Written by DrNeurohax
"Some Thoughts on Ways Mods Can Stay in Malicious Compliance, in Order To Prolong the Protest and Their Removal by Admins.
r/funny should be proud. They sat in the crosshairs for longer than anyone thought they would. I hope they, and all the other subs pressured into going restricted or public, continue to show their support in some unique way. Some ideas:
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Include kbin/lemmy equivalent magazines in the banner and a sticky post. Sticky an autocomment on every post with fediverse info.
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Only use the standard mod tools and halve your time commitment. “We went back to using the tools they gave us and this is how it will be from now on. Welcome to the new Reddit you guys chose by not supporting the blackout!”
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Mark the sub NSFW. Realistically, there’s rarely a reason anyone in an office should be on Reddit. This should also make the sub unavailable for mobile users when the API changes go into effect.
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Make every day April Fool’s Day. Like when r/DataIsBeautiful posted nothing but pics of Star Trek’s Data. If you have no ideas, just google the sub name and see what you find!
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- PIC is also:
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- a type of long catheter that is inserted through a peripheral vein, often in the arm, into a larger vein in the body, used when intravenous treatment is required over a long period. Seems like an important topic for r/Pics to cover. (Dictionary.com)
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- Slang abbreviation for Partner In Crime, so maybe change focus to famous crime duos (Urban Dictionary)
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- Slang for a movie, so become the movie subreddit (Encyclopedia Britannica)
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- Just go nuts with https://www.abbreviations.com/pic
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Set unreasonable posting requirements without an announcement, but noting the change in the side bar. Gotta read the fine print."
Set posts to require moderator approval.
- Approve 1 post every hour or only approve really poor quality ones.
Fracture the community.
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Announce alternative subs for your topic, which you also control, and encourage unsubbing from the original sub. Do some of the above, while also setting the sub to require accounts be subscribed for a month to post. Those that leave will find nothing in the alt subs, which they can’t post to, and be unable to post on the main sub for a month. Also, fracturing the large subs will reduce traffic overall, due to the chaos.
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Remove and replace scrub mods where possible. If you get booted down the line, another supporter can continue the pattern.
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Forward any post remotely related to a product advertised on Reddit to that company’s media contact for approval. Advertisers should know what is being associated with their brands. (And if some really gnarly stuff gets submitted by some non-mod account, it might be more impactful."
We must fight back. Spread the word.
The whole problem with reddit (aside from the people who run it) is the amount of negative energy that comes out there. If that’s all you have, wonderful, unleash it there… it will help to hasten the end. But in trying to celebrate the death of one thing, you’ll miss opportunities for spreading good vibes here and enjoying the birth of something new. It’s a buzzkill to have a new community sprout up and have everyone obsessed with killing the old one. Think about the type of energy you give to the world, you will get the same in return.
That’s the standard cycle when it comes to these migrations.
- People get angry with the old platform.
- People find or make a new platform.
- People bitch about the old platform on the new platform.
- People either go back to the old platform or stay on the new one and forget about the old one.
It’s interesting watching all the people here that… this is clearly their first time experiencing this cycle.
Eh, just because it’s happened a few times before doesn’t mean we can’t do better or suggest people do.
Where’s that “First time?” meme when us internet oldsters need it?
It might not even be the first time. They just forgot about why they ever left MySpace and that they ever tried Gab.
‘Leave MySpace?’ Why would anyone ever do that? 🤣😂 I mean, look at all the shiny and/or sparkly gifs which I’ve painstakingly arranged with my mad ctrl-v ctrl-c skillz! Trust me bro, this is peak internet.
Narrator:…
Narrator: What? He’s not wrong…
The amount of extra energy folks have for this is crazy. By all means, leave while making a statement, even if that statement is profanity laced. But that site is tearing itself apart just fine on its own, no assistance needed. When you start agitating on a platform that isn’t yours (and let’s be real, Reddit communities haven’t been user owned in a long time, you turn in to the asshole. Reddit may fail, may learn its lesson, or may slowly mutate into something radically different from what it is, but pour all your energy into a creative pursuit. Destruction is fun, but ultimately not very rewarding. Just my perspective.
I think spreading a bit of positivity on reddit with the occasional post about lemmy and the decentralised nature of all this will attract some people and things can grow organically. At the end of the month I’ll stay here and leave reddit be. Reddit will either wither or carry on and change from what it’s been.
i made a nice, positive and neutral post abt my mag @SilentHill kbin on r/silenthill recently. didnt take, but it was worth a shot
I’ll be frank, most of these ideas are childish and will result in mod removal quicker than you can say “malicious compliance”. Just keep the blackout, or maybe make posts require mod approval and set the automod reply message.
Or just silently purge all of the subreddit’s content behind the cloak of the blackout before stepping down permanently or even outright deleting the subreddit.
Can’t be done, admins have it all backed up.
If a user deletes their own content though, legal barriers arise to restoring that from backup (against the user’s explicit will)
Unfortunately, the question of legality hasn’t stopped Reddit. Many people have been reporting that their comments have been restored against their will [https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Updated-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and#comments].
This thread prompted me to check my old account which I had completely scraped clean around a year ago. I was shocked to find that posts I made in an extremely popular subreddit a long time ago were restored. I am very sad that the admins of Reddit are resorting to such immoral tactics.
Ahh, I was hoping that like OP said in the update, it was just some bad scripts - Power Delete Suite, looking at you - that didn’t properly delete things but reported that they were. Or like a restore from backup made necessary by the outage on Monday or something.
Won’t accomplish anything - mods can’t delete the content itself, just remove the listing from public display. All that has to happen is run a script reversing post removals by [moderator XYZ] between [time period] and the sub is restored; IIRC they’ve used similar tools, or methods, in the past when a mod has gone rogue and tried to kill a community with the same methodology.
If that was possible, it is literally destroying information, much of it useful (more of it useless I know but what IS useful is hard to find on n other places. Why not export the data? Make an archive? Distribute useful content and curate it elsewhere.
You can’t just keep private anymore. Reddit admins and the reddit ceo have both said they’re no longer interested in maintaining a community run website. They can and will begin taking over subs and making them admin run. They’re going to have to rely heavily on bots for moderation, which will obviously result in massively deteriorated quality for a significant portion of the website.
The end result is reddit rebranding itself entirely. Maybe eventually they’ll do away entirely with community controlled subreddits, and instead maintain only the most popular ones. I don’t trust a single thing they say anymore, but their actions show they’re committed to morphing reddit into a newer corporate-centric social media. They will naturally shift to a model of scraping and selling user data to make up for what will inevitably be a massive decline in profits.
That’s what killed Digg, more than the interface change.
True that. But there are likely quieter versions of this which mods could enact, if they wanted to slowly undermine a sub. Not necessarily advocating for this approach, though malicious compliance can have its place — and certainly not the pieces of getting people to join the fediverse by spamming Reddit. Maybe it heightens awareness of the fediverse; but not sure it sets the right tone nor ultimately serves this whole venture.
Just being a shitty mod would do a lot on a wide scale. Use only the official tools. Have a timer on your phone for how much time you will put into moderation per day. Lax up on rules. Disable all 3rd party mod tools.
It’s what’s going to happen either way, once the end of the month rolls around.
Unions have a phrase for that. It’s called “work to rule”.
I agree. I wonder if they’ll still be in trouble even if they open but require mod approval to post. Based on the first option the OP listed, they just want people to spam reddit for kbin/lemmy which is pretty cringe. There are a lot of options/alternatives out there which if people want to know about they should be shown most/all of them, instead of just one.
Yup, just a friendly reminder highlighting alternatives (fedi or otherwise) would suffice. Which can be done through a pinned reply by automoderator.
Ruining user’s experience yourself just makes them hate you specifically. Kind of how titanfall players hate the DDOS attackers more than EA now.
Going NSFW would do quite a bit to kill a default sub. It means only lurkers with accounts and nsfw enabled could see the posts. It would also kill more google scraping of it.
At this point if the users want to continue using Reddit, that’s their choice and I don’t think holding a subreddit hostage is gonna help. I like the non-intrusive suggestions such as promoting alternatives. The users ultimately decide whether the platform survives. I’m staying on kbin because I don’t like the direction Reddit is (has been) going, I’m just glad this whole situation enlightened me to good alternatives. This is just one more step in the wrong direction and people will continue to leave if they continue to make the user experience worse.
“If you build it, they will come.”
Law of attraction is more influential than anything - providing alternatives when/if it’s requested is enough, and contributing here!
Well said. Don’t be the bad actor in someone else’s story.
This guy fucks!
They really need to disable and stop all moderation. Maybe even create their own spam bots.
That’s very rude, harmful to users, and will only serve to have the sub taken away from the mods doing that. It’s a very bad idea. I do suggest using only the tools provided by the website. But don’t use the NSFW tag erroneously, because that will get mod powers taken away.
OP has the spirit, at least.
That said, malicious compliance is definitely the way. Use the mod tools provided by the website, and when that leads to massive amounts of shitposts staying up for hours/days, then change to having posts be approved by the mods. While continuing to use the mod tools to do so. Hopefully it will make the admins have to take the time to “help” with moderation, since the mods will no longer be able to keep up.
If I can’t moderate effectively with the tools I’m left with, I can’t guarantee that all content will be SFW at all times
“oh no”
Having the subreddit taken away from the mods would be a good thing, actually. Up until recently powermods with over 100 subreddits under their moderation belt were the main thing ruining the site.
The powermods are likily to be the last ones standing and work for Reddit. They will just get given the others
I don’t think that’s been true for years, has it?
If you can’t mod the sub properly then the spammers will make it nsfw anyway
The absolute #1 thing we need right now is focus on building kbin:
We DESPERATELY need a bot that will take submissions from our subreddit and mirror them on kbin so that we can create the same experience over here and build this place in parallel.
Once Spez eventually ruins Reddit through this Elon phase he’s going through, we will have a functioning community here, but we won’t do that if we can’t recreate the experience.
Does anyone have a solution to this? Any bot builders out there?
You should just make new posts of unique content instead of ripping posts from Reddit. Recycled memes doesn’t make a community - interaction does
I believe I read that kbin at least doesn’t have an API yet, anyone know if this is true?
Overall I like your plan. Each time migrations happen (like from YouTube to other places), I’m always surprised that people seem to think it’s an all-or-nothing thing. Like, I’m surprised I don’t start seeing people use or write a service to cross post to a bunch of video sites. Seems like a good way for them to help start building up views on other platforms (and help build alternative platforms that generally just lack content), but I have yet to see ANYONE do it. I’m sure someone has but usually they either just whine about how small other platforms are or try to switch too early and die off.
I don’t think that would have the intended impact though. What you end up with is a ghost town. It isn’t fun chatting about something when nobody else is there. A sub full of posts and zero comments discourages anyone from trying.
Less posts, but full of comments will be way more appealing because it means there is a community. The posts will come in time.
I like the /r/pics approach of John Oliver pictures only.
/r/gifs followed their example
What would this achieve? Mods who’ve spent years building their communities aren’t going to hurt their reputation just so you can live out a fantasy of burning Reddit to the ground. We get it, it hurts to lose a community. But if you’re done with Reddit, post content here that makes this place better. For now at least, Reddit and Kbin/Lemmy will exist together. There’s not going to be a Diggesque switchover to this platform, there’s too many people who just don’t share our concerns, amongst other blockers. This is doubly so if the only unique content here is complaining about Reddit.
Basically, live and let live. Some people will find their way here in due time. Spez is doing a fine job of butchering Reddit himself. He doesn’t need help.
I used both Digg and Reddit for literally years before quitting Digg.
I like these ideas.
Just wait for IPO day and then “Blackout 2: Electric Boogaloo”
r/askhistorians has created a megathread on past protests…
This could only work if it’s done en masse. Organized and synchronized.
Subreddits doing any of this on their own will only get their mods removed faster
We know that simultaneously changing a whole bunch of subs between public and private drives reddit into the ground. Subs are not allowed to stay private or risk being taken over, but they can surely still change between the two modes provided they don’t stay dark too long. So, every 48 hours simultaneously switch the subs between the two. Malicious compliance, right?
Good, let someone do my free job.
Fuck reddit and fuck spez ass Huffman, ima lurk here whilst I shit
Damn dude… This is absolutely brilliant 🤣😂 Though I gotta say I’m just a bit taken aback by the ease with which you seem to torture… Not judging or anything, by any means, but by the time I got to your ‘Fracture the community’ section, I was like, ‘so how many years did you say you were in charge of gitmo again?’
I came expecting to see more of a ‘late 1930s Austrian resistance to German occupation’ kinda vibe, and this dude brought the whole ‘French underground’
