Reddit has an army of unpaid moderators. Not to mention the Reddit users who upvote and downvote.
Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter.
Also, politicians and other important public figures don't use Reddit like they use Twitter.
Smart, Reddit is comfortable with the fact it’s a glorified web forum, Twitter lied to itself that it’s something more.
Despite the recent disruptive events, society still treats twitter as a public square. Politicians, celebrities, charities, and governments all make announcements there. So many updates on the russian invasion of Ukraine have been put on twitter but not facebook or instagram.
My personal opinion is that twitter is a public square. I don't know what that means legally, because it is an international public square with all the judicial/governmental chaos that implies. I guess an alternative would be to have "twitter is a USA public square" kind of language on the site, but that may well dampen any participation from non-US people.
No, journalists did. Society at large doesn’t even use Twitter. Their own stats prove this.
So this argument gets weird really, really quick.
I think that may change in the future. Many politicians, including prominent ones, have done AMAs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a semi regular. The Sergeant Major of the US Army is a regular. Rick Astley is a semi regular. Verne Troyer was a regular before he died.
Twitter allows you to soapbox on any current issue and communicate directly with people.
You could in theory do something similar through your own subreddit but then you'd need to manage it, it's not the same thing.
I am not a fan of Reddit in a lot of ways, but overall the other mods and I have made a pretty safe place for our community, and we have had relatively little trolling, hopefully it stays that way. Before Reddit I did in person meetups for a couple topics and even in highschool almost twenty years ago I was a big support for a lot of people. Reddit is just a pretty good platform compared to Facebook. The relative anonymity helps a lot in a mental health sub.
I have to assume it's similar for others. Why do this work for free? My only answer to that is it gave me a feeling of being wanted or needed that I was severely lacking at the time.
I spend maybe five minutes a year on it, so it’s more of a responsibility than a labor.
As far back as I remember there’s always been bbs moderators. And almost always unpaid.
I think Reddit would be worse if mods were paid because then the positions would be more sought after and tried to run as a job.
I don’t think Twitter has equivalent moderation.
Twitter, OTOH, is a free for all cesspool. And that was with the moderation policies. Somehow it’s even worse now.
Others do it more casually, just because they wanted to have a forum for a topic and you need to do some light-touch moderating to keep the spam out.
Post some sort of "anti-musk" or "anti-apple" or whatever is popular at the moment and watch everyone rush in to come to that person/organizations defence.
I always find it astonishing when people do this and was always curious as to the motives as well.
I drive a Hyundai and have an iPhone, if someone were to say something critical of either I don't mind. I don't work for either company, i don't hold any of their stock, no family works there..
Yet there are always rabid fans and i suspect Reddit and such has its "fans" who feel compelled to moderate. Probably because they feel a sense of "community" or belonging to some company and are willing to do unpaid work, the same as people will post "pro apple" comments when someone makes a critical statement.
Look at the post the other day on the electric truck comments and others are writing that this is "a coordinated attack on Musk"??
People do odd things at times.
Or how about people who contribute to open source software that they use? Like a cult?
Volunteering to moderate a forum you participate in and enjoy is not really very different from those.