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Comment by maeln | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually. Aside from this move that is an obvious way to steer user toward the official app and have tighter control, the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit [1].

Moderator from those community have been contacted by reddit admin to tell them that they created localized version of popular subreddit ( r/offmychest, r/tooafraidtoask, ... ) and asked them if they basically could signal boost them. In itself nothing is wrong here. The issue is that people have found that a lot of activity in those subreddit are seemingly just poorly google translated popular post from the original english sub or just plainly generic classique karma bait post (but also clearly google translated).

Karma bots are nothing new but in this case, those subs are brand new, have very few member and very few karma to gain and are basically of interest only to reddit (since the communities already usually had their own better moderated subs). So there is a lot of finger pointing at reddit themselves using bots to try to force engagement in non-english community and virtually (since it is mostly bots) bump their stats before their IPO, which is very dodgy.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/14199iu/reddit_saut...

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> the r/de and r/France community have find some really concerning behavior by Reddit

For anyone who doesn’t want to translate the French post and German comments: Reddit is using bots to fill copycat subs with local content by machine-translating successful posts of the original subs, and then spammed every user from that country with an admin message about those subs.

Reddit going back to it's roots with fake users

Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud? They're making financial statements about the revenue they receive per user. By flooding with fake users, their trying to make their top-line numbers seem high while pretending like the revenue / user is staying constant. It's one thing if it's the initial seed to a two-sided marketplace, but if this gambit doesn't pan out that seems like a problem. The SEC failing to enforce securities fraud like this is a separate matter.

Since those users are their own, it's easy to just write "select count(*) from usres where fake = 1" and report it.

It's not like they need first to detect those users are bots.

I assume you meant "fake != 1"?

I think both would be correct, though your interpretation is more likely.

They could use “fake = 1” to report the number of fake users. Or “fake != 1” to report the number of real users.

I can’t imagine the gymnastics they would have to do to make a fake user count palatable in a road show so again, I think your interpretation is most likely. Then again, I’m about a billion dollars short of my opinion mattering…

It would make me so happy if they have an SQL table or whatever they use that's actually called "fake." That'd really be cutting the bullshit while also creating bullshit.

It's more likely to be some kind of prettified name like "internal public accounts for assuring control of external applications," some sort of technical name that doesn't really make sense by itself but is complicated enough that it looks like someone knew what they're doing when they came up with it.

Management would flip if they stumbled on anything titled "fake." It's way easier to just hide red flags behind technical sounding terms than it is to try to explain why a "problem" isn't a problem and shifting the blame to someone you won't miss.

The don't have to include those fake users in the active users count. They could exclude them.

Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.

Sure, they could be dumb enough to do that, but no evidence of it.

>Generating content is not the same as falsely counting users.

I agree, but all content _is_ generated by users.

Are bots users?

> Doesn't this potentially open them to serious securities fraud?

Maybe they're hoping to find a private buyer for all of their equity who's willing to waive due diligence.

Pulling a Twitter XD

Funny enough i've been getting multiple daily notifications of people following me on reddit.. Never used that feature.. nor does anyone I know use it. All the names are clearly generated too. Is it a 3rd party? Is it Reddit trying to create user metrics as a social platform? It's all suspect at this point.

In my experience it's all OnlyFans porn spam, which I doubt are bots created by Reddit.

Maybe for you. Those girls were genuinely interested in my thoughts on philosophy.

careful you're putting descartes before the wh... nevermind

Thanks. This made my day.

Wonderful!

Just share your credit card and they'll share even more... thoughts.

Funny, i get multiple daily notifications for suggestions on subreddits to follow. I'd love if we could just cut out the middleman and get the users following you to follow the threads that get suggested to me instead.

As others said, those are non-Reddit-operated spambots. But as for the names, any new Reddit users gets a WordWord1234 type name now, and you have to go out of your way to change it, so there are also a lot of legitimate users using those generated names.

I assumed this is simply spammers as they accounts are ~always deleted quickly.

I know I have accidentally followed like half a dozen people. Looks like the UI is a bit different now but it used to be way too easy to click that button.

I noticed the same thing this past week.

I am not very active, but people are following me daily.

Just copying the playbook of every social media platform using monthly active users as a bullshit metric to pump their perceived value.

Should be illegal for the purpose of pumping your value for becoming a public company

I'm curious about what a better metric would be.

Social media sites are usually valued by how many active users they have, so what's a better measure of that?

DAU/MAU ratio tells a lot more. It's often called "stickiness." It's a good metric of who continues to come back to your platform.

Those numbers would still be juiced in the same way with artificial traffic. Revenue / user or revenue / request is less easily gamed as the more artificial traffic you add the larger that drops. Of course that's a lagging indicator but at least that forces Reddit into a position where they'd have to be defrauding their advertisers (or overcharging them on impressions which they'll push back on).

I'm not sure. But the answer should not be, for example, Instagram doing literally nothing about the sea of bots.

They gotta read more Dante

Amazing comment and I'm sort of left begging... how does Dante tie into this? (serious comment)

Is your username your (old) phone number?

Could be the ham radio sign-off "73" which is basically "cheers/best regards".

and it's hard to blame them no? As much as I hate Reddit and their ways to force me to login or use their app, if they want to get more users from some countries why not fake it til you make it?

Uh, yes? It looks dumb and low quality. And it’s not as if Germans are a tiny minority, the German sub has over 1 millions subs, and at least on samplesize, they are the largest group after the 3 big English countries (US, UK, CA)

Have you looked at nextdoor or fb groups lately? They look the same

No, because in Germany we use nebenan.de :D And the fb groups I know are sane, otherwise I wouldn’t be there.

Elimination of the API’s used by pushshift will make it harder to observe and quantify this behavior across Reddit by outside parties.

Who even wants to moderate all that?

Oh boy, I'm sure that will work out fine (I mean, it does for the tiktok-minded people)

What do you mean about tiktok here? I've not noticed machine-translated tiktok being a thing.

I mean the "average tiktok user" who just mindless consumes content and is very uncritical about what shows up in their timeline

(this is more a user persona rather than meaning an actual tiktok user but it seems that's the way Reddit wants to go)

The creepy algo of TikTok is giving me way better content than Reddit. It actually caters to my interests, not ragebait. I guess the bar to beat reddit is not high in the end and mindlessly scrolling TikTok is a problem.

Isn't faking user activity how reddit originally started out, so that's very on brand?

On a more serious note, I'd be super interested to know how high the percentage reddit users who don't speak any English is. And how high it could grow in the future. I'd wager that most of the people that hang around r/de and r/france are also members of English-speaking subs (even if passive). That's because the interesting thing about reddit is that you have all these niche communities of your interests that you could join. But if you fragment these niches further down by language, you end up with communities that are too small to be interesting. E.g. r/Elektroautos/ just does not have enough content, compared to r/electricvehicles/

I think people who speak no english don't end on Reddit in the first place. It had very few traction in France as a far as I know, and facebook groups would be the go to places for most people.

So yes, members of /r/france and /r/de read and probably participate the other subs as well, and the whole point of /r/france and the variations is less to speak french but to have local discussions gate-keeped by the language.

Same for Japanese communities, there's massive subs for anime an Japan life, and there will be small niche subs in Japanese only to isolate from the bigger group and paradoxically have a less filtered bubble.

I’d say most, but certainly not (almost) all. There are quite a few (real) German subreddits, and most of my countrypeople prefer their native language over English, and are often not even that comfortable with it. Forum culture is also still relatively big in Germany, so for niche hobbies there are probably several forums, I know that for ecigs, the German reddit community can’t hold a candle to the several ecig forums.

Reddit is hiring and some of the job descriptions talk specifically about international expansion, so I guess at least Reddit thinks it is or will be significant.

Although I’d be shocked if good old Rocket Internet hasn’t done a Reddit clone by now, thus capturing the non-English-speaking part of the German market.

Reddit actually just fired 90 people and put on a hiring freeze for the rest of the year.

https://archive.ph/3wR5j

>Reddit is closing on its IPO and is seemingly desperate to generate "growth" by bumping every possible metrics possible virtually.

If by "growth" and "metrics" you mean they have to figure out how to make money to sell themselves to investors in an almost-hostile financial environment, then yes, I agree.

Beginning of the end and all that. You can't sell "community". IPO means ads, ads, ads and dodgy strategies like you describe above.

Meanwhile, their valuation has gotten worse. In 2021 Fidelity invested $28.2M in Reddit and now values that investment at $16.6M - a 41% drop [1].

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/01/fidelity-reddit-valuation/

Most tech companies are down 40% from their peak still unless they are part of this ai hype train.

Big difference between tech giants making software used by businesses and a glorified message board

Not really, all comes down to "are they making money?"

That's not far off tech in general though

To be fair most every growth tech company took a pretty big haircut. Some value has returned to the stronger players recently. However, weaker ones are still well off ATHs. Will be interesting to see how Reddit looks.

IPO doesn't have to mean ads, though. There are other ways to monetize a user base and to generate money based off of a 'community'. They're just ways that require more time, more concerted effort and planning to execute.

Many platforms have recently shown how you can monitize an audience without ads. It's weird to me that Reddit hasn't pursued something like that.

Discord and Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit. Allow users to pay a small fee to upgrade their subscription to a subreddit - maybe $1.50/mo per sub or $15/mo for all subs. The upgrade includes access to special emojis for the sub, a special flair or re-colored username, and no ads on the upgraded sub. A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub, and Reddit could pocket the rest.

The irony is that Reddit already has this feature, but that goes to show how poorly they market it. They also sell NFT avatars (though cleverly, not describing them as NFTs in the UI)

> A portion of the money would go towards funding moderation for the sub

That creates bad incentives, though. A streamer I mod for once suggested something similar, I told them I’d quit modding in that case. If it’s a job, it stops being a hobby.

I think I see the point - that people have very different beliefs and expectations about paid jobs versus volunteer work.

If I pay you just a little bit for something you were doing, it may not really register much because it isn't enough money to really do anything with besides buy a meal or a new toy here and there or something.

If I pay you enough for it to be considered a job, that brings in a whole bunch of new expectations on both sides. You may expect to be paid a fair wage compared to what you previously did, to have a good career path, to do something that looks good on a resume, to have a good work-life balance, etc. And they may expect a certain stable and reliable productivity level, advanced notice for any time off, etc.

Is there any way Reddit could support mods using the funds without paying them for moderation?

They could create better modding tools, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Cognitive dissonance in action.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

I think you are confusing OPs point. If he is a volunteer moderator he gets to set his own expectations and efforts. By introducing a financial component it could disrupt his incentives, make him feel like he has to put X hours, and change the spirit/community of the people that now volunteer (but would then "work") with him

There is a name for this effect (it's no cognitive dissonance) I think - I recall reading about it in Freakonomics, wherein they discuss it in the scope of parents being "fined" for picking up their children late. The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction - instead of being a social imposition - and actually led to more delays, not fewer

Name of the effect: categorical change.

The most (in)famous example in the US is the American Red Cross following the US forces in Europe during WW2 beginning to charge a few cents for donuts that they had been giving away for free. While they were still inexpensive compared to their usual price at US donut shops, it was a huge change in the relationship that ended up souring a lot of soldiers towards the Red Cross.

The early Festinger (1959) studies are basically this exact point. Getting paid or paying transforms an internally driven experience into an externally driven one (get paid or deal with fines). Later studies generalized, but the idea that "external reward or punishment is involved" changes perception of the task from internally reward driven to external, due to the dissonance of "why I'm doing it."

The economists have their own name for many phenomena that come down to the same thing that the psychologists would predict. Hence the rise of "behavioral economics" to converge the fields.

> There is a name for this effect

Are you referring to incentives? Specifically turning a social incentive to a market incentive?

> The fine actually validated the tardiness as part of a business transaction

It should also be noted the parent’s monthly bill was around $380, and the fine was only around $3. So even being late every workday in a month was only an additional $60. And I’m sure some of those parents would happily spend that to be rid of their children for a little bit longer.

I do wish it was recorded whether the length of tardiness increased as well, and what the mean and mode were. Whether parents started to abuse the time or not, in effect milking the daycare for care, is an important data point as well.

Milking the daycare would look the same as people feeling less obligated to pick up on time, now that they are compensating the provider for the extra time spent.

Looks like you pasted the wrong reply in this thread ;)

No, though you may wish to check over the 2nd paragraph in the post I replied to ;D

Admittedly without quoting it does look out of place. I just edited it to fix that. Thank you!

Oh, yeah, without actually having read freakonomics, that looked very out of place ;)

I disagree

Not sure if you're joking, because that is hilarious, but they do offer that sort of thing. Reddit Premium (née Reddit Gold iirc).

https://www.reddit.com/premium

They don't revenue share with moderators though, because as far as Reddit is concerned, fuck moderators.

Reddit has offered a premium subscription for years, though it's not specific to subreddits. It gives the user a customizable avatar, removes ads, and enhances a couple UI features.

https://www.reddit.com/premium

They had this!! It was called PowerUps.

Then they killed it.

Nearly everyone who cares at all as a user or creator hates how Twitch makes money. They take 50% of gift subs and yesterday banned some ads, etc.

I’m unsure why Twitch would keep squeezing every dollar in insane ways unless their funding model isn’t working either.

Do discord and twitch actually make money though? Consumers are tired of subscriptions so I bet that would be a hard sell. They tried premium features with the gold and stuff but I don't think it every really caught on.

>Twitch have a funding model that would probably work great for Reddit.

Twitch's model works great for creators but not for Twitch and as a result Twitch has been working hard to force their creators to run more ads.

Taking 50% of subs is not great for creators.

Twitch is ad driven though.

Discord doesn’t charge for per sub access does it?

No. They charge a yearly fee for their "nitro" product which offers some perks in any server you're in. Each server can setup their own perks (emoji, reactions l, user name color, etc) for nitro users that join.

You also get sitewide access to emojis/stickers from other servers, for the $2.99/mo Basic plan. For $9.99/mo you get profile customization, HD video streaming, and 500MB uploads.

Decent perks for an eye-watering price, and you don’t even get encrypted messages to boot.

"More time" would equal "lower ROI" unless there is some magic inflection point that would cause a dramatic upward leap in gross margins. Gross margins, in this case, is mostly cost-per-user-acquisition. But "this new social network is amazing, I love it, and you should join" mostly happens when social networks are new, young, and small. It would be difficult to bring back the days of triple digit growth for a network the size of Reddit.

So, impossible.

so they give lower ROI.

therefore they don't exist after IPO.

As a shareholder I don't want "instead of ads we have", I want "On top of ads we have"

On top of ads, you can have a dead website :^)

I find it funny that…

Literally no one is talking about how all of the LLMs are training on Reddit data via the API.

So far…

- PaLM

- GPT3

- Falcon

Yes, Reddit is closing on its IPO because it’s not a non-profit.

But that doesn’t mean they should be forced to provide a low cost service to OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and the entire investor community backing LLM startups.

Source:

https://huggingface.co/blog/falcon

Perhaps because killing third-party apps is completely unrelated to LLMs? While they’re both related to the API lockdown, the core problem is not LLM-related. It’s Reddit’s own short-sighted incompetence.

They can EASILY provide high prices to LLMs and low prices to app devs. They just won’t. It’s in their best interests to remove third parties and force everyone on the inferior, ad-ridden official app. They could even make premium-based account tokens to allow them to use third party apps, but that’s too long-term oriented. They have to pump’n’dump NOW.

While it seems that some people feel reddit is "owed" something when its data is used by machine learning companies, the reality is that reddit themselves claims that posts are owned by users and so really they are not in any position to be owed anything.

They can fully dictate the terms of their API sure, but unless they want to drop off all search indexes there is nothing they can do about people scraping the data the old fashioned way.

I disagree entirely.

There’s a real non-negligible cost to Reddit hosting the content.

The bottom line is there’s solutions here.

- High volume API users pay up and subsidize the cost of everyone else

- All Reddit users pay a monthly 9.99 subscription and the API stays the same.

- A not-for-profit let’s say Internet Archive takes ownership and begs the Reddit community for donations (ie. Wikipedia)

If it was that expensive to host the API, they wouldn't have done it for over a decade. Reddit's popularity was at least partially built on the labor of 3rd party devs building mobile apps, moderation tools, useful bots, all types of stuff.

The bottom line is they'll happily pull the rug from under those 3rd party devs if it means they can pump their numbers for their IPO.

Multiple LLMs scraping all of reddit is a far different deal than how the APIs were used in the past.

Small cost x moderate usage = moderate cost Small cost x overthetop usage = overthetop cost

What they should do is really hammer the LLMs.

They could just block them if they want. Can't be that hard.

I think this is more about the IPO and inflating figures.

- Everyone will just run web scrapers increasing the load on reddit's servers even more

An API actually REDUCES load and lets you manage it.

Your solution isn’t a solution.

Please answer the question:

How is Reddit supposed to make money with increased load and demand for its content?

The framing in the question is wrong. Reddit gets ~80 comments per second on average. An API to get comments with ids starting after n would let you reasonably scrape all new comments with 1 request per second (or one every 10 seconds if the API returned up to 1000 results, which would be entirely reasonable). They get ~10 posts per second, so add another 1 request for that. The load is trivial. Storing the content is also trivial; the entire history of reddit fits very comfortably on a single consumer-tier SSD.

The infrastructure they provide is easily replicable at almost no cost (really it's just the bandwidth that costs any money at all). The community curation and moderation is done by volunteers. The content is all from the users. Reddit Inc is providing almost none of the value, and is just benefiting from network effects. People go there because people go there.

Reddit hosts images and videos

Only recently. For most of its history of only stored text.

It was 7 years ago.

Yes, and those are features most Reddit users could care less about and or can be linked easy enough.

The real meat and potatoes is plain old text with Reddit style markup.

Your question isn't the question you should be asking.

Please answer the question:

How is reddit supposed to prevent scraping when it is legal to do so, and they have incentive to appear in search engines? Considering that scraping is legal and WILL happen, why not opt to reduce the load by offering an API?

If consuming their content by scraping was easy, nobody would be complaining about the APIs being taken away... it's very easy to make web scraping impractical if they want. Don't be deluded.

The context of the thread is machine learning companies. You're delusional if you think they don't have a ton of web scrapers running 24/7 already.

This content is text, it is extremely cheap to host. The site itself is not particularly resilient, so there is not a lot of overhead there. 10 euros a month is an absolutely ridiculous price for what probably doesn't even cost them 20 cents per user, per month.

Isn't this mostly closing the barn door after the horse left? The AI companies already have their data. It may grow stale, but the bulk of the corpus has already been ingested. Either that or they do old-fashioned scraping.

Depends on the model but that HuggingFace blog post on Falcon was just released in the last couple of days where they mention which models are using Reddit.

Reddit content is actively being pillaged by LLMs.

The web is open, the site is available to anyone with a computer and internet connection. LLMs aren't pillaging anything, they're using it as intended. By this definition Google has pillaged the internet far longer and made a lot more money.

It's not "Reddit content" it's content posted on Reddit. It's an important distinction as hosting the content is the reason the business exists at all.

Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free.

In fact, making the API paid does nothing for that goal. Scrapping has been long established as legal so if their license doesn’t change, nothing about LLMs using their content will either

> Reddit is able to license its content in a way that prevents companies from using it while leaving the API free.

And there's the scam laid bare.

It's *NOT* Reddit's content. Sure, by posting you're granting them a whole slew of rights. But you dont transfer ownership to them.

And when your content creators leave, blammo, you have no more new content. And I'm already seeing some subreddits drop dramatically in terms of comments and posts. Tech ones, naturally. Turns out Lemmy is actually pretty cool for a fediverse version of reddit.

We're already seeing the start of death of Imgur as "reddit image host", oh wait "imgur social network", oh wait "no porn Imgur". We all know how this works out. Same game, just a bit ahead of reddit.

It's quite key to the legal strategy of all the LLMs that they do not need a license for their input data. So if they want reddit data they'll just scrape it (which is also legally protected). And if they do need a license then reddit does not have one to sell to the AI companies, at least for most of the text on their site. I don't believe it's a reasonable strategy for any platform (except maybe marketplaces like shutterstock) to attempt to charge money for data for machine learning.

I find it funny also. This fact seemed to have its moment in the sun for about 15 minutes a few months ago when everyone was first talking about ChatGPT and then everyone forgot?

Reddit data? It's entirely user generated data, merely hosted by reddit, regardless of what the terms and conditions say.

This isn’t how the world works. We live in a class based society. Reddit could just have LLMs pay more and focus on moderating correct API payment usage.

Any one can scrape too. The bigger one is, the more likely they have extensive scraping tools.

Isn’t faking use activity….fraud?

When you’re trying to gain traction on a new and free website it’s one thing (Reddit essentially started this way)…but if you’re trying to sell the company to investors this should be a crime.

It sounds a lot like a version of "pump and dump", which the SEC puts in the securities fraud category.

Its fine (well to be more specific- legal) to have fake users/content on your privately owned website, but it will be fraud if they include those users and posts in their metrics provided to investors. In the US anyway.

If the owner of the site was in on it (adding fake users/content) and passed it off to investors as natural, I can see that as being fraudulent, but what if the owner legitimately wasn't in on it, as could easily be the case if the "fake" users/content were created by third parties for unrelated reasons and not detected by the owner? Indeed, the concept of using a throwaway per submission in certain circumstances is a well-known part of the culture, which is why I put "fake" in quotation marks -- accounts are only fake if someone erroneously assumes the ratio of humans:accounts would be anywhere near 1:1.

And if the latter is not fraud but legitimate usage of the site, then it seems like there could be a huge gray area of plausible deniability that the owner was simply using the site the same way that anyone else could (albeit with a streamlined interface).

Faking activity to bootstrap real activity is probably fine. To expand into international markets, they need to present existing activity to draw and retain users. But I don't see a problem with this.

I don't think many people have much of an issue with it at the base level. Creating threads to drive engagement on hypothetical issues, made up humor/ragebait stories, etc. are pretty harmless in itself.

But when the actions are done in an attempt to trick individuals weighing financial incentives? That becomes much more murky. Had they bootstrapped these communities prior to the IPO filing? Fine. After the spotlight is on them to prove organic growth for the IPO? Murky.

> made up [...] ragebait stories [...] are pretty harmless in itself.

Strong disagree, reading such things habitually is corrosive to the mind and turns people bitter. For reddit to recommend and promote ragebait subreddits to their user is deeply unethical. And to create fraudulent ragebait content, to make people vicariously mad about something that didn't even happen, is evil on par with being a tobacco advertiser.

Fair point. I didn't realize they already filed for IPO.

Google is showing its regency bias and not allowing me to find the older articles about reddits creation and how the admins back then used to post a huge amount of their own traffic to make the site seem busy to draw users in. Why would the admins not do it now if it worked then.

I guess you just needed the right search terms? I searched for "history of reddit fake user activity" and got this:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

..and it turns out it's right on Reddit's wikipedia page as well:

> Supported by the funding from Y Combinator,[28] Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp[29] and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.[30][31] Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated,[32] an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.

"Hundreds" of fake users doesn't register in the grand scale of things.

Nobody would accuse a waitress of fraud for seeding the tip jar with a few dollars.

I guess at the end of the day scale matters. When Reddit was doing this that percentage of fake posts was huge per capita of total users.

Now, if Reddit is doing fake posts in mass to change the valuation of an IPO, that would be the definition of fraud, specifically a public fraud the SEC could investigate. Reddit doing this at the start at best would be a civil investigation by any investors it had at that time, but it's highly unlikely any investors it had when committing said fraud would bring said investigation because it increased the value of its investment.

Reddit Founders Made Hundreds of Fake Profiles So Site Looked Popular https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

Yikes that DM in the first comment from a Reddit admin basically asking the community member to perform free labour.

Reddit is built on free mod labour. I remember seeing a relationship advice thread from a woman who was concerned her partner thought being a reddit mod equated to having a second job. https://teddit.net/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_husba...

Proper link: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueOffMyChest/comments/r2w9qb/my_h...

Whenever I read r/de or r/France I am always surprised by the higher quality of the comments compared to any of the English subs.

I wonder if the demographics are different or if it's just the lack of bots/fake accounts/astroturfing.

Having reddit try to push down low-quality content that was auto-translated to these (in my opinion) higher quality communities is quite funny in a sad way.

I wouldn't be surprised if they try to stop this protest by allocating a large block of IPO shares to moderators. As they should given how much moderators contribute to their success.

Actually paying the moderators for their time and effort to manage and build your product? I mean - it would be the right thing to do, for sure, but to suggest that Reddit Inc. under its current direction would have such foresight is a fantasy.

There is 0% chance of this happening. Moderators are too fungible

How many mods are there on Reddit that run big communities? For all we know it may result in mods getting $100 each.

Far more likely they'll just remove all the "offending" mods and replace them with puppets

That's part of a whole program; while reddit lets many mods work for free they are paying these "mods" $20/hour to "organically" drum up subscribers on non-US subs. I shared some links about this a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34481478

This is essentially how reddit was founded - fake users, fake organic content. We shouldn't be surprised.

It's behaving like a VC funded unicorn that is trying to get their IPO payday but it really isn't that at all.

Sucks.

Do you think humans would do that? Intentionally instigate online engagement for profit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com