Hacker News Reader

Comment by dannyphantom | Hacker News Reader

I suppose this will be a litmus test on how valuable long-established moderators are to the platform.

At the end of the day, they are volunteers who are now boarding themselves behind the property of their digital landlord so the risk of eviction isn't really all that surprising.

I've seen endless complaints from users who feel personally offended by being muted/banned from a community and a common response to their complaints is "if you don't like it, go to another site". If the moderators are not happy with the direction of the platform, they are free to vacate the property willingly or have an admin spend :30s removing them.

The relationship has always been unilateral in favor of the people who actually work there.

View on HN

The relationship is skewed in favor of the owners, seems like a more accurate description to me. The mods do do real work (absurdly, they just do it for free).

The community is the only worthwhile thing about reddit. Their IP is simply awful garbage that could be profitably replaced with their own old open source code and their leadership is full of the kind of folks who think they can hire a sex offender then silence community outrage.

The last thing they own is hardware not valuable enough to pay severance if a substantial portion of the community leaves.

Worse the folks they are threatening are the tiny minority that are most liable to walk away with that value.

The community is exactly why toxic mods should be removed.

Can you explain why you believe the mods are toxic? Reddit allowing autonomy created an entire army of unpaid mods in order to create communities that pay 100% of managements salaries despite current reddit management being basically bad at every aspect of their jobs. They absolutely can crush them if they want to but if they do they stand to crush those communities and end up owning the shell of what they wanted to control.

Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges. For a case study consider freenode and look how that turned out.

I think the median mod deserves almost zero credit for "creating" the communities that they oversee. The welfare of the mods and the communities are usually not tightly intertwined, and scenarios where the mods are committed to destroying these communities should serve as a counterexample to this idea.

>Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges.

The idea that Redditors had some sort of prior affection for moderators is laughable. At best this is just tribalism where a vocal minority of Redditors is so upset at spez that they're opportunistically creating a narrative of heroic moderators being oppressed by evil admins that's reminiscent of an inverted Ayn Rand story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com