You may know that r/haskell recently went private to protest Reddit’s planned changes to their API access. You can read about that here:
After a week of being private, I am opening r/haskell in read-only mode. I am also starting a poll to see what the community would like to do. You can vote here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/14dqllb/vote_on_the_future_of_rhaskell/
Feel free to discuss here as well, but only votes on the Reddit post will count.
Who in our community has figured out how to download their reddit posts and replies, and would they mind sharing it loudly ?
Many of us have invested time posting there, have not backed up that work before now, and need a proper grace period to get that done.
Also, some ideas that might help smooth the next actions:
Due process - announce more widely, and give more warning. A discussion on reddit that appears to have lasted only two days is not enough for such an important community resource. (I read /r/haskell regularly and missed this completely.) As well as reddit and discourse, please pre-announce on haskell-cafe, #haskell:libera.chat and #haskell:matrix.org.
Six mods are listed on /r/haskell but it appears as if only Taylor is making decisions / doing the work / taking the heat. A joint all-mods announcement would be more effective. If the other mods are retired and we are down to one, that’s worth making clear (and if /r/haskell were to continue, the other names should be removed).
The new poll isn’t really a poll, it’s a free-form discussion. That’s good to clarify options, and maybe all you have time for; but isn’t there a Poll post type on reddit ? An actual poll with bar chart would attract more participation and record the community’s choice more clearly.
Thanks for your work Taylor.
Thank you so much! Honestly, I find it hard to care about whether I talk to people on Reddit or Discourse (or anywhere else, for that matter). However, I did care that many years’ worth of discussions was inaccessible. Keeping it open but read-only seems like a good compromise to me.
I have a shell script I’ve used that downloads them in json using curl. I don’t have time to grab it right now, but feel free to ping me if I haven’t shared it by the weekend and it would still be useful. Caveat: it won’t get anything in private subreddits. If you edited it to use a login cookie, it would get things in private subreddits that you have access to, but not ones you don’t.
I’ve considered making a request under GDPR for them to share with me all the data they have on my account, but never bothered. I’m not sure if they’d legally have to comply (I’m in the UK).
Errm but to vote I need an account on Reddit. I’ve only ever browsed Reddit threads. I’m certainly not going to sign up and get all their durned spam, just to vote for abandoning it.
Correct me if I’ve misinterpreted you. But it sounds to me like you want to abandon reddit because you dislike reddit, not as protest for how reddit is acting. All Taylor’s suggestions other than “reopen” are “do _ until something changes”, whereas I think what you want is “just abandon reddit entirely whether or not something changes”.
As I said in the other thread, that’s a different discussion and should be had elsewhere. If you want to take away from me a thing that I like because you happen not to like that thing, I’m not going to stop you from trying to make that case. But I don’t want it to get mixed up with the case for “we who like this thing should be willing to give up something we like in protest”. And as someone who doesn’t like the thing, I think you are ill-positioned to make that second case.
Ok thanks for the clarification. But I’m not trying to unilaterally take anything away from anybody. I rather thought as a community we were collectively deciding whether to pool our knowledge / Q&A resources on a place away from reddit, on grounds reddit’s (management’s) direction is no longer aligned with ours.
Note Discourse wasn’t a thing when Haskellers started using reddit, so this would have been a much more difficult decision. Separately there’s a q how we get the accumulated ip out of reddit.
Leading/moderating a large community must feel akin to shepherding cats, am I wrong, Taylor?
Have a slice of virtual lambda cake. I suspect the situation will take quite some time to resolve, I can only imagine how messy it is after so many years of active involvement in growing the community.
Just to bring up what Reddit is threatening:
It appears that we cannot keep /r/Haskell closed, and Reddit will forcefully keep the Reddit open by replacing moderators as needed.
As mentioned in the Reddit thread, I’d consider Reddit as having declared war on its moderators and users, but open resistance will end up splitting the community. Subtle, latent resistance (i.e, waiting on Reddit alternatives to mature, choosing the best of them, and helping to encourage a move to mature Reddit alternatives) is the best way to screw Reddit back.
x-posting my comment here:
Regardless of your opinion on Reddit, it seems to me that permanently shuttering or limiting (eg readonly mode) a subreddit for a big tent community when many users observably wish to go on normally isn’t a responsible usage of your fiat mod powers.
I get the temporary stuff. But making it permanent when plenty of people want to use r/haskell is a different move entirely.
The end result will probably be another subreddit with a worse name (r/haskell2 
), which would in turn make the permanent shuttering move equivalent to namesquatting.
So yeah, I don’t think this should be left to a casual Reddit vote. This is a matter of governance, not popularity. If 1/3 of users wish to use Reddit, then it should remain open even if it is not the winner. I don’t have a horse in this race - to me, this is all civics class stuff, on a higher philosophical & ethical plane than what amounts to internet politics. And a civics mindset is especially important when in this type of leadership position.
All of that was discussed to no end on the original announcement thread:
https://discourse.haskell.org/t/r-haskell-is-going-dark/6405
…at least until it was ended by that one being locked, to avoid confusion with this thread. After the vote has been tallied, you can ask a mod here to re-open the other thread so that discussions about civics-class and other principles can continue there.
Any ideas as to when this will be done?
Well my comment was specifically about how a voting approach is wrongheaded to begin with, so it felt relevant to post now.
Yeah, I for one can see how trying for twelve (12) days to convince an obstinate management to reconsider their decision could leave someone somewhat “wrongheaded”:
I really do understand the immense consternation – if there was anything that we could ethically do to hurt the reddit management and compell them to be resonable I would be all for it.
But I fear we are hurting ourselves disproportionately here. If there is no sign of them folding after a reasonable period I would restore the service and work out a long term strategy to migrate to an alternative. That will hurt them without hurting us – or at least the relative harm will be much more in our favour.
the process is super easy, so it’s probably worth a shot. just two clicks here and a bit of waiting: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
Oh, thank you! I looked for something like that before, I think through google as well, but didn’t find it, so I thought I’d have to email them. I still can’t find a way through the interface to get to that page.
Anyway, maybe doesn’t matter now, but I said I’d share the script I have, so:
#! /bin/sh
ua="User-Agent: Definitely firefox"
base="https://www.reddit.com/user/YOUR_USERNAME/.json"
echo "Fetching page 1"
curl -H "$ua" "$base" > reddit-comments-01.json
n=1
wideN=01
while true; do
wideN=$(printf "%02d" $n)
id=$(jq -r .data.after reddit-comments-$wideN.json)
if [[ $id == null ]]; then break; fi
let n=n+1
wideN=$(printf "%02d" $n)
sleep 60
echo "Fetching page $n after $id"
curl -H "$ua" "$base?after=$id" > reddit-comments-$wideN.json
done
It creates a bunch of files that you could later consolidate into one if you wanted, but I never did. Not sure if it violates reddit’s TOS.
The vote has been going on for seven days. Does anyone know when we’re due to get a result?
Yes!