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BardWatch
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Anti-Hate-Brigade
12d ago
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#335894
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Bard spotting on Bluesky 23 January 2025 
- 23
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Now playing: Aquatic Ambience (A Hint of Blue remix) (DKC).mp3
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🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 (@unormal.bsky.social):
you honestly love to see this
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The reddit admins scrupulously avoid (unless absolutely necessary, and then only in a way that applies equally to all subreddits) telling subreddits what to do, because "You can't ban links to x dot com" is the kind of thing that converts volunteer mods to employees.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And I have seen a coordinated and controlled effort to take over a website; the operators of /r/cringeanarchy, /r/the_donald, /r/metacanada, and /r/conservative (among others) were involved in it in 2017. /r/friendly_society was a white supremacist conspiracy to harass other mods off the site.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Sorry, 2018, not 2017. It's been two decades since 2020, seems like
🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ＞∿＜ₑͤ ∞🌮 (@unormal.bsky.social):
400 years
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Foxhack / Dave Silva (@foxhack.bsky.social):
But they still removed mod powers from people who closed down subreddits during the API debacle.
What's to say they won't do it again, forcing these subs to allow links to Xhitter or else be forcefully replaced?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Ah! They removed moderator privileges from people who closed down subreddits with the express purpose of denying Reddit advertising revenues, or inducing people to cease using Reddit. These are both civil torts of interference with business relationships.
Also —
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The "API Debacle" is a controversy manufactured by a group of people who had been kicked off the site for operating hate groups and a group of people who had been stealing service from reddit thru use of the API.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
The Reddit API had been mismanaged for ~6 years, because the employee who had been in charge of it, well, it wasn't his primary or even secondary job responsibility, and an overhaul of it was down the list of priorities behind improvements that generate more users & revenue
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
However, the API User Agreement from 2016 explicitly disallowed the things which the large Third Party App developers were doing with the API. Reddit came to them and said, "You've abused it for 6 years at no charge while raking in $$$$$$+ apiece, sharing none of that back; Let's talk" —
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And one of them tried to extort Reddit.
At the same time, a cohort of people who had run i.e. CringeAnarchy & The_Donald and MillionDollarExtreme & CoonTown & worse, used their access to a Reddit Moderator Groomercord to urge them all to "unionise" and go dark to extort Reddit.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Those who went along with that are the ones who were demodded.
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Foxhack / Dave Silva (@foxhack.bsky.social):
I never heard anything about hate groups.
All I heard was that their forced API changes and excessive fees made a lot of friends have to abandon the apps they used be able to read the site without having to deal with their ridiculous design choices and overwheming ads.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
You never heard anything about hate groups because it takes time to research and build knowledge and dig up backroom discussions, while the pretexts used get around the world in a flash.
Granted, the native Reddit app was garbage, then.
However - apps that existed for i.e. blind accessibility …
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
And moderator supporting apps, etc - those were given full and free access to the API.
Reddit's change in business pricing for the firehose was to shut down people whose business model was to strip advertising & user privacy from the site
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Another reason the API change was made was to shut down people whose operations were literally just "fusker every NSFW photo off the site from every public subreddit & as many private subreddits as possible"
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Some of these groups were enabling minors to access explicit pornography, circumventing the site's access controls, in multiple felony violations; some were harvesting and non-consensually sharing intimate media shared to groups in confidence.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
These also were never mentioned by Reddit; They were brought to Reddit by concerned redditors who had been affected by these issues.
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
At any rate, apologies if you felt compelled to read this far; I am cursed with too much knowledge of why Reddit was dysfunctional 2015-2022, because I needed to kneo, to Karen at Reddit admins over it all that time
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what is bro yapping about
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Tony Sladky (@unitedshoes.bsky.social):
Can you please explain what was meant by "converts volunteer mods to employees"?
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
Because of various court decisions about internship, labour law, and the employees of UCHISPs giving direction to volunteer mods: if the employees of a UCHISP give directions to (manage) volunteer mods, they're legally employees, not third-party, arm's-length volunteers. It creates that relationship
Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):
That's part of the reason Reddit spun off the Reddit Gifts program, shut down having an employee work with moderators to run AMA interviews, and community / T&S stopped "working closely with" the mods of the "defaults"
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