They don't need to. They do need to keep the stock price up just long enough to cash out and leave a sucker holding the bag.
Edit: not that I'm against paying mods, I support that. But replacing enthusiast mods with paid mods, I doubt that'll be adequate.
There's a bit in Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely where he talks about social compensation vs. market compensation (I could be remembering the terms wrong). He asks how poorly it would go if you went to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandmother, and after eating the amazing spread you handed her a $20 and said, "That's for the great food, gran, it was amazing!"
Gets rid of a nuisance relatively easy, but degrades the quality. But reddit doesn't seem to care much about quality for the last years so.
I don't care about the reddit API but I am enjoying watching the this dumpster fire burn. Popcorn sure does taste good indeed.
I think my explanation is at least as plausible as yours with the added benefit of not denigrating an entire group.
Obviously there’s exceptions, but it is a really common phenomenon. They found communities or get modded simply because they spend the most time and hang out in the right chats, not because they’re objectively great neutral moderators. They are very frequently people with very strong personalities, and are often in the long-term have a more destructive influence on communities than any short-lived comment troll, especially wrt to the effect on newcomers as they tend to make communities increasingly insular.
These same people, are just overstressed and take too much shit, and this explains the vast majority of all alleged abuses?
I've heard this before. I hear it every time someone is shot to death while crawling towards their attackers while being screamed at to not move and come closer simultaneously. Every time that someone dies with a knee on their neck for 10 minutes. Every time a grenade is thrown into a baby's crib.
That's about the most generous I can be. Reddit moderators have not actually thrown grenades into baby cribs. They're not quite as bad as those that do throw grenades into babies' cribs.
>tend to get burnt out
People can also just overcommit to volunteer activities in general for a period. If people can just dial down their involvement, that can be OK. But if it's an activity that's all-in or nothing, it probably won't last for more than a while as people burn out or their priorities just change.
I’ve never been an active Redditor, but there are people discussing my open source software on Reddit, so I’ve answered questions there on a good number of occasions.
That my informative and completely rule-abiding posts can be made unavailable at the whim of some community mods while the site is still alive feels like a betrayal. These mods don’t own my posts. No complaint if Reddit goes the way of Digg and takes everything with it.
My prior experience moderating other forums tells me the contribution of these community moderators are often way exaggerated and usually easily replaceable. Some form personality cults and periodic rotation would actually be a good thing.
Is there a link to this? That's crazy!
If I were spez I would simply disable the ability to make new subreddits private.
This protest is not for the greater good, it's harming half a billion users for the benefit (actually, for no benefit since nothing will come out of it) of the 3% that want to not see ads and use the 3rd party apps.
If Reddit does a mass replacement of mods, the illusion is broken. You're not running your own forum, you're doing free work for some website. So if you want to create a place to discuss X, then you dont think to make a subreddit for X, you go with something you actually control or far more likely just somewhere the illusion hasn't been broken; like create a discord server.
That illusion is what has made Reddit basically the forum. It's the whole value of the site. Destroying the thing that makes your site valuable is crazy.
Reddit's value proposition is not the ego stroking of the 0.0000001% that are moderators, it's the discoverability and interoperability between unrelated niches.
If little dictators don't get their kick from rulling lawlessly on a community anymore, I say good ridance.
Sad.
This whole thing about third-party apps has been ridiculously mismanaged by the communities.
The only 2 reasons people want to keep third-party apps are 1) they prefer them to the official one, 2) they don't want ads. Both of those reasons are valid, but neither are even remotely close to justifying the actions that those Reddit nerds are taking.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
I get not being sympathetic with petty kings of message boards, but let’s be real, Reddit is an awful company whose incompetence is legendary. They’ve failed to monetize, failed to maintain the user experience and now are failing to keep a vital aspect of their business going.
Ultimately their failure is a good thing. Reddit broke the internet by ending the phpbb era. Time for the next thing.
What does this have to do with what I wrote?
>the discoverability and interoperability between unrelated niches.
Why are those niches on Reddit if Reddit isn't giving away faux forums?
>If little dictators don't get their kick from rulling lawlessly on a community anymore, I say good ridance.
Odd because I get the impression you prefer the communities those little dictators create to be on a google crawlable site over discord.
> What does this have to do with what I wrote?
You are suggesting that those users will go away from Reddit to form separate dedicated communities, and I am saying that they will try but fail to attract people.
Reddit allows the vast majority of the subs that participate in the blackout to survive simply because they are a part of Reddit and benefit from its infrastructure and features.
You really think a website dedicated to cute animals will attract 34M subscribers like /r/aww? And another one with the exact same theme will attract 4M subscribers (with a lot of overlap) like /r/Eyebleach?
Those communities exist and strive because the barrier to entry is literally non-existent. It takes one input to create them and one click to join them.
> Odd because I get the impression you prefer the communities those little dictators create to be on a google crawlable site over discord.
I would prefer if there were no little dictators, with elections every 3 months, showing detailed stats of the moderators actions, and most of the moderation to be in the style of StackOverflow, so community driven.
The notorious Digg collapse was in part because of their fight with a big poster who was dominating the rankings and in the process supplying a lot of the content. They won against him, and the rest is history. Similar with Vine.
It's not because a few terminally online Reddit addicts are vocally posing as the resistance that the majority of the community supports it.
Without comments, HN would be just a boring link aggregator and we'd get very little information if the article was BS or not. But because we have comments we get gems at times where 'the creator of X' discusses the merits of the article. That can be nearly priceless. Things like this draw people that don't upvote and don't comment, but they still get immense value from it.
Posts are what makes Reddit, so much so that Reddit created hundreds of fraudulent profiles in their early days to fake popularity.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
----
Of course this interests me what the future looks like for social media. At one time in the past you needed users to generate and post content. Could we end up with social media sites with 'good enough' bots faking humans that draw in the masses, but few biological commenters and posters would exist?
The big subs that they would 100% do it on that are a few million plus, you would never really notice. /r/pics, /r/gaming, etc who even pays attention to who the mods are. The mods aren't the community.
If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience. People getting banned for disagreeing with a mod would stop for example. You wouldn't have to guess what the mods mean by their rules. For example, on /r/startups replying to people giving them an answer and saying if you have any more questions I'm free is called an unauthorised ask me anything. Which is crazy. There are many subs where it's anyone's guess what the rules are. And it can literally depend on the mood of the moderator. There are some subreddits that automatically ban people who have posted in certain subreddits.
Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
I can guarantee you the opposite. You'll have a site-wide abusable Scunthorpe-incompatible report-based automated moderation with no proper appeal mechanism in place because half a dozen underpaid interns/offshored employees will be responsible for taking over the work of hundreds of moderators.
It's already happening in some cases. There's ways to make reports go directly to the so-called Anti-Evil Operations team who will irrevocably override any moderation decision and enforce abusive reports.
It's easy to get people banned, post some hateful content, wait for reports, and then report the reports for report abuse.
> But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
There are some legitimate cases of poorly moderated subreddits and mod abuse (and the whole powermod issue), but beware, most of the time people complaining about power-tripping mods and "not being able to say anything anymore" have been banned for very good reasons (those reasons being straight-up hate speech most of the time).
They can do whatever they want with their platform, but I can also not like mods who make decisions I don't agree with.
I also don't think mods should be allowed to ban people just for being subscribed to other subs or having posted there. The whole idea that I co-sign everything the sub stands for just because I read it tells you all you need to know: they expect and often demand that you do in fact co-sign everything the sub stands for.
And that's the fundamental problem with reddit, really. It's not just the keyword squatting mods: it's that it's a giant social experiment that distills the worst of mob behavior and anonymity.
Fixing reddit requires some kind of check on the mods and the elimination or complete overhaul of the karma system.
You can employ paid moderators, I don't think it's a terrible idea from a quality of user experience perspective. It's an awful idea from a "We're desperately trying to get this fucking company to IPO".
Pretty much every other social site of note doesn't have a rep for moderation, on account of not having moderation at all. A solid 20% or higher of the YouTube comments I see are straight-up phishing scams, Facebook and Twitter are complete cesspits where only content that's literally illegal to post ever gets removed, and the less said about imageboards the better.
Wikipedia is the only even remotely comparably large site I can think of that actually has anything resembling moderation, and you'll find the exact same crowd criticising them for enforcing their rules as well.
I think you may be making a mistake....
Years ago I had to manage SMTP servers. Of course a huge part of that is dealing with spam. Users were mad about how much spam they got and asked if "I was even doing my job". In one particular users case, they did get a lot of spam, and it was a pain in the ass to deal with and they always had lots of complaints. So I showed them for ever 3 messages they received I blocked somewhere near 1000 messages to their address.
If you've never been on that side of the system you don't know what 'not having moderation at all' looks like, but I can tell you it looks far, far, far worse than YT psts.
In theory channel owners have the ability to handle that for YouTube specifically, but in practice the tools and incentives aren't there to make it actually happen.
Did you mean "more advertisement friendly"?
Like no shitting on a big mobile publishers, no criticism of Blizzard, or EA, or other big corp.
That’s why they use the volunteer mod model, and why they keep us at arm’s-length, and mandate that we cannot receive any compensation of any kind from anyone for moderating.
That said —
The mod code of conduct gives them avenues for removing mods that violate it; there’s also neutral admin-developed tools that identify users who are already active in helping the community out as potential moderator recruits.
So mods that close subreddits maliciously — with an intent to damage Reddit or to demand that they disburse money to a third party — could be removed from mod privileges, and replacements found.
Now, reddit may SAY that this is the case as an excuse, but it isn't the truth.