Hey everyone,
We want to be completely transparent about what’s been happening behind the scenes.
Over the past few weeks, Reddit admins have started cracking down on subs that post political, off-topic, or “low-effort” content — even when it’s obviously satire or harmless shitposting. Unfortunately, r/CirclejerkSopranos got flagged in that wave.
We were told, directly and indirectly, that if we didn’t clean things up, the subreddit could be taken down permanently.
What This Means
To avoid a ban, we’ve had to remove a lot of posts that don’t fit Reddit’s updated enforcement standards. That includes:
Political jokes or memes — even if they use Sopranos screenshots
Non-Sopranos posts, current-event edits, or general internet memes
Some of the more “random” or off-topic shitposts the sub used to allow
We know that kind of content was part of the sub’s identity and humor. We didn’t want to change it — but Reddit’s moderation team made it clear that if we didn’t comply, the entire community could be wiped out.
The mod team isn’t happy about this either. None of us want to over-moderate or kill the vibe — we’re just trying to keep the sub from getting banned.
Anyways $4 a pound. It’s up to you guys if you’d like to keep this sub around.
EDIT:
Whatever happens to this sub, thank you for the last 8 years. It’s been an honor to be joined by men of honor.
Ah salud
https://www.reddit.com/r/CirclejerkSopranos/comments/1ob5b3n/mod_update_reddit_cracking_down_on/
Mods will now forfiet their own communities and work for free delivering ad-friendly content dictated the admins.
When I got kicked out in the February, post-inauguration bloodbath, I was upset. I had a 12 year account, and nearly a million Karma, and was active in several communities.
After seeing what Reddit has become, I no longer miss it. It’s a shadow of what it was, and I wouldn’t like it the way it is now.
I wish Lemmy had active guitar and cat forums, but other than that, I’m much happier here.
Only thing I miss now that I’ve been kicked off Reddit are the fandom subs. Haven’t been able to really replace that anywhere.
As always, redditors will just sit and take all the abuse and control, because switching to the threadiverse is just too much for them. It’s no wonder that fascism has taken over the USA so easily when even switching sites is too hard.
That feels a little inaccurate.
For any individual user who switches, there is a stunning lack of content, a loss of the niche communities etc. Even things that should be fairly mainstream have pretty small communities.
Yes, if all the users switched, great. But getting any group of thousands to do one thing is difficult, let alone the users of one of the most popular websites of all time.
I dunno, I think acknowledging and understanding the very real issues encountered by anyone trying the fediverse is key to actually solving those issues and helping it grow.
You don’t to convince everyone, just the biggest porn posters. People will go where the porn is, just ask 4chan!
Is there anything porn can’t do?!?
We’re all aware of network effects. Merely knowing about them won’t help you solve them. But when they’re literally forcing you to lobotomize your own comm and you still cannot switch, well then you’re just asking for the abuse.
Apologies, I should’ve outlined the bit I disagree with.
because switching to the threadiverse is just too much for them.
Like, no, for majority of users, switching to the fediverse isn’t too much effort, it’s just for what they want, switching to the fediverse sucks pretty hard.
“Oooh, I can’t wait to see what fun memes the fediverse has about the Toronto Blue Jays going into a game 7! Oh. Almost nothing? Cool. This is uhhhh. Yeah. Why am I here again?”
Yeah, reddit has all sorts of nonsense but to a casual user, it’s also got the content.
Like, no, for majority of users, switching to the fediverse isn’t too much effort, it’s just for what they want, switching to the fediverse sucks pretty hard.
That’s not opposing what I said. Switching to the fediverse is too much effort because building up the communities here requires effort, and they just want to consume. Eventually reddit will enshittify to such a degree, that even having an active Toronto Blue Jay comm won’t be enough and they will switch, but for me, it just points to the abuse people will tolerate for comfort, which as I pointed out, has parallels to the rise of fascism.
Okay, I just mean when you say:
when even switching sites is too hard.
It came off like you were saying a user simply had to log onto lemmy instead of reddit which they are too lazy to do.
it just points to the abuse people will tolerate for comfort
For most people, minor inconveniences like “oh no, my sopranos doesn’t have politics any more!” Or “oh no, I have to use a new app!” are trivial compared to the hassle of growing an entirely new social media ecosystem.
Yes, it has always been a death of a thousand papercuts, like with fascism. By the time you realize how bad it’s gotten and decide to take action, it has become harder than ever.
I think equating everything to fascism is partially how we got into the current mess but to each their own!
Like, the first Voat exodus kids also decried fascism because they couldn’t be horrifically racist anymore. By your theory, everyone should have left and built a new community in Voat which would have been terrible.
I agree. In my case it was a necessity, so I spent a bit of time actively looking for a Reddit alternative.
I half-heartedly joined Lemmy on a random instance (is that what they’re called? I forget). Anyway, it was Lemmy.pl and it went offline for a bit before I could get anywhere with it.
I tried again with lemmy.world and then stumbled across Boost, which was my favourite app for Reddit before they locked everything down and forced everyone on to the inferior Reddit app.
Anyway, the experience now is great. Just like old times. I confess I’ve no real interest in the fediverse as such, although I’m of course greatful that others do and that it exists. I’m just glad to be able to easily interact with communities that seems to be free from oppressive moderation and cold, automated admins that ban longtime users for accidental missteps.
Let me tell you, it’s even worse for NSFW comms. I still infrequently moderate one on Reddit only because of the disaster that was my attempts to move it. There are only two notable instances that allow NSFW content, and the first one became incredibly hostile to 2D content, while the second made a name for itself hosting underage content (not real csam, but still too fucked up to associate with). And during the couple of months I was actually able to run the comm, I was literally the only person who posted despite clearly advertising to the reddit users and cross posting to other relevant fediverse comms.
Lemmy has a… Strange aberration to anything porn/hentai in general, I know instance owners who live in certain countries can’t allow it due to legal reasons so they defederate anything sexy, but really close to the reddit exodus one of the most prominent complains were how people didn’t want to see anything sexy in their feed but didn’t want to turn on the nsfw filter because they still wanted to see news with graphic content in public.
Every now and then you can spot comments here and there about how people who like sexual things (like mods in their games or as a wallpaper in their pc) are bad and shouldn’t be enjoying it freely.
Or every time the lack of artists comes up, they don’t care about the fediverse because they know they will get shunned if they draw things a little too sexy.
The fediverse so far is prudish, bland and mid.
Great example. The thing is that technically, reddit’s not difficult. The mind bogglingly difficult is getting that user growth.
I’d also be concerned about the physical capacity of the Threadiverse to handle such a huge influx of users all at once. A lot of instances might get overwhelmed.
Good point. I doubt many instances could handle suddenly having 100x the users.
If there’s one sympathy I have for Redditors (and others), is that switching to the FV and trying to have a ‘Reddit-like’ experience is not only a bumpy learning curve for most, but in some ways simply impossible, based on various types of communities and content simply not being here. Or not being here nearly to their satisfaction.
I’m not saying that’s a great excuse (because it isn’t IMO), but to me it kinda reflects the level of effort many (or most?) Redditors are willing to spend, like it or not. Not unlike, say… the willingness to educate themselves on various political parties and figures such that they can make smart voting decisions.
Anyway, maybe we’ve been kind of hamstrung here by the fact that big social media’s ‘one stop shopping’ experience over the space of ~two decades has succeeded in producing a sort of jaded and entitled user-base, emotionally & psychologically unwilling to expand their boundaries in certain ways. Meanwhile, if something like the Fediverse had come along around the time of BBS’s or early web days, I’m thinking it would have been much more of a sensation, with loads more people willing to approach it in a much more open-minded way. *shrug*
Reddit is mostly filled with bots anyway. They can’t cry.
I honestly get it to some degree. ~50% of threadiverse users are people banned from most of reddit and are the most hopelessly miserable and arrogant assholes to be around. On top of that, the main content feeds are overwhelmed with low effort memes that give the whole Threadiverse dead-internet vibes. Until the larger instances actually take steps to make themselves welcoming while creating space for real discussions I wouldn’t blame anyone checking out lemmy.world (or whatever) and just noping right back out like the grandpa Simpson meme.
Wow, no political jokes or memes? Reddit really is officially dead then. It’s just a wasteland, a junkyard where everything valuable has been stripped and now patrolled by bots.
So Reddit administrators are deciding what subs should be about now? And enforcing their preconceptions? That’s bizarre. Even for Reddit admins that’s fucking weird.
Remember when the excuse for allowing subs dedicated to jerking off to pictures of children was “free speech”? What a difference a few years makes.
The_Donald encouraging violence against women? “We allow all ideas no matter how unpopular”.
The creator of KotakuInAction removes posts encouraging violence against women? That crosses a line!
Was GamerGate really only 11 years ago? That’s spun my head a little, TBH. I mean, it’s the root of QAnon, from there Trump, and just so much about the current US. I could have sworn it was 10 years before Trump got elected, not 2.
Yep. IMO, the experience of using social media was pretty good (far from perfect but pretty good) going into 2014, but 2014 set in motion what became 2015. When gamergate-style ““debate”” tactics took over well, everything.
EDIT: And more importantly those tactics weren’t banned by most subreddits
Reddit (the company) deciding what communities can be about is actually not new and I wish it were widely known. The first big example I know of goes back to 2018 when the admins overrode a subreddit creator to force their community to be for (pro) gamergate content.
I mean this is also true of many instances here. If someone deliberately subverted a notable community for their own purposes, against much of the audiences userbase - I imagine the instance admins would feel they have to step in.
If someone creates a community about topic A and removes posts about topic B, that is not “subverting”.
Oh I agree. I’m just saying that it would be justifiable in some instances for instance owners to remove moderators for how they run a community.
Oh yes, I believe it is the responsibility of instance admins, as I believe it is the responsibility of the Reddit admins too. And if Steve Huffman wants Reddit to be a pro gamergate right wing website he absolutely has that right. What I wanted to highlight is that Reddit has a long history of enforcing their policies selectively in ways that just-so-happen to allow right wing propagandists free access to everyone else’s communities.
I saw this coming a long time ago. Not sure how this is surprising to anyone.
As much as I hate the casual homophobia that’s rampant in that specific subreddit, this is some bullshit and idiotic moves by Reddit
Are political jokes no longer allowed on Reddit? Wtf?
Political jokes are not allowed anymore?!
Probably because they’re almost always at Trump’s expense.
The majority of the user base is anti administration there. They are killing their own utility to placate an admin that will demand more until the platform fails and is used less by real people, like fb now, because it no longer has that utility.
Yeah, but I guess the head honchos figure that’s less of a risk than having the wrath of Trump throwing his toadies after them. They know if they lose a significant portion of their base, it’ll likely only be temporary since they have all that user history and probably still a significant enough base to attract people back once the threat has (hopefully) passed.
Maybe it makes for undesirable training data?
Well maybe they could just talk about the latest episode… /jk
The slow but inevitable murder of platforms by their paymasters is a real pisser.
Feels like every platform starts well, expands and just gradually mutates into unusable corporate dogshit.
Those are exactly the three stages of enshittification:
-
Provide nice and useful platform to draw in users
-
Once there is a critical mass of users locked in, start with the ads and monetization to draw in the corporations
-
Get companies locked in, squeeze them for everything until the platform dies
-
Chasing away real engagement for fake manufactured engagement of powerful groups.
In this case allowing govt to censor users by threatening thd company behind the scenes. Already they send lists of users to violate under other pretext, especially israel related.
1st ammendment means nothing, just as 4th does not as they buy all data broker info and use it without wartamt or judicial oversight.
Another end run around our inalienable rights, sacrificed for short term profits and convenience.
Not surprising anymore, as spez wants to sanitize the site to make his fellow fascist techbros, fucking Kahanists, and MAGAts happy to thrive.
Sounds like Nazi Germany to me…
I can’t have this conversation again.
edit: seriously, is there an equivalent on Lemmy?
Hopefully someone creates one that’s not on world.
We need an alternative!
No, not like that!
Not sure what the point is in going from one Nazi bar to the next.
Anyone here who still has a reddit account should hop in that thread and link to the Lemmy version!
Fastest way to get banned, ask me how I know.
HA. At least your account died for a good cause?
