wow WoW Subreddit Is Going Dark "Indefinitely"

[Starym 3,800]

 

The protest over reddit's recent API changes continues, as the moderators of r/WoW have announced the sub will be going back to private mode "indefinitely". After the subreddit reopened today in a limited manner, the mods made the decision based on community feedback and posted this update:

In 12 hours r/WoW will return to private.

Hi all.

As you may have noticed, we opened the sub back up to a restricted state after the 48 hour period we committed to before. After reading over the feedback we received, on the post and in modmail, we have decided to take the sub back private, indefinitely.

Feedback ranged from "don't partially reopen; either stick to our guns or don't bother at all; go back dark, to hurt reddit ad money; reopen, because we're fucking over the community, because it won't have any impact, etc; who gives a shit."

Ultimately, "don't partially reopen; either stick to our guns or don't bother at all" seemed to be the most common and popular, so that's what we're doing. The sub will go back full private 12 hours after this post goes up, giving y'all a window of time to get anything saved from the sub that you may need.

To recap:

Over the last 48 hours

• /u/spez sent an internal memo to Reddit staff stating “There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” As many of you predicted, the intention is to wait us all out.

• The AMA with /u/spez was widely regarded as disastrous, with only 21 replies from reddit staff, and a repetition of the accusations against Apollo dev, Christian Selig. Most detailed questions were left unanswered. Despite claiming to work with developers that want to work with them, several independent developers report being totally ignored.

• In addition, the future of r/blind is still uncertain, as the tools they need are not available on the 2 accessible apps.

Thank you for joining us in this fight to make sure reddit stays open and accessible for its userbase. More information on what the blackout is aiming to achieve can be found here.

Please take this window of time to save anything from the sub you might need in the meantime.

We can suggest using Google's cache function to do this. We can also suggest joining discord.gg/wow to continue interacting with the WoW community.

-/r/wow mod team

Source.

 

You can read more about the protest and why it's happening here.

[zaframkot 8]

Ah yes, power-hungry moderators ruining entire communities because of things they don't understand. I wonder how long it will take before Reddit just removes mods from these subs and finds new ones. Because everyone on board with this doesn't understand basic principles of cost and also think far more is being taken away when it's really just like 2 apps and everyone else is exempt. Cost wouldn't even be that much for Apollo if they didn't suck as a dev and need to query 1000x more often than he should (which he admits to but says it's Reddit's fault and that he's a good and fine dev lmao).

[SpilledStars 71]

World of Reddit (edit to add: this is the art title at the top of /r/wow so I'm addressing it by human name, is all) has "tanking thursdays" and other regular encouragement of the players in the community OF USERS.  

That Reddit itself decided to "monetize" and slammed it together in a hurry and then are superior, snarky, and tone deaf in their ex post facto AMA, just tells me that REDDIT has failed to learn the lesson that WotC/Hasbro got whomped with much earlier in the year.

We play these games regularly
We learn strategy, tactics, politics, and workarounds
Get in the players' ways, and players will find other ways.

We're the kind of people willing to look at 8 places and watch vids and side ads to learn how to (raid, tank, find BIS, answer some game puzzle, figure out the gearing system, etc) and Reddit is setting themselves up to lose all previously "sold" eyeballs.

For those of you who prefer the tl;dr edition I recommend look back at Reddit in the news in 5 weeks and see if they've "accepted a mutual parting of ways" from whoever thought that doing this API cutover was such a brilliant idea it was worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater & lets goooooo about it.

Edited June 15, 2023 by SpilledStars

[Cham79 87]

sure it is...

[Arcling 898]

At least they commit to the protest, but is it going to get any results? I doubt Reddit is going to back down from this change to API. Most subs only blacked out for 48 hours and many others haven't participated. If they wanted to really show their stance they would just black out indefinitely until something changes. But even this would probably just end up with other people creating alternate subs.

[TheCake 144]

Quote

After the subreddit reopened today in a limited manner, the mods made the decision based on community feedback and posted this update:

This is quite dishonest, as there was never a poll made for this and plenty of people were against this idea of a protest.
In the end, it just punishes the users.
Possibly a new sub will open up? None the less, the mods of these things have too much emotional/political-forced power over platforms used by so many people to gather information and communicate, it pushes discussions and opinions as well as the flow of information itself into hallways of heavily skewed views either way.

We need mods of places to stay none political and none-emotional, even if that sounds inhumane, when we're dealing with platforms of heavy flow of social engagement as well as information outflows.

[Yridaa 490]

2 hours ago, TheCake said:

We need mods of places to stay none political and none-emotional, even if that sounds inhumane, when we're dealing with platforms of heavy flow of social engagement as well as information outflows.

I'm gonna cut straight through this. A lot of automation goes on to moderate a subreddit, in the form of moderation bots and such. With the API changes, moderators that do this kind of stuff in their free time, would now have to either pay to keep the moderator bots/automation online, or just quadruple their non-paid workload.

 

That should void all misconceptions regarding it being political/emotional/cancelculture

[TheCake 144]

20 hours ago, Yridaa said:

I'm gonna cut straight through this. A lot of automation goes on to moderate a subreddit, in the form of moderation bots and such. With the API changes, moderators that do this kind of stuff in their free time, would now have to either pay to keep the moderator bots/automation online, or just quadruple their non-paid workload.

 

That should void all misconceptions regarding it being political/emotional/cancelculture

Okay but those are not the things I mean with what I said. The same mods will ban a person for being part of the opposite political party than they like, from mass amount of subs they happen to be mods of.
These automatic-tools are used terribly in the hands of way too many mods. They use these tools for their own agendas and funnel them into hallway-thinking.

The modding is really a free thing, a hobby, and no one should expect to get paid or equal unless told (I'd love if that was an actual job if they were kept neutral and not politically/emotionally/etc fueled).
Either get more mods, or perhaps consider if they are really doing too much? (Or wrong, even)
Otherwise, I am sure we'll even see Reddit themself take it upon them to start sorting it out if it turns out to actually be such a big problem as some suggest.

I am of the beleif that most tools are used to "mod" things into their hallway-think, and that is what takes up their time.

[TheRagingwolf 258]

I find this whole thing hilarious. Reddit is a corporation and has to make money to exist. API's are expensive to create and maintain and Reddit has every right to charge for access. How much they are trying to charge may be prohibitive to some, but it stands to reason that their pricing model was discussed and thought out well before it went live.

As for the protests, it seems Reddit leadership do not care one bit: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-its-time-we-grow-up-and-behave-like-an-adult-company

 

Edited June 18, 2023 by TheRagingwolf

[Loogus 0]

Please just close indefinitely and make an official alternative Lemmy/Kbin instance, and put it on the private message. That will do so much more good than just going dark until an indeterminate agreement. There still isn't really any good wow communities on these places yet but I think they would thrive really well.