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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

From Reddit's perspective overall this is a terrible idea, but from Huffman's perspective it's purely rational. If he has to walk this back it's probably not compatible with his continued tenure after all, the question of why this was done so hastily and rudely would inevitably undermine his leadership. If he just barrels ahead though, and prays that the addictions of mods and users are greater than their pride/desire to have a functional site, then he can possibly survive.

It's not as though there's a third choice, he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them, then expect that to not blow up in his face. He can't walk this back, and he's doubled down on libeling the dev of Apollo for example. "Stay the course and hope everyone just gets over it" is his best option, having already sunk into the quicksand.

IMO of course.

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> he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them, then expect that to not blow up in his face

I'm not so sure about that. I would be very surprised if there was a high % of redditors that know / care about the mods or mod system. This could be the cynic in me but I bet he could eject all the mods tomorrow, replace them with more faceless accounts, and the vast majority of reddit's userbase would not see a difference.

Those that have been around the site for a while would notice and feel the change and not be happy about it, but we're most likely talking about a very small single-digit % of the userbase.

I don't think the problem with ditching the existing mods for new ones has much to do with how users would perceive the shift. You have to ask how the hell Reddit would vet that number of replacements in any way, how they'd find the required number of able replacements, and not just people who would (through incompetence or malice) run things into the ground. That's doubly true for the mega-subs which genuinely require a LOT of constant moderation, specialized automated tools, and so on.

That doesn't seem like a feasible path to me, and I think if it was remotely possible it would have already happened. The only way it COULD work is to get rid of the volunteer mod system and replace it with paid mods... and I don't think Reddit has the funds for that.

You're correct if you hold the assumption that they actually care about the quality of the content.

I definitely don't think it's a good idea for Reddit to do that as it will eventually create a substandard product. However, I do think if the goal is "profits at all costs" and an IPO in the near future (which is what it clearly appears to be), replacing a large number of mods with literally anybody is a possible path forward.

Again, it's a horrible idea and I think it would cause irreparable harm to the platform down the line.

I don't think the users mostly care about the mods directly. They will care about the effects of not having motivated, committed mods, because it makes the subreddits less pleasant or compelling to use. That is, there wouldn't be user protests, just lots of users drifting away because reddit kind of sucked.

I agree, it would be a bad idea. But I also think it would take time for the average user to feel the negative effects of such a short-sighted decision. Enough time, perhaps, for an IPO and cash-out for the c-suite at reddit.

Users will definitely notice when their favorite subreddits suddenly go to crap under the tenure of the new puppet-mods.

The one login for multiple forums as nice but I wouIdn't mind it if they fold. But not HN. Today, I can just spin up a dedicated forum browser and save all the username-password there in isolation.

> he can't realistically get rid of the mods and replace them

Out of hundreds of millions of users, finding new mods does not seem that difficult. There are a lot of power-hungry users and people looking to leverage moderating for political or financial advantage.

There would be backlash, but I don't know what it would take for the real mass-exodus of Reddit. Lemmy/Tildes aren't showing massive numbers of new users that would make a real exodus (Lemmy has gone from 1k users to 18k, but that's far from 500M on Reddit).

* Source on Lemmy numbers https://the-federation.info/platform/73

This decision comes from the board of directors, not Huffman. Huffman's job here is to be the whipping boy for their decisions.

Huffman isn't going to walk it back or he'd have done so during the Q+A. Like nobody doubts that mods are willing to take subs private, the move was telegraphed well in advance. Spez doesn't care, he's not going to back down on this change, that was the message from the Q+A last week and actually pushing the button doesn't change the status quo from last week.

They're gonna wait the 48 hours, lever open any major subs that stay closed, and move on with life. If mods leave en-masse there are "abandoned communities" procedures for new mods taking over or being inserted. There will always be someone willing to take on the work for the modicum of status and power it gives you. Some of those will be bad, and life will move on.

Don't mistake "terrible for the communities that have been built" with "terrible for reddit as a business", and yes you're probably also right that there is also "terrible for spez the person" in play here as well (there always is). Even if they lose 25% or 30% of the users turning it into Reddit-Shaped Tiktok, that may be more profitable for Reddit The Business than operating as a community platform. Because advertisers are, on the whole, willing to pay more than the average user, that's always been the thing about Facebook and Google and every other platform. Nobody's really paying for a Kagi subscription, in the grand scheme of things, that's a lot smaller revenue than Google selling Adwords and offering a free search service on the back of it.

But users have an emotional attachment to their posts and their community, and see it (rightly) as something they've built collectively and is being taken away from them. But that's not necessarily where the interests of Reddit The Business lay. Reddit-Shaped Tiktok probably is more profitable.

At the end of the day this is their platform, Spez is YCombinator and they're gonna chase the YC payday. You don't have to like it, but after the symbolic protest they are gonna clear the place out and get back to it.

If you want to build sustainable communities hosted by people who aren't chasing a payday, use Mastodon and Lemmy and Matrix, and not a Ycombinator platform or Facebook or other centralized service. Otherwise we're back here in another 2 years crying about how great Imgur Communities (idk) were before they cranked rates.

It is, of course, an ironic sentiment for YC, home of the “10,000x ROI or go home” mindset. Hypercapitalism is great up until it affects you personally, right? Very “bioshock”.

Tiktok bans leave a market gap for TikTok-Shaped Reddit and everybody in the industry wants to be the one to fill that gap. Spez is pivoting to profitability and 1000x revenue in classic YC style and people act like he’s grown a second head.

Fediverse is too disjointed, I want one place to go for all the seedy "ask reddit" stuff, or for "history", etc. Single-topic silos is a big feature that you can't get in the fediverse when there could be askhistory on multiple instances, etc, and when the whole community is going to different servers to access lemmy, etc..

A centralized reddit that is a co-op / wikipedia like org, would be better. It could still be profitable, it could still run ads even, but it doesn't have to take VC funding, or sell it's soul.

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