I honestly don’t know if this is allowed here but I thought this is malicious compliance at its finest.
If you don’t want to drive traffic there I’ll repost what the mods posted below:
POLL: Decide on the future of /r/Pics!
Hello, /r/Pics subscribers!
Boy, what a whacky time we’ve all had lately, huh? Reddit decided to kill off third-party applications, a protest got planned (and possibly exploited by bad actors), the site showed up in the news, various communities started opening back up, others decided to stay inaccessible, and then the CEO of Reddit implied that a bunch of moderators would be removed from their positions!
Crazy, right?
Anyway, we – the so-called “landed gentry” – definitely want to comply with the wishes of the “royal court,” and they’ve told us that we need to run the subreddit in the way that its members want. To that end, we figured that the only reasonable thing to do was directly ask how you’d like things to progress from here.
Which of the following should we do?
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Return to normal operations
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Only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy To be clear, if people choose the second option, screen-grabs from videos will be allowed (provided that there aren’t any visible logos, inserted graphics, or other digital elements present). You could – if you wanted to – look through episodes of Last Week Tonight on YouTube, find moments featuring John Oliver at his sexiest, then post images of those moments here.
It’s entirely up to you! Whatever the /r/Pics community decides is best, we’ll respect!
Vote, friends! Vote now!
(You can vote by upvoting either of the comments in the thread below.)
Voting has now closed.
Our final tally is as follows:
Return to normal operations: -2,329 votes
Only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy: 37,331 votes
It would seem that the community has spoken!
Henceforth, /r/Pics will only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy.
(Said images must adhere to all of the community’s other rules, including those mandated by Reddit.)
Happy posting!
Is this real?! What episode is it from!
yes, it’s real. it’s from the episode on coal from june 2017: https://youtu.be/aw6RsUhw1Q8?t=1443
Ah, probably my favourite episode! I’ve never been a big fan of john oliver purely because I find him aggressively unfunny, but showing everyone the ridiculous cease and desist letter with “Let us neither cease, nor desist” is amazing.
It’s edited
no, it’s actually not edited. that exact frame appears at 23:03 in the episode on coal from june 2017: https://youtu.be/aw6RsUhw1Q8?t=1443
“Bob” was replaced with “Spez”
Yes it was edited. But the base image is real. It also resulted in a lawsuit.
Where they SLAPPED each other.
Incredible move. But I doubt it’ll last. Reddit is going to became 9gag and iFunny very soon. Rest in peace old reddit. It was fun while it lasted.
The point is to hit reddit where it hurts - ad revenue. There will be a slight spike in interests as people laugh, then the lack of original content will cause people to be bored. New subreddits will have to be created and built from the ground up. Moderating a subreddit with 40m subscribers is hard.
Spez needs to realize that going to war with the users is a dumb move.
He will not realize that, because he wants money and he’ll get it. On the one hand, Reddit was fun. On the other hand, it’s archaic for the reasons we’re experiencing right now. Progress.
Spez is thick as fuck but reddit will likely IPO and be just fine, this was a battle that didn’t need to be fought.
Spez is a bad leader and his goals lie contrary to reddit’s mission statement.
I left last time, I think it was the Victoria thing, and I joined Voat and that quickly went to shit. Reddit will get what they want from this which is more mainstream use.
I would argue that this whole thing will delay or devalue the IPO. Institual investors will look at this rather public fight and question his leadership. And the whole attempt at damage control makes him look bad. The only investors that will look past this fiasco are those who are doing the long play, and even then, they likely won’t want Spez involved.
From a risk perspective, Reddit has just highlighted it’s biggest risk: the volunteer moderators. The only way Spez will be able to fix that is to replace moderators with AI or paid moderation teams. At an estimated value of $3.4M, and a company that is not profitable, that increases the risk in terms of the business model.
In general, social media is inherently flawed for profits. The path to monetization is ads and data, and the fact that Spez is now squeezing the users make me think that the value of the data and the ads is not producing the returns to compensate for dumb ideas like the NFT project.
I visited 9gag last week for the firdt time in maybe 8 years…wow the boomer humour and aggressive bigotry rivals Facebook
Wow you ain’t kidding! Its White nationalist this, and White nationalist that! They’re going to replace us! /s
deleted by creator
Absolutely crushing the direction they chose.
Update on the vote results, for people who don’t want to go there:
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Pro John Oliver: 61.7k
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Return to normal: -13.7k.
The redditors have spoken. Also r/gifs do this as well.
I like the malicious compliance but I find that to be a bad way to do a poll. Better would have been one comment with the text “Upvote if you want John Oliver pics, downvote if you want it to go back to normal”.
The way they did it if one group only upvote their alternative and the other also downvotes the opponent then the result isn’t representative. Or at least could be claimed not to be.
It would exacerbate the swing but wouldn’t change the result
And I don’t think maliciously compliant mod is interested in statistical representation.
Let’s assume that everyone who upvoted their option also downvoted the alternative.
The group A, has |A| number of individuals. Group B has |B| number.
Option A: |A| - |B| Option B: |B| - |A| Option A = |A| - |B| = -(-(|A| - |B|)) = -(|B| - |A|) = -Option BThe results would be opposites of each other and would highlight the opinion of the majority anyway.
r/theydidthema-- oh.
Right.
you can’t both upvote and downvote the same item. the last option you selected is the only one that’s counted at any given moment.
edit: wait, i see. if they’re separate comments, you could just upvote the comment you like and downvote the comment you don’t. i was assuming one comment that said upvote or downvote.
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“John Oliver Supports the Reddit Protests’ Use of his Image” - https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/reddit-protests-john-oliver-pics.html
I don’t think this is a good idea. The point of the blackout is to hit Reddit where it hurts, by driving traffic down. This prank (partially) reverses the work of the blackout, by getting people back to the pics subreddit to post and see (John Oliver) pics. It turns the blackout into a joke. And I think is a step towards the community just moving on from the blackout without it actually having the long term effects that were intended.
I’m all for malicious compliance, but I think this is the wrong flavor of it.
Well, it’ll put Reddit in an odd place. Spez in particular has cited the Moderator Code as a justification to remove mods and instate his own.
THAT would be worse, since then instead of any blackout at all it’s business as usual (while being slowly crippled from bad moderation and decaying user behaviours).
The John Oliver thing is an alternative to THAT. They are technically doing what the users want, which was Reddit’s whole ammunition against them. Closing a sub of millions of people could be said as harming the site significantly enough that reddit steps in. Opening it and maliciously complying with the rules IS what the users want, so Spez will be hard pressed the wrest control of the sub while simultaneously saying he supports the protests in line with the Code.
THAT would be worse, since then instead of any blackout at all it’s business as usual (while being slowly crippled from bad moderation and decaying user behaviours).
I view that as the next step in this protest: proving to Reddit that the previous relationship Reddit had with its organically grown volunteer moderation system is (was) quintessential to what made Reddit good. If instead Reddit thrives in a context where those moderators are simply replaced with Reddit stooges, then I guess we’d be proven wrong, about whether this protest mattered at all. Either way, the outcome will act as a transparent display of what Reddit’s true value is, which I think is a useful thing for everyone to know.
A blackout prevents action. It prevents the usefulness.
A satiric malicious compliance focus does not categorically prevent activity, but does prevent general activity. It prevents the usefulness and value of the subreddit too.
When you are at risk of losing the blackout by losing control of the subreddit. it’s the only thing you can do. It’s the next best and next most effective thing.
Nah I disagree. Turning things less serious is not necessarily a bad thing. People will visit to check it out but long term it will get stale and die off.
I disagree, while driving traffic down is one way, filling the website with garbage is another way! Who wants to use a site full of nothing but sexy john oliver?
…wait. Bad example.
Who wants to use a site full of nothing but sexy john oliver?
Bout to say. Who wouldn’t want to use a site full of nothing but sexy John Oliver?
This is essentially my problem with this plan, lol. It’s content people want to interact with, meaning it’s counterproductive to the blackout.
Short term it’s going to increase traffic, which also increases awareness of the issue at hand. Long term it will become stale and reduce traffic. Both are good things for the mods to do and it forces spez to eat his words should he choose to retaliate further. This was a choice the community voted on.
Amazing work as always! Though I did have to check it out kind of defeating the purpose of the protest. I think the best way to achieve what they want is to just do a really shitty job in moderating. Let the entire site be over-run with scams / crypto bros / nazis.
It already is, /r/all used to be current and now it’s just a constant stream of spam posts.
You should be able to block a webpage and all users that share it. Relay For Reddit has a feature where you can select “other conversations” and see all the posts of a specific link. If I could then block everyone who posted a shitty “Elon runs an ETH competition” post… There’d still be a millions others.
Nazis everywhere, Spez left #the_donald alone to grow in scope. Fuck Spez
It already is, /r/all used to be current and now it’s just a constant stream of spam posts.
and that’s the whole point of this!
And this will become the same if it catches on, either it will die slowly or remain very niche or it will be victim to the same shit as reddit.
Reddit was astroturfed and spammed and that doesn’t seem like something the fediverse can fight any better.
Looks like a few other subs have joined. r/gifs and r/art did the same poll
This is brilliant! I had just took a look at /r/pics without logging in and can see its just now filled with John Oliver pics
I haven’t laughed this hard in so long. The malicious compliance is epic. John Oliver can’t buy PR like this, and he has got to be one of the few people that can appreciate being the face of something like this.
Glorious :) I hope John Oliver picks this up in his show…
the writers are still on strike. don’t know where they are in the negotiation process.
Plot twist: John Oliver is secretly a mod of r/pics.
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he was. That’s totally in character for him :)
This is great. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can do with stable diffusion.
I think their rules specifically say no AI pics.
the only rule that matters now is John Oliver only.
I think that was before this John Oliver thing. Since the subreddit rule also says no screenshots, but the post even says screenshots of him are fine. So we’ll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
God dammit I guess I’ll make an exception for /r/pics.
That’s a classic reddit moment. There’s such a good community on that website, it’s tragic that reddit wants to use that against itself.
These kind of protest won’t reduce the traffic on the platform though. They might even gain traction and increase it. If it’s not linked to reduced ad revenue, I’m afraid it’s counter-productive.
the odds are stacked against the mods and the users, but any little bit of resistance is useful.
Look at the alternatives. It’s either this kind of protest, or returning to normal operations or losing their sub.
I think it will reduce traffic at some point, when the lurkers are getting tired of John Oliver pics
who the fuck could ever get tired of that? idiots and losers that’s who.
Glad you posted this - its the epitome of malicious compliance! And a fantastic form of protest too. With Reddit admins threatening to demote mods unless they re-open subreddits, this move takes away that ammo. Additionally, after the initial boost in activity due to novelty, the sub will get stale quickly and users will think of migrating to other platforms like lemmy or kbin. I’m all for it!
Edit: This is what I’m talking about. Here is one of those Reddit refugees now!
https://lemmy.world/comment/273363
Welcome, @exixx@lemmy.world!
Thanks! It still feels weird, I had my account for a long time and have a fair amount of karma, but the site has been going to shit for a while and enough is enough. This feels like the very early web or fidonet and I’m stoked to be here.
