Tag: Wikis

Redditors Vent Their Rage At CEO In Funniest Way Possible

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r/place, the Reddit-based collaborative art project, is back for its third incarnation since the 2017 original. And it couldn’t arrive at a better time for pissed-off Reddit users who have had enough of the message board management’s shit. With everyone able to place only a single pixel every few minutes, it’s some collective fury that’s allowing the result to be shaping up quite so cross.

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Last year, r/place saw an incredible total of 10.4 million people contribute 160 million pixels to create an astonishing and enormous piece of pixel art, 6000 x 6000 pixels big. Somehow meticulously detailed faces were created, despite the restrictions placed on any individual being able to deliberately directly draw. It was a strange and beautiful thing.

Jump to 2023, and times at Reddit aren’t nearly so content. The introduction of charges to third-party apps caused widespread outrage, and in turn, a widespread outage, as many subreddits went dark to protest the decision. Multiple beloved third-party applications like Apollo and BaconReader have had to give up, facing API costs in the tens of millions of dollars, and users are livid. Which makes now the most peculiar moment for Reddit to think launching a new r/place might be a good idea.

With what might best be described as “optimism,” Reddit posted the new version saying, “but hey, what better time to offer a blank canvas to our communities than when our users and mods are at their most passionate… right?”

Er, right. The results are predictable. “FUCK SPEZ” reads enormous swathes of the picture, over and over, referring to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who has been particularly tone deaf in his response to the protests and anger. “There’s a lot of noise with this one,” Huffman is reported to have written in a staff memo. “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.” It was hardly the message Redditors were looking for.

Such feelings are being made very clear on the canvas. In German across the top of the image it currently reads, “U/SPEZ IST EIN HURENSOHN,” which translates to, “U/SPEZ IS A SON OF A BITCH.” Elsewhere are the more normal depictions of Pepe, some My Little Ponies, and even some Pikmin, but by far the most prominent and repeated motif is “FUCK SPEZ.”

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine what else Reddit was thinking would happen. We’ve contacted Reddit to ask what else they might have been expecting, and whether Huffman might listen to any of this noise.

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John Walker

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July 20, 2023
Steam’s Subreddit Is Running An Excellent Protest

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As we’ve been covering, things are not going well over on Reddit at the moment, with the site’s ownership currently engaged in a running battle with readers and moderators. Users are so annoyed at attempts to monetise the site that they’re working through a variety of protests, but one of the larger gaming subreddits—r/steam, with 1.9 million subscribers—is now my favourite.

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We’ve seen blackouts, we’ve seen sites toggle their settings to NSFW (thus cutting off ad revenue), but r/steam—whose mods were threatened with removal if they didn’t reopen the subreddit after an initial blackout—has decided as a community that if they had to reopen, they were going to reopen with a purpose.

And that purpose, as PC Gamer point out, was to become the internet’s top destination for all things steam-related. And by that I don’t mean the PC’s preferred shopfront and launcher, but steam engines. Steam clouds. Steam tractors, steam-driven cars and academic books about steam.

Here, for example, is a classic “rate my setup” post, emphasis on classic:

In this post, a user has an important technical question they’re hoping the community can answer:

Just because there’s a protest going on doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to celebrate:

Like most gaming subreddits, users are sometimes overcome with nostalgia, and like to reminisce about the good old days:

Here’s a reminder that Reddit only exists as it does today because it’s a place where users can teach, learn and hang out with other human beings for free:

While this maybe isn’t the most effective form of protest—with users still generating content, anyone viewing r/steam on the company’s official mobile app will still be served ads, which is the whole reason they’re trying to squeeze third-party applications out in the first place—if you’re going to settle into a protest for the long-run, you may as well have some fun with it.

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Luke Plunkett

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June 21, 2023
Reddit Is Removing Mods Over NSFW Protests

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Image: Reddit

In the wake of sitewide protests, ostensibly over some API changes but really about an increasingly corporate squeeze of a historically community-run site, some Reddit moderators have decided to hit CEO Steve Huffman in the only place it seems to hurt: the site’s wallet.

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Following a disastrous round of press interviews, where Huffman came off sounding more like a Dril tweet than a company CEO and it became clear that mass blackouts were not changing his mind, mods from some of Reddit’s biggest communities decided to switch their subreddits over to NSFW (Not Suitable For Work), a toggle normally reserved for stuff like porn and, crucially, a type of subreddit that Reddit can’t show ads on, and so can’t make money off.

Some of the communities making the switch included r/MildlyInteresting, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It) and r/interestingasfuck. It’s a clever move (plus it’s more legal than ransoming the company with stolen data), and one that shows the lengths mods are going to protest Huffman and his team’s actions, but it’s also one that Reddit says violates their “Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct”. As a result, and as The Verge report, these mods are now finding themselves “logged out of their account and locked out” by “a Reddit admin account”, and their subreddits—with millions of members—are showing up as being completely unmoderated. Those former mods have also seen their accounts suspended for seven days.

It is incredibly funny to see the lengths Huffman and his staff are going to here. They’re in such a panic about their profit margins—and more importantly in their case, potential future share value--that they’re ignoring the fact Reddit’s entire worth is built on the back of unpaid labour. The site is literally nothing without its users (providing “content”) and mods (working for free), and Huffman is out here worried about ad revenue, from which none of those users see a cent? And sending the message that he’d rather leave whole communities unmoderated than put up with some protests?

The internet has wrought many perils on our civilization, but the one thing it has been good for is helping publicly record just how stupid these CEOs really are.

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Luke Plunkett

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June 20, 2023
Reddit Goes Down As Communities Protest Wildly Unpopular Changes [UPDATE]

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As we reported earlier in the month, Reddit, one of the most popular forums for gaming communities, is planning to make some changes under the hood that will essentially kill off every third-party app. Given the state of the official app and its heavy reliance on huge ads, it’s a deeply unpopular move, so unpopular that it has led to a protest movement that you are likely witnessing the effects of as we speak. If you load Reddit right now, chances are very good that you’re seeing a message that reads, “Sorry, we couldn’t load posts for this page.”

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Alongside big subreddits like r/bestof, r/sports, r/music, r/pics and r/videos, a number of the most popular gaming subreddits have either confirmed they’re taking part, are polling members for their thoughts or will be taking more limited action as well.

That includes r/gaming with its 37 million members, r/PS5 and its 3.3 million members, r/minecraft’s 7 million members and r/wow’s 2.3 million members. Meanwhile mods at r/pcgaming (3.2 million members) are asking users for their input before making a decision, while r/nintendo are going into a “a read-only/restricted mode”, which is not quite as severe as locking the entire subreddit down. But if you’re like most people, you likely just lurk pages, so you may not be able to see anything but this right now:

Screenshot: Reddit / Kotaku

The entire thing has been planned for a while now, as a gathering of Reddit’s unpaid moderators banded together and penned an open letter to the site’s management, outlining not just the general popularity of the third-party apps, but also concerns over the potential loss of important moderation tools (which many third-party apps have but the official offering somehow lacks) and impact on NSFW content as well.

Reddit Goes Down

That letter has been backed by plans for much of the site to engage in a “blackout” on June 12, meaning today, which means individual subreddits will lock down into “private” mode, meaning anyone who isn’t already a follower/subscriber won’t be able to access them or see any of their content.

According to The Verge, over 6,000 subreddits have been affected on Monday as a part of the protest, which will last until the 14th. Some, it should be noted, are planning on staying private until things change. Other communities went dark as soon as the unpopular API changes were announced. Really, there are all sorts of approaches to the bad news. You might notice some communities are indeed available, but you can only post about the API changes. Others meanwhile will let you read the subreddit as it was, but won’t let you make new posts. In short, it’s a shitshow for Reddit.

Update 6/12/2023 11:10 a.m.: We’ve updated this post to reflect that Reddit is now in fact down and out.

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Luke Plunkett

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June 12, 2023
Reddit Is Killing The Best Way To Read The Site

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Reddit is one of the biggest and most important websites on the planet, especially since it’s one of the last places human beings can get questions answered by actual human beings. So it sucks to see that the company is about to crush many of the best ways to actually experience the whole thing.

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For anyone using the site on a desktop computer the Reddit experience is fine, I guess (“Old Reddit” is better), but on phones, that all changes. Reddit’s official app sucks, and is absolutely loaded with intrusive ads, meaning a lot of people rely on the work of third-party apps—like the incredibly popular Apollo on iOS and my own favourite, Infinity on Android—to browse and comment.

Or they did. Those third-party apps only existed because Reddit allowed them to access their API (essentially their backend); today, the site announced specific changes to that arrangement (first broadly announced last month), implementing charges for the data—similar to those introduced by another platform with popular third-party apps, Twitter—that are so astronomical they’re going to price every third-party app out of the market.

The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says:

I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.

Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.

Meanwhile one of the developers of RIF, another popular Android app, say that not only are they also being priced out (if Apollo can’t afford it nobody can), but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not:

Removal of sexually explicit material from third-party apps while keeping said content in the official app. Some people have speculated that NSFW is going to leave Reddit entirely, but then why would Reddit Inc have recently expanded NSFW upload support on their desktop site?

It’s obvious that the steep pricing, which goes far beyond what these developers were expecting or could ever afford, is not there to make money. Not when it was clear nobody was ever going to be able to pay it. It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium.

Or, you know, stop going to Reddit.

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Luke Plunkett

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May 31, 2023
Redditors Are Competing To Make The Worst User Experience Possible

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As the recent Reddit commercials have made clear, there’s a community for everything. Nihilist horror, Game of Thrones’ Hodor, avocado food porn (because why not)…you can always find your people. Case in point, there’s a subreddit dedicated to atrocious user interfaces, which is now seeing members attempting to best each other by creating the worst UI designs possible.

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The term is self-explanatory: A user interface is what allows you to interact with technology, from computers to McDonald’s kiosks to exercise equipment to, of course, video games. Some, like Elden Ring’s, are good. Most just get the job done. However, when you come across a bad UI, it’s like a painful hair in your eye and a sour taste in your mouth. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Bungie’s Destiny have been derided for their cluttered and clunky interfaces, respectively. But the nightmares being dreamt up on Reddit definitely, albeit intentionally, take the rotten UI cake.

Thanks, these UIs make me hate it here

As spotted by Twitter user Aleksandr Volodarsky, engineers on the badUIbattles subreddit are scraping the bottom of the barrel to build the most annoying user interfaces ever. A forum for folks “[creating] bad UIs just for the sake of them being bad,” redditors are designing UIs that, if they were ever implemented IRL, would make you never want to interact with technology again. Take this one designed by redditor Lamamour last April, in which you have to funnel digits into a moving row of blocks to enter your phone number.

This “enter your phone number” concept has been iterated, tweaked, and worsened since Lamamour uploaded their initial atrocity. The latest entry by user NotYourBoii confronts you with a disordered drop-down menu that makes entering a phone number (twice, I might add) pure pain.

But what if you wanted to unsubscribe from a newsletter, YouTube channel, or some other subscription service? Well, you wouldn’t be able to with redditor OrangePrototype’s unsubscribe button, as a fan blows your cursor away.

Folks saw the challenge and wanted to make unsubscribing even worse, with user KountrySelektorXpert’s post asking that you tear through a 3D animated net to reach the cursed button.

Entering your name is usually pretty easy when you have a keyboard, but leave it to these sickos to throw a wrench into things. Consider redditor IlluminatingEmerald’s Donkey Kong Country-inspired input method, which makes spelling your name truly suck.

Funnily enough, there hasn’t been much further competition in the name-entry arena. Still, while IlluminatingEmerald has probably created the worst of this type of UI thus far, redditor jordanE124567 submitted one that requires you to upload individual JPEGs of each letter.

There are so many aggravating user interfaces on that subreddit, with Volodarsky tweeting out some of the worst he’s found. For your viewing frustration—I mean, pleasure—here’s a little roundup of Volodarsky’s incredibly annoying findings.

All of these were purposely designed to be as irritating as possible, and thankfully, I can’t imagine any game developers taking inspiration from user interfaces meant to get on your nerves (unless it was intended as part of the gameplay experience, as in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or QWOP). That said, it’s hilarious seeing redditors doing their best to make the worst UI ever.

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Levi Winslow

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May 19, 2023