Reddit CEO slams protesters, calls them “landed gentry”
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
But I just genuinely can't understand how he thinks it makes sense to publicly disparage pretty much everyone who uses his site. There's no way he can make Reddit better if he's decided every single person who contributes content or curation to it is the enemy.
I guess he looked at Elon, and thought "man, I hate the people on my site as much as he does, and he's getting away with it." The difference is (and I'm no Elon fan), Elon has enough fans to power through. Nobody even knows who spez is.
Back in 2016, The_Donald members started posting "fuck u/spez" all over Reddit after he banned a Pizzagate subreddit. He went in and edited a bunch of their comments to say "fuck u/the_donald" instead, and there was a pretty big backlash.
Hey, I get it... it's gotta suck to have a bunch of people on your site hate you for the past 8 years. At some point it wears you down, and I bet that's what we're seeing now. I bet the things he's thought and said to his friends and coworkers for the past few years have been so normalized for him that he sees no problem saying them to the press.
But still, I don't think this is the way to respond.
All he needs to do is... not despise the people who his company is built on.
Trying to find the comment since I'm not the expert who was mentioning, but it's likely not that easy/why they haven't just done this already, not counting the extra cost.
Edit: Were you referring to this post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36320043
Basically because mods don't just remove, but they approve content, paying them as 1st parties gets you into risky "publisher" territory.
edit: YOU FOUND IT. thank you!! your search-fu is a long lock of hair and mine is but an eyelash
That comment is misinformation. Moderating your website, whether through volunteers or paid moderators, does not change your liability under Section 230.
Pro tip: if you ever see a comment about Section 230 using the terms "publisher"/"platform", there's a 99.9% chance it is wrong and repeating one of several common misconceptions.
> There may be situations in which a court decides that those protections do not apply to a given piece of content
Which is all someone needs to lose, is section 230 protections over 1 piece of content, to lose a defamation lawsuit about that piece of content - which is what the comment I was linked was discussing. Seems pretty apt to me?
All of the other conversations about moderation in that article apply to removing content. Reddit moderators often review and approve flagged and auto-removed content, making it available on the site by their actions; I believe the commenter I paraphrased was saying that that action crosses the line into content creation, which even your article says introduces liability for bad content.
That's a fair point about the publisher/platform thing - the original comment was talking about literal newspaper publishers as an analogue of a content creator under section 230. I just plucked the word publisher and ran with it thinking it was a meaningful term wrt the law!
Good read.
edit: Either way though that commenter said the law hasn't been decided by court case around this question yet so it's all hypothetical!
He's betting the mods don't represent how most users feel.
He’s not wrong. There’s something about giving community power to people with the free time and willingness to do that work for free.
Twitter was near bankrupt if my understanding is correct, and that would have led to some restructuring and/or firing anyway (Elon or not).
The moderators are volunteers who work for free. The landed gentry were rent seekers who sought to live entirely from that income. If anyone is the landed gentry here, it's Hoffman.
Maybe he should allow Reddit users to vote on retaining him as CEO seeing how important democracy is to him.
What an asshole.
> “What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,” he said. “We’ve got some old, legacy decisions on how communities are run that we need to kind of work our way out of.”
If we're voting on things, I vote to eliminate the ridiculous popup when you view a Reddit page on your mobile phone. Just give me m.reddit.com. Pretty sure that's not the kind of "democracy" that he's talking about though.
Especially given the leaked memo which downplayed the impact of the blackout. Maybe there is an impact.
The CEO is the landed gentry. The mods are the sharecroppers who have had enough.
Apart from being a terrible idea in general, has he seen the up-vote ratio of the blackout posts?
it's an attempt to try to threaten the mods and split off whatever user support they have
divide and rule
edit: he will find that he will have to pay people, though. If your mods are unpaid, you get mods that get off on power, or are paid from other sources.
like he did before
Just in case you needed another reason to stay away from Reddit.
musk, spez, zuck, bobby kotick
no, they're just idiots who were in the right place at the right time
(and maybe had good advisors, but apparently no longer)
And everyone still celebrates these assholes. Even as the scales fall from our eyes, they are still supported by their staff and employees, who continue to sell their lives to these narcissistic pieces of shit for a discount. The folks who do the real work should literally walk off the job and go start their own thing together, sharing the work and sharing the proceeds. Cut the rich assholes out of all of it.
we see how Musk and spez basically got into this egoistic (illusion of grandeur, psychotic) state over their own respective fiefdoms.
one more interesting data point about irrational decisions and power: Putin. he clawed his way into the dictatorship from a middling KGB officership. it seems his most competent skill is exactly that, scheming his way into bigger and bigger things/jobs, and of course he absolutely sucks as a leader.
all in all what I'm trying to say is that yes, even if some "basic competence" is needed initially, it's irrelevant in the long term
Err no that's not how it works.
This seems like both sides are going to dig their heals in so hard the rope will snap.
But they dont seem to understand the chances of a website that recently lost 99% of its traffic having a successful IPO.
Or even surviving another 12 months.
Reddit continues to attract drama, censorship, moderation, and now usability problems that cannot be resolved when the leadership (with user-hostile corporate interests) is damaged beyond repair.
It's not difficult to make a site that can add posts and comments. It's difficult to moderate users and moderators in a fair and appropriate manner that respects the interests of the individual and the community: the emotional labor of meta-moderators and UX technical effort of developers is crucial to make a site as civilized as reasonable while allowing enough freedom of expression balanced by reducing and diffusing conflict.
Too bad he hasn't.
Might not be be the best metaphor for him to be using. Historically, when the king gets in conflict with the landed gentry, well, very often the king suddenly finds himself a bit lacking in the head department.
Here's an example community:
Reddit moderators are almost all a cancer to that site. They do it for free and are threatened that their power tripping fiefdom tools are going awy. Ironically reddit even said most of those tools would hit the free tier anyway.
If spez had balls, he would run a script that opens all of the hidden subs, disable the ability to hide/delete subs, and show these jannies erm mods the door.
The site has become an absolute cancer with discussion being heavily dictated. I welcome a mass exodus of those "mods".