I admin that I prefer Reddit’s style of news as users quickly grab the headlines to make it easy for me to use. Today was the first day I truly took a look at this forum and it’s sufficient to me, which is great, as lord knows how long that sub will be down.
OH, if ever there was a time though for those daily Post show news updates 
I have visited Reddit SquaredCircle and other Reddit pages for news and funny comments for years although I never posted much. And I saw their post last week that the moderators are closing SquaredCircle indefinitely but I did not understand why.
Because of API updates? I don’t even know what that means. Or what those changes have to do with how most people use Reddit. The protest is ridiculous. If there are changes being made by Reddit that a mod or a user doesn’t like they should just leave. They shouldn’t have the power to shut down whole communities without even a vote.
Very glad the Post Wrestling forum exists to continue to have somewhere to discuss the wacky world or pro wrestling.
The gist of the gist is this: Reddit is “going public” soon, or they hope to. In the past year they’ve been cleaning out their closets. One way was hiding the NSFW stuff to where you had to know where to look for it (it used to flap on the Popular sub winds. Now, while there’s ways to easily find it, you gotta “know” how to filter for it).
The biggest way though has been slapping around developers who use APIs. These devs use APIs to basically make Reddit “better” on a mobile level. Most folks seemingly use their phones for Reddit and I’ve been told the official app is just pure garbage. I use old.reddit.com, which is a bare bones version of Reddit, and it’s super fine to me.
This is where things get funky. Reddit claims devs like Apollo is basically hogging API resources. There’s disputes about this, but Reddit is basically going “hey, if you continue to go down this road, you gotta pay…$20 million a year.”
The Apollo dev did the math and realistically it should be a fraction of that, but more importantly, could never even sniff that type of money. Their “cut” is drastically less than what it would take to pay Reddit, who seemingly asked for a number SO HIGH that nobody could reach it unless they were aggressive in making it happen, or was a big of a site as Reddit. He also released a bunch of notes/conversations with the Reddit folks, as I guess you don’t need to dislose privacy in Canada.
Why do all these mods care? Modding a site like Reddit is unpaid. They have Admins who are paid, to note, who the mod report to. Since the stuff is unpaid they’d rather use API functions that make their lives easier. Reddit shaking down the heavy API users means that the mods gotta do more work in an unpaid position. That’s the crux of the outrage. They also claim its for accessibility reasons, but truly, it’s Reddit not paying these mods, and now making these unpaid mods work (harder) to do their jobs.
I side with the mods who are shutting down shop, but think it’s silly to claim to the world that you’re protesting from X to Y, as it’s going to be super easy for folks to find stuff to do for two days. The wrestling sub mods seemingly went the more smarter route of doing it “indefinitely”, which I support much more…but will now have to lean on this forum for my news as I don’t use other social media sites.
Hope that is a good recap for you. All in all, it makes sense to me, and I understand why everyone is rallying behind this Apollo app guy, but I feel if you’re going to boycott…you boycott quietly (and not in a fashion where your “bosses” know when you’re not showing up for an unpaid job)
I guess my view is that as you pointed out, the Mods are unpaid. They also don’t “own” the page they moderate. I don’t think they should have the power to shut down a reddit page.
I understand that some mods treat moderating as a full time job as though they do own the place. But if Reddit is going to make a change that makes it harder to moderate then the mod has the option to quit. And somebody else will probably step up to be a moderator who understands the constraints. Or not. And moderating goes down-hill and the people stop visiting. But it should be a choice of the user whether or not to stop using it.
I guess Reddit might just be playing nicely but if SquaredCircle is bringing people to the site which Reddit then monetizes through advertising, then why doesn’t Reddit just come in and turn the page back on? You can almost argue that Reddit has a financial responsibility to the Admins that do rely on income from Reddit to turn all these pages back on.
RIP Reddit
Once they decide to go public you can rest assured the product will not favor the user base who made the product what it was in the first place.
There is nothing like a good Reddit forum in a sub that feels like a communal home. It was a better town square than Twitter ever was. A real IYKYK vibe.
FYI SquaredCircle and most other subreddits are back. There is along post pinned about what the blackout achieved and what it didn’t. It’s an interesting read.
I read it, and I feel that this is why online boycotts never work. There’s way too much variance, nuance, and “chefs in the kitchen”. I’ve seen mods act like nothing has happened, mods act like it’s the end of the world, mods who have been caught posting on other subs (and their own when it was dark…which is dumbfounding), and mods who feel truly defeated.
There’s also mods now who are allowing pure NSFW through regular subs like nothing is wrong.
As a reader, I just wanted to see content and discussion. I feel the mods should have waged war against the admins without involving us foot soldiers.