nsfw – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the so-much-for-democracy dept

As you’ll recall, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman whined about what he called the “landed gentry” among moderators of subreddits that were protesting his ridiculous extractive API changes. He insisted that perhaps things should be more democratic. In response, many subreddits took a vote on how subscribers to those subreddits wanted the mods to handle things, and many urged the moderators to continue protesting.

But, Huffman apparently couldn’t handle that kind of democracy. So he’s spent the last few weeks threatening mods. The ultimatums ramped up over the weekend, after Reddit made it official that protesting mods who changed their subs to be labeled as NSFW (“not safe for work” meaning no ads can show) would be removed unless they changed back.

However, Reddit has sent messages to the mods of those subreddits saying they must “immediately correct” their NSFW labeling, claiming each community “has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.” If the designation isn’t corrected, any moderators involved in that decision will be removed. Those mods may be “subject to additional actions,” such as losing the ability to join future moderator teams.

Much democracy, very freedom.

It appears some mods have caved, saying they don’t know what else to do. But some are still holding out.

As of Thursday evening, r/PICS had dropped the NSFW designation, along with r/military.

In an email to The Verge, a moderator for the military subreddit said that the mods decided to revert the NSFW designation because the community is a helpful resource for veterans experiencing mental health crises. The mod said that if Reddit removed the team, it could put the community at risk.

The moderators r/PICS discussed remaining NSFW and awaiting removal, but decided instead to explore “alternative ways of adhering to Reddit’s vague and contradictory mandates and policies,” a mod wrote in a Reddit DM to The Verge. “To be clear, reverting the NSFW setting technically constitutes a violation of the site-wide rules (as they are currently written), but since Reddit has insisted, we have been left with no other option.”

The mods of r/Askwomenadvice, who also received the warning, instead plan to keep the designation and potentially face removal. “Anyone with two brain cells to rub together could do a quick look at the top posts, whether it’s by week, month, year, or all time, and see that our sub is peppered with NSFW topics,” one moderator wrote. “Our ethics won’t allow us in good faith to lie to you so Reddit can make a buck. So when the sub gets turned over to whatever scab steps forward, we hope they have the decency to run it in a way that keeps you safe.”

Meanwhile, now that the API changes have been put in place, and a bunch of tools have had to shut down, moderators for the /r/blind subreddit announced that their blind mods can no longer moderate the sub.

Since the latest “accessibility” update to the Reddit app, the amount and magnitude of new accessibility related bugs has made it virtually impossible for blind mods to operate on mobile.

We have done absolutely everything we could to work with Reddit and have given them every opportunity. When they offered to host a demo of the update, we understood how little they understand about accessibility: they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on. The only fair conclusion is that they cannot use it without sight, but expect us to.

The update introduced various regressions and new bugs. This is entirely within the expectations of the mod team, given how rushed it was and how Reddit continues to demonstrate how underprepared they are to deal with accessibility.

While the group initially talked about moving elsewhere, for the time being they’re staying on Reddit, but all of the moderators on r/blind are now either sighted or visually impaired, as opposed to fully blind.

Seems like an ADA lawsuit waiting to happen, but hey, Huffman wants his IPO, so why not just toss out the blind moderators who are causing so much trouble.

Once again, things feel ripe for someone else to step in and fill the void of the enshittified Reddit. There are, of course, already attempts in the Fediverse with Lemmy, kbin and others. I’ve seen talk of building Reddit-like functionality into other decentralized protocols like nostr and ATproto. And, I’m sure that some others are looking at jumping in as well. For all we know, in a few months, Meta may launch its own Reddit competitor as well, just as they’ve slipped into the microblogging world with Threads.

Filed Under: accessibility, blind, nsfw, protests, steve huffman
Companies: reddit

Reddit Tells Mods That Protesting By Changing Sub To NSFW Violates The Rules

from the fuck-u/spez dept

The enshittification of Reddit continues. Yesterday we wrote about the next move from protesting mods to switch their subs to NSFW, which strips those subreddits of ads, and how Reddit was experimenting with removing the mods who did that. For what it’s worth, just a few days ago, Reddit insisted in a comment that it wasn’t “threatening” mods with removal, and then just days later it literally did remove the mods, so nice going Reddit comms: you’ve completely fucked over whatever credibility you might have had.

Anyway, late on Wednesday, a Reddit admin admitted that the company was changing its rules to say that if you change your sub to NSFW in protest, that violates the rules:

That’s a discussion where a mod asks if “transitioning from SFW to NSFW is allowed” and the main admin account that interacts with moderators, ModCodeofConduct, replied:

Thanks for asking this, we’ll have messaging going out to affected communities later today. Changing a previously SFW community to a NSFW community in order to protest Reddit policies is inappropriate for members of your community and not acceptable overall. People subscribe to communities based on the content at the time of subscription. Communities can gradually change as they grow, but this is not what we are observing and not in the best interest of the users being subjected to that content.

Incorrectly marking your community is a violation of both our Content Policy (rule 6) as well as the Moderator Code of Conduct (rule 2).

This is similar to the language that was used by Reddit’s spokesperson a day earlier, accusing the mods of violating both the Content Policy (which, you’ll recall, Reddit took down for a while) and the Moderator Code of Conduct.

But… this excuse is bullshit. The content policy rule 6 reads:

Ensure people have predictable experiences on Reddit by properly labeling content and communities, particularly content that is graphic, sexually-explicit, or offensive.

Obviously, that’s for the reverse situation of what’s happening here. That rule is clearly designed to say that if you’re hosing NSFW content you can’t label your sub SFW. Spinning that around to say that subs labeling themselves as NSFW violates that policy is just ridiculous, obnoxious lawyering.

As for the Mod Code of Conduct Rule 2, that excuse is also bullshit. This rule is for the sub to “set appropriate and reasonable expectations” and then says:

Users who enter your community should know exactly what they’re getting into, and should not be surprised by what they encounter. It is critical to be transparent about what your community is and what your rules are in order to create stable and dynamic engagement among redditors.

And so, again, you could obnoxiously lawyer this and claim the switch goes against “expectations,” but in looking over various subreddits making this change, most of the ones I’ve seen held votes of their community and asked them what they wanted to do, and clearly stated their intentions to the members of that subreddit.

So, the blanket statement that switching to NSFW in protest violates those rules is clearly inauthentic bullshit.

Even worse, moderators are reporting that admins have started removing memes making fun of CEO Steve Huffman, as well as comments from angry Redditors repeating the “fuck u/spez” mantra (“spez” being Huffman’s username). They’re posting images of the ones that they claim are deleted. It’s unclear if those are actually being deleted or what’s going on, but Huffman has admitted in the past to editing comments that criticized him. And while he promised never to do it again and said he just did it out of frustration, I’m guessing he’s pretty damn frustrated right now.

Mods are continuing to fight back, and some are pointing out the ridiculous hypocrisy in all of this. For example, the mods of r/Canning (a subreddit for how to safely can food) said they received another threat from admins, and pointed out in response that they’re literally doing exactly what their community asked them to do, so to claim that they’re going against community wishes is bullshit:

We agree that subreddits belong to their community of users — and so when 89% of our users voted that we should blackout the community until Reddit backtracks on their current API access stance, we followed the communities request that we close shop.

The mods of r/Canning will continue to follow the wishes of our community first. If you wish us to make the subreddit public again, you will need to meet the demands of our users; to whit that you re-open discussion with 3rd party application developers, reduce your outrageous API pricing, and give them a minimum of 6 months before that pricing takes effect.

That is what the users have asked of us as their moderators. If you sincerely care about the “Subreddit belonging to the community of users” you will meet our demands, at which point we can discuss re-opening the subreddit. Should you prematurely force our subreddit public against the wishes of the vast majority of our users, our users will know the truth of the lie as to whom the subreddit really belongs.

In comments later in that thread, the mod from r/Canning points out that canning is a very tricky process, and done wrong can create real harm. They fear that if Reddit replaces them with mods who don’t know much, it could create real dangers. I’ve heard similar things from other mods of other subs as well. While certainly not all mods are perfect (many are far from), unilaterally dumping the most active ones and replacing them with corporate lapdogs creates real risks.

Or then there are the mods from r/PoliticalHumor who decided that if Huffman wants “democracy” rather than “landed gentry,” he’ll get it. They’ve made all members mods:

But, again, it’s incredible that someone needs to remind the dude who created Reddit how Reddit users react to any sort of threat to their way of doing things. Reddit is the place where the users don’t give a shit what you want. They want to fight for what’s right.

Perhaps Huffman is right that he’ll wait out his users. But I can’t see how any of this plays well for his investors, or how this speaks well of Reddit’s future as a community site.

Filed Under: nsfw, protests, rules, steve huffman, subreddits
Companies: reddit

Reddit Experiments With Removing Mods, Blocking Attempts To Switch Subs To NSFW

from the from-sexy-john-oliver-to-sex dept

Reddit’s ongoing war with its volunteer moderators (and users) has moved up a notch. As you’ll recall, last week, the ever tone-deaf CEO Steve Huffman insisted that the protests were just a blip, would be over by last Wednesday, and were having no real impact on the site anyway.

That hasn’t gone quite to plan.

The protests got extended, and as Huffman and Reddit made noises about removing mods of protesting subreddits, things got weird over the weekend, with mods holding votes on a variety of subs that got overwhelming support to reopen with only pictures of comedian John Oliver. And some subreddits took it even farther, requiring they be sexy pictures of John Oliver.

And, from sexy pictures of John Oliver, it didn’t take long for some subreddits to switch to being open, but for NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content: i.e., porn. This included many popular subreddits that wouldn’t normally be home to such content, such as r/interestingasfuck, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It), r/formula1, r/videos and even r/iOS?

Of course, this impacts Reddit in multiple ways that probably aren’t great for Reddit, or Huffman’s desire to take the company public and help investors cash out. First, it effectively makes those subreddits private, as you can’t view NSFW subs unless you’re logged in and have confirmed that you’re over 18. So, that creates some friction. But, an even bigger deal is that Reddit does not post ads on NSFW subs:

Ads for adult-oriented products and services on Reddit are no longer permissible, and Not Safe For Work (typically referred to as NSFW) subreddits will no longer be eligible for ads or targeting.

As for the claims by Huffman that the protests were not having any real impact, well… the data suggests otherwise. No, it didn’t completely crash traffic to Reddit, but an analysis by Engadget, using SimilarWeb data, showed traffic definitely did drop during the protest. While the decline in unique visitors may not seem that much at 6.6%, the more important point was that the time spent on the platform dropped even more precipitously:

The day before the protest began, an average session on the website was about eight minutes and 31 seconds long. A day later, that metric fell to seven minutes and 17 seconds, or the lowest that stat has been in the past three years.

Any such drop does not look good for investors who would be looking at buying into the company’s “vision” if they’re going to buy equity on the open market.

I’m also kind of wondering if one of the reasons for the massive drop in time spent has to do with the well known fact that the answers to Google searches are often found… on Reddit. And if people are searching for information that takes them to a Reddit thread, in the past, they’d spend some time reading through the threads. But if they do a search, and then click through to find a sub closed or overwhelmed by John Oliver or porn, they might not stick around. And, certainly, some people have noticed that the Reddit protests are also making Google worse.

Given all this bad news, it looks like Reddit and Huffman dipped their toes in the water of trying to remove these moderators thumbing their nose at Huffman. A whole bunch of folks sent over a post on the r/ModCoord subreddit in which a mod from r/MildlyInteresting (one of the subs that switched to NSFW, with support from its community) suddenly found that the entire mod team was locked out of the subreddit.

I was preparing the sub to go live, but just after I switched it to NSFW, I was logged out of my account on every single platform and locked out. I can successfully reset my password, but it will nevertheless not let me login.

Following this, another mod posted our update instead. Right after, the u/ModCodeofConduct account removed the post and flipped the sub back to restricted instead of public. Then, the second moderator was also logged out of their account and locked out. Other mods tried to re-approve the post, one of them was promptly logged out and locked out as well.

A few minutes after, the entire team was removed from the subreddit without any prior communication of any kind. As it stands, at least three of us are literally locked out of our Reddit accounts and the other mods were only removed from the sub.

It appeared that other subreddits that had gone NSFW had the same thing happen, including r/TIHI and r/interestingasfuck.

After complaining, the mod team was told that they had received a 7-day suspension, with some excuse from Reddit about how it was done to “prevent subs spamming sexually explicit material” which the r/MildlyInteresting mods insisted was never the plan in the first place.

And, of course, just as all this started to go viral, someone at Reddit HQ realized how bad all this looked and reinstated the mods:

ModMail from a different admin (not ModCoC) explains that we were apparently “swept up in actions” that they were taking against “communities that were encouraging sexually explicit content”. Situation remains really unclear, and the fact we were a mistake does not excuse r/interestingasfuck being targeted or any of the other 5 subs.

There have been other reports that Reddit staff are deliberately changing subreddits back from NSFW to SFW. Even if the community voted to support the change to NSFW.

A spokesman for Reddit, Tim Rathschmidt, (who over the weekend insisted that Reddit’s threat to remove mods was no threat at all) continues to lie through his teeth with a quote to the Verge:

“Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said to The Verge when asked about the suspended mods. He declined to comment when asked if Reddit removed the mods.

Rathschmidt also seemed to get a bit snippy when the Verge’s Jay Peters followed up:

Asked if Reddit could confirm the reinstatement, Rathschmidt declined, saying, “I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take to ensure users can access their communities.” He didn’t elaborate on how removing a subreddit’s entire moderation team with no communication ensures users can access their communities, particularly since they were never entirely inaccessible beyond the limitations imposed by Reddit itself.

And it appears that this was just the beginning. There were reports that Reddit pulled down its content policy page. And, as I write this, that appears to be the case. Here’s what it looked like yesterday, according to the Internet Archive:

And here’s what it looked like a few hours ago as I wrote this:

Just… gone. If you pull down the language menu, you find there’s no option for English.

This morning the content policy came back, but… still.

And that same Reddit post noted that subreddits switching to NSFW now receive a popup saying that “Content tag is pending until reviewed,” suggesting that Reddit admins are now blocking the changes:

Basically, for all of Huffman’s talk of “landed gentry,” he seems to have decided that he’s the emperor, and gets to make all the decisions now.

Filed Under: mods, nsfw, protests, steve huffman
Companies: reddit

NSFW Trademark Actually NSF Those Without Humor

from the chill-out dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in the fact that the ever-popular (reasonably so, I should add) Fark has registered for a trademark on “NSFW,” the popular abbreviation used widely across the internet that stands for “Not Safe For Work.” We ignored the story, as we knew it had to be some sort of joke or prank, fitting with Fark’s (or just Drew Curtis’) outlook on life. However, the stories about the trademark application have gotten so bad that Curtis had to post a “calm down guys” post about it himself — though he won’t say what sort of prank he’s planning to pull. The trademark app itself is real — though Drew clearly has something else planned beyond just the trademark. Either way, the whole story is reminiscent of Despair Inc.’s successful trademark of 🙁 years ago. That, too, was something of a joke, though (again) many people didn’t get it and angrily responded to the company (Drew, consider yourself warned…). Of course, all of this would be fun and games if there weren’t more serious legal battles involving similar trademarks — such as the worldwide fight over who gets to trademark the smiley face. No matter what Drew’s got planned, it’s unclear if it can be any more absurd than real life trademark ridiculousness.

Filed Under: fark, nsfw, trademarks