As with many other subreddits, /r/LegalAdviceUK (which had been dark since the start of the blackout) has been sent a thinly-veiled threat by Reddit.
So they’ve reopened in order to start moving the entire community of 810,000 subscribers to somewhere else.
As you can imagine there are a number of legal professionals who moderate that sub, and they really don’t take kindly to being threatened. They sign off their reopening message with “Fuck /u/Spez and long live John Oliver.” but for the real fun you might want to look up a very famous British legal case they reference, Arkell v Pressdram 1971.
Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. The last thing u/spez wants is a bunch of angry attorneys who want to fuck him over. If uklegaladvice makes a move legaladvice will too. If I were u/spez I’d be checking the strings on that golden parachute.
No-one is suing reddit for any of this. Reddit is a private business that can charge what it likes for it’s API, can shut down 3P apps usage without warning etc.
The only power we have is leaving the platform.
If that was the only thing Reddit was doing in the midst of this shitstorm, maybe. But they’ve also been slinging threats and accusations around. There are laws against some of those things too, Reddit maybe should try treading a bit more carefully if for example they want to accuse someone publicly of “blackmailing” them.
Legends!! That’s how everyone should react.
Moderating on discord seems quite difficult
Modding aside, my experience of Discord is that it’s great if you want to use it like a chatroom, but it sucks if you’re trying to search for information. I wouldn’t think Discord would work well for something like legal advice.
Discord has threaded discussions, but its truly a case of “jack of all trades”. It’s simply not built to manage they kind of content, and does nothing but realtime comms with any utility.
Guilded is better, but still relatively unpolished.
The only real apples:apples option for an exodus from snooville is a vbulletin site or federated boards like kbin.
Moderating can be a bit of a pain, but there’s bots to help with moderation etc. But yeah, agreed. It’s a good space for a chatroom, but not to search for information.
Yeah, one of the Discords I help with is >450k people. It’s a gargantuan task to moderate, and a lot of it depends on having >20 people (which is another task in and of itself to vet >20 trustworthy people) that relies heavily on the community actively reporting things as well.
It can work, but for legal advice, I’d probably recommend another option.
There are moderation assistant bots and a number of settings that can be used to ease moderation. Because of the free API, big servers can make custom bots to suit their needs.
Moderating anything with over 10k active members is going to be a lot of work, no matter how streamlined the tools are. People are very creative at finding new ways to be assholes.
Mirror: https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/
Awesome! My favorite bit.
Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.
Huh. That’s the same behaviour Unberto Eco identified with fascist movements in his essay on the subject, Ur-Fascism:
Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
That tracks, given that Spez admitted in a recent interview that he’s emulating Elon Musk, champion of the fascist right.
Can highly recommend the LibRedirect browser extension too, to take care of that 100% of the time
For those who don’t want to give Reddit the traffic:
We’re back - and here’s what’s happening
(Please don’t give any awards for this post - although it’s a kind gesture, that’s money that goes to Reddit!)
Hello r/LegalAdviceUK.
As you may have noticed, the mods have taken part in the Reddit blackout for the last week.
For those not in the loop of the drama, there are a lot of concerns about Reddit’s recent changes and their response to user concerns.
LAUK took part in these protests, not only in solidarity with other subs and their issues, but we feel that these Reddit changes make moderating more difficult, and therefore present an increased risk of our users being exposed to harmful and dangerous advice, or influenced by idiots or directed by people looking to make financial gain.
The mod team of LAUK are mostly employed professionals either directly working in law (e.g., Solicitors, Police Officers,) or in related professional fields (HR, finance, etc); who rely on well developed mobile apps to moderate, which the official Reddit app has never, ever been good at.
Last month, the moderators manually removed over 5,500 unique comments that broke the subreddit rules - this is a very different subreddit to more casual subreddits and the mods take delicate care to balance the regulatory environment of giving legal advice in the UK, the Reddit platform, and trying our best to help people in need. This task would be impossible without 3rd party tool and applications.
Like many other subreddits, LAUK was recently sent a vaguely sinister and threatening message from the Reddit admins, attempting to divide and conquer mod teams, re-interpreting their long standing rules in order to desperately leverage them against the moderators who curate and manage their website in their own time for free.
Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.
In response to these threats from Reddit, the LAUK mods have opened the subreddit under protest.
The mods are in discussion about the following changes:
Encouraging users to look at safer and more regulated advice options than Reddit
Supporting users to minimise supporting Reddit financially (e.g., use adblocks)
Moving our FAQ and wiki off-site out of a Reddit controlled location
No longer constructively working with Reddit admins - e.g., no AMAs, betas, surveys, mod council, etc.
Additionally:
We may decide to operate from whatever Reddit alternative turns out to be the most popular, or move platform entirely e.g. to Discord. This would be over the coming months
Some moderators may stop moderating Reddit to give their free time to the alternatives above
Our initial reaction was - as we suspect it would have been for many of our users if threatened in that way - to refer the admins to the reply famously given in Arkell and Pressdram. However, the primary motivator for moderators (as well as being power hungry neckbeards) was to help people using our professional skills and knowledge. Reddit is actively harming this community but the majority of moderators believe morally we should continue to use the community we have built to help people as best we can.
We encourage any admins reading this to look for other jobs at organisations who are not going to make you actively harm the community you are supposed to support, whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.
For and on behalf of the LAUK mod team,
Fuck u/Spez and long live John Oliver.
