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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

The thing that will surprise me most is if the mods - who spends tens of hours a week working for free just for their status symbol, will actually remove their accounts and/or shut down subreddits for good, instead of 1 or 2 days

Reddit moderation is not a democracy, there is a very small group of people who control a large number of the 1 million+ subscriber subreddits. They work so hard just for the respect/props, maybe they figured out a way to make money off it buy promoting corporate posts, who knows

If that happens, it really will be a re-creation of Digg, where the power users ending up killing the website by manipulating it

Without subreddits in their full control, what else do they have?

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What I don't understand is why people think Reddit will let them just shut down subs permanently. They'll just remove the mods and bring the sub back forcefully if they have to, ride the wave of negativity and everyone will forget.

I agree, but I see two possibilities:

* New mods cause controversy. Users are going to be on edge and riot about any small thing. Quality deteriorates.

* volunteer mods realize they don’t actually have any power. People loose interest in propping up Reddit. Mods become paid positions.

This only works if they find replacement mods ready to set up all the moderation infrastructure again. Mods use a huge amount of 3rd party tooling to automate a lot of the work. If the tooling is turned off or even if the most basic automod configs are deleted when subreddit goes private, then most subs would be overwhelmed by bots and spam within hours if not minutes. That or they'd have to pay people to be moderators and I can't imagine increasing headcount is something they want to do pre IPO.

I am a mod of r/portland. We use a 3rd party chat app and other web applications.

We also have custom tuned automod and other software to help out. A lot of the need for these services is because Reddit has failed to provide necessary tools in a timely way forever.

For example, our sub has been under brigade since the national news began focusing on it this past administration. The company did nothing for us, not even words of support.

The company has spurned volunteer mods long enough they have got whatever’s coming to them. It isn’t just an API people are upset about.

Anyway, the software tools for collaboration matter in moderation, but even more so it is a huge amount of work to keep a sub from going off the rails.

I’ve seen comments of people thinking it’s mostly power stuff and there are elements of that at play. But it doesn’t work day to day. Big subs that aren’t moderated constantly fall on hard times.

> sub has been brigaded

> past administration

lol. One trip to Portland is enough to see how disconnected the sub's mods are from the reality.

Reddit didn't provide these tools, so clearly they're not concerned with whether good moderation tools exist. The lack of them will not prevent them from restoring the subreddits.

Subreddit quality doesn't matter. Most of the popular subreddits are already horrible.

What I don't understand is why any of you think that any of this shit matters.

At all.

What is a couple of days of a few subs shutting down going to matter in the grand scheme of things? This is why unions aren't run by hobbyists.

Unless the Reddit admins change their tune, I seriously doubt this will be a few days. It’s entirely plausible that the site implodes over the course of a few weeks.

Besides the political fallout, this API change will fundamentally cripple most of the tools hacked together to moderate the most popular subs.

Without the means to operate at scale (including many valuable bots), the volunteer mods who choose to stay will probably slowly drown under the sheer scale.

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