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Comment by Raidion | Hacker News Reader

What's the next play for Reddit leadership? I feel like it's just a "wait and hope it all blows over?". If they don't change, are all of these subreddits going to stay dark? If the subreddits do stay dark, how long will it take before someone creates a replacement that gains enough traction?

I'm participating in the Reddit blackout (as a 15y user), and I love to see the collective action, but not sure if it's really going to bring about long term change. Egos are clearly involved here, so I think Reddit's future hinges on spez's personal ability for change and growth. I'm not optimistic.

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Only some of the subreddits are going to stay dark unfortunately. The mods are worried that if they stay private too soon, scab redditors will make their own subreddits and take their niche's users.

Once third-party tools are gone those huge subreddits will degrade quickly. Moderating a busy subreddit becomes very cumbersome using the native tools, so even if they don't go dark we will see a dramatic decrease in browsing quality as spam fills up the queue.

Probably for the best. So many reddit users are overly pejorative to moderators because of bad experiences. Let the current moderators get replaced and maybe people will appreciate the previous experience.

Maybe then, reddit will get off its ass and build proper tooling for moderators.

why wouldn't reddit remove all the mods and open the subs?

they still might.

Well they could, but who is going to moderate then?

Scab moderators? Reddit is built on monetizing the efforts of volunteers already, so presumably they figure they can just get more volunteers whenever.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a community-organized effort to crapflood the subs and make the scabs' lives a living hell.

Furthermore, the people most pissed off at Reddit aren't just the moderators, it's also a lot of the power users who post the vast majority of the content. So Reddit would have to hire a bunch of scab "power users" to post content. And a lot of subreddits are based on original content, not news links, so real power users won't be so easy to replace.

ChatGPT to the rescue.

I think the feeling at Reddit HQ is that as long as there isn't someplace else for the users to go they will be alright. I mean where else are you going to get a Reddit like experience? Digg? Tumblr? Livejournal? Slashdot? Twitter? Usenet?!? Nothing really compares to Reddit. Personally, I wouldn't feel too confident. I saw how fast Digg and Tumblr collapsed. Even if you don't know the name of the next big thing, it is probably out there already.

as the mods of Ask Historians have explained, and I have seen in the subreddits that I visits. Finding unpaid labor is much harder then finding paid labor, and many companies can not find paid labor right now....

Most of the subreddits were already having moderator staffing issues and were very much understaffed with no one wanting to do it...

Couple that with the shit show moderating the site will be with only official tools and I think this idea that the admins can just boot all the mods and snap their fingers with all news mods is a bit fantastical

As long as the IPO investors don't know that it is all good.

There’s been very poorly detailed/researched press coverage even in tech circles about this.

I do worry about the quality of credible press coverage around this. The issues are much deeper than charging for the API. Many prudent points are missed even in the “I was there when it happened” explainers.

And who will moderate them?

"hey what if we replaced all our mods with AI, that's pretty hot right now, that might look real good on our IPO"

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