A Reddit transcription community will shut down over a 'lack of trust' in the platform | Engadget
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A group of Reddit volunteers who transcribe media from around 100 subreddits are shutting down their community, partly due to the company's controversial API changes..

A group of Reddit volunteers who transcribe media from around 100 subreddits are shutting down their community, partly due to the company’s controversial API changes…

  • LChitman
    50•1 year ago

    I never looked into the community behind those transcriptions but I always thought it seemed like good work. Individually a small effort, but collectively I bet it made a big difference for those who benefitted. And it looks like they did a lot more work than I ever saw.

    It’s too bad they invested so much into bettering a company that doesn’t appear to have worked with them or even cared that they were bridging gaps in their underdeveloped platform. Funny I could be talking about mods here.

    • BornVolcanoEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      The discord alone has about 850 members, with each person having contributed anywhere from 1 to 29,000 transcriptions each (pretty much only the mods are at that upper count, most of us are anywhere between 5 and 300. I was about 30, since I mostly use mobile which doesn’t allow for proper markdown mode needed for transcriptions).

      And I’m sure there’s a lot more. We worked not for the company, but for the users, hoping to get the company’s attention on bigger accessibility issues that need addressed. I’m not sure where it’s going to go from here, but I’ve talked to some of the mods about creating a smaller transcription force on the fediverse. But we’d need a reliable mod who understands and can operate within the fediverse, since the system we used to log transcriptions and filter posts was a lot more sophisticated and complex than a lot of people may have realized.

      I’m sticking around on Lemmy, at least for the foreseeable future, in order to try to hop around and act as a sort of freelance transcriber until a more organized effort comes in. I like to think of myself as “going rogue” rn lmao but it’s very much not, even the mod I talked to is very much in support of me doing this. But a few of us are popping over to try to help out, it just remains to be seen if there will be a larger, organized effort towards it or not.

      But we are planning to come together to clear the last of the reddit queue in a few days, to give ToR and the blind/VI communities on reddit as powerful a sendoff as we can. So I’m excited for that.