this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!

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[–] mizmoose@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My Moose Sense was tingling and I decided to check on the subs I moderate on Reddit. Sure enough, there were issues.

One of the three subs was set to 'restricted' (nobody can post or comment but the sub is still open), not private. (I'll pedantically put my explanation for this at the bottom so you can ignore it).

However, the seniorest mod, who is never around (seriously, his last post/comment was 10 years ago!), decided the sub should be private, not restricted. And he'd tried to do it himself, but because he hadn't been around for at least two years, the site wouldn't let him make the change! So I've changed it and it's now private.

Additionally, a report troll appeared, because he couldn't make any comments. I guess that's an even better reason to make it private.

[you can now ignore my exposition blather]

The sub was set to restricted instead of private because, well, part of this protest is also about people with vision impairments not being able to use the iOS mobile app and relying on 3rd party apps. If a subreddit is private, any message set by the moderators ("This sub is private because...") is not displayed by the Reddit mobile app. So the idea was, restrict access so any regular mobile reader would be sure to know what we were doing. But with 7000+ subs dark, I don't think it's any great mystery any more.

[–] ApathyMoose@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

My moose senses also tingled. What great senses we have eh?

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[–] uthredii@beehaw.org 23 points 1 year ago

The rust subreddit is apparently considering moving to Lemmy:

https://lemmy.ml/post/1205713

[–] daniel@beehaw.org 19 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Would love to see a list of large subreddits that aren't participating and the statements (if any) they put out explaining why.

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[–] crank@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (10 children)

If i may dream, the actual solution to this issue would be a mod/user takeover along the lines of a factory occupation, or a more peaceful worker buyout. (Sometimes the former leads to the latter.)

When the tools of production are a server farm, how do they get taken over? What does it look like?

To be a little more grounded, the real targets of this action should not be "reddit" or /u/spez. It should be whoever is actually in charge. Do we know who that is?

[–] patchymoose@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Disturbingly, there is really no way to know who actually owns a private company like Reddit. Once it goes public, then the owners will be the shareholders (and in reality, the owners are the major shareholders who have a controlling stake).

The only clue to the current ownership is whatever management wishes to disclose. Spez wrote a blog post in 2021 indicating that they issued $250M in "series E funding" to existing and new investors.

If there are any finance bros around here, they may be able to dig up some sort of disclosures from bond auctions to try and see who bought it.

The only confirmed investor I know about is Tencent. They invested in 2019. Its possible they were also some of the "existing investors" Spez referred to in 2021.

Bottom line: nobody knows who owns Reddit. But apparently the owners think this guy Spez is a good fit to run their company, somehow.

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[–] uthredii@beehaw.org 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

r/programming is private even though I think a lot of the mods were reddit employees, I think even u/spez. what is going on lol

[–] sijt@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

If the AMA taught us anything, it's that spez doesn't actually use reddit. Let alone understand it.

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[–] anji@lemmy.anji.nl 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] admin@beehaw.org 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)
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