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:
Agreed. I think this is the disagreement or misunderstanding.
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
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.
Yeah. It is odd. Why would they not go after restricted if restricted means they lose ad money?
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.
Restricted does not stop ad revenue. It just means no new content, which depresses traffic. We get “insights” as mods and we saw a drop in user traffic after we went restricted. It was trending downward, but I no longer have access to it as I have resigned so even if I wanted to I can’t show you the data points.
The mod team was clearly not willing to play ball, so the only option for the admins - seeing as how they are clearly unwilling to compromise at all - is to remove the problem mods as they see them. The most obvious targets are those that are currently impacting traffic/ad revenue, as adweek demonstrated was a very real problem the moment subs went private en masse.
Never said NSFW was the only driver so not really sure how to respond to this.
Agreed. And yes I definitely agree the only real option is to leave, as my original comment said! I’m not really sure what we are disagreeing about at the end of the day lol
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.