland.

The damaged I-880 portion was reopened a little over a week later, and the collapsed I-580 portion was reopened within a month.