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 😤🤝😤
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
Haha, no worries. I think we mostly agree, and certainly we agree much more than we disagree.
I think my disagreement is just on this one point: that in the short or near-term, the John Oliver-style of protesting is an effective way of impacting reddit’s bottom line.
I’m sorry to be a bother on this actually, but I feel it’s really important for me to understand this point. If I’m mistaken about the above, then I need to change how I advocate accordingly. I could be doing a lot of damage by telling folks that John Oliver protests are effective, when they are not.
Ah, gotcha. Restricted doesn’t directly or as obviously shut down ad revenue like going private or going NSFW, but it does impact it by significantly reducing traffic. So basically the opposite of driving traffic. This makes sense.
No worries. I’m more than happy to take your word for this. If anything, the fact that you’re a former mod means you likely have insights into this that I should be willing to learn from.
This is what your original comment said.
From that, I would gather that there are three drivers here: reducing traffic (on which I would include going restricted, based on your comment above), going private, and going NSFW.
So the second article I linked to said that overall traffic was back to normal, pre-protest levels, but ad traffic was still down and trending downwards.
That doesn’t work with the first driver (reducing traffic isn’t compatible with overall traffic increasing), and the second driver, going private, ought to be reducing overall traffic as well. That leaves NSFW as the third and only driver to explain the difference between overall traffic rising but ad traffic dropping.
However, if we agree that NSFW can’t explain all the difference, then there must be at least a fourth driver that helped increased traffic back to normal levels but still hurt and reduced ad traffic specifically.
From there, the original disagreement arises - I argue that this fourth driver must be John Oliver-style protesting. From your comments I believe you disagree with this.
But again, this is only short-term. Eventually, reddit will either learn how to make money off of the “protesting traffic” - or else crush it.
The important point for me here is - is it okay for me to encourage folks who aren’t fully ready to leave yet to take part in John Oliver-style protests, or do I need to push for total disengagement? I know I must eventually switch over, but what I guess I’m asking is, has that time already come?
The fact that reddit seems to be dumb about going restricted makes me hopeful that reddit just also being dumb about John Oliver (rather than making full and normal revenues off of it). After all you explained very well how going restricted hurts reddit’s bottom line by reducing traffic but reddit still isn’t resisting it.
Agree 100% but then they are left with the problem of who will run the sub.
Yes but shutting the sub down for being unmoderated has the same effect, no? A real shot-yourself-in-the-foot moment there. Worse for reddit even, as in theory even if the mods were finally ready to cave in, they can’t anymore.
reddit being dumb about the above makes me hopeful that reddit is also just dumb about John Oliver, rather than the alternative.