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Comment by 0xParlay | Hacker News Reader

Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.

All but new users are aware that subs are governed by mods. Installing a corporate-approved mod panel because a community isn't acting in Reddit Inc's financial best interest is to light the whole product on fire.

What's the point of starting a new sub if it'll be repurposed as reddit sees fit? What's the point of joining a sub and contributing if upon gaining popularity - it'll be taken away and controlled by "the adults".

Imagine starting a discord group for your buddies and then corporate decides the group should be controlled by some outsider. At least perform a sham referendum to maintain a facade of authenticity. "Do you want to remove the evil stinky mods with fun cool ones? Vote now!"

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> When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.

People don’t choose subreddits because of mods, they only leave subreddits because of mods. One of Reddit’s larger problem’s really is that some subreddits have better names than others, and the moderators have to be extremely bad for users to get mad enough to migrate to a new community with new mods and a worse name. Or Reddit has to replace the mods (seldom happens).

It’s not at all the case that the most popular communities correspond the best mods. Reddit also not only doesn’t want to provide their own mods, they can’t, it’s not even close to fiscally feasible. They will more likely appoint new community mods or remove some of the mods and let the remaining mods continue to moderate. This will likely lead to a general decline in the quality of moderation, especially in the short term, and especially in terms of neglect as it might surprise people how many subreddits have NO additional volunteers to do actual mod work.

Put another way, who knows who the mods are? People who have a problem to deal with.

I take your point, but to a large extent the value of the subreddit is in the name since it makes it easy for people to organically find the right space for the content they want. Domain names are the same. For example, for content local to New York City, going to /r/nyc was my first guess.

/r/UncleBens can claim to have developed their own thing, but not the obvious ones like /r/Apple, etc.

Seems like survivorship bias considering you wouldn't be familiar with well-named poorly moderated subs that never took off.

But also you searched /r/nyc instead of TheNewYorker.com because what you're after is community curated content instead of the views and opinions of Condé Nast and their vast network of quality publications that are already available for subscription.

Following /r/nyc and /r/newyorkcity during the mayoral elections was what made reddit useful. You could see how moderation could create an echo chamber and distort a users perception of reality. Having reddit install "community leaders" is a hilariously bad idea.

So long and thanks for the fish! Looking forward to see what replaces Reddit.

>Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.

How can this "tacit approval" be applied to mods but not the admin policies that constrain the mods? I participate on plenty of subreddits where the mods are clearly despicable; however, there are simply no viable alternatives in terms of the actual community content.

I'm super angry of all the mods who are taking the subs prisoner. If you don't like to pay reddit back, then let us use it. I'm a premium user and I pay reddit because I like the content, freemium users pay back watching ads, I was a freemium user of other platforms for decades. Why is letting them charge so bad?

>why is letting them charge so bad

In this case, the specific concerns were benefiting from third party developers for well over a decade to grow their business, and giving them a month of race before rolling up the carpet. The devs were working on code they thought they might have years to earn money back on, who sort of got screwed.

It was also the whole “poor us, we can’t make a dime, we need this money” routine Reddit was jawing on about when if they lowered that API pricing down to the point that the pricing was affordable for consumers, or locked it to Reddit Premium users, to me there seems a clear path to profitability or at least sustainability. Again even if they ultimately priced things high enough to slowly strangle these apps, I wouldn’t care as much.

It’s that Reddit fucking lied to everybody’s faces to push false public narratives to bolster its PR.

No doubt the admins, the freemium users, the paid users, the third party devs, and the moderators all contributed to what Reddit is today. However if the moderators don’t punish a decision by the admins thru gutting the profitability of this scheme they just pulled thru disobedience, in future conflicts the admins will be more empowered, and fuck everybody harder. So people collectively behave in this way in solidarity almost by intuition, at least for awhile.

How much are you paying the mods for the work they do?

> Why is letting them charge so bad?

No one - not one person I could find - said that Reddit charging was bad.

You are "super angry" about a belief of yours that is completely false. Not a good look.

Reddit mods are often terrible and exploit their position of power.

A sub's popularity is invariably because it covers a topic that is popular outside of reddit and through whatever reason (often fortuitous or unrelated to current mod behaviour) that incarnation of it got the most users which lead to monopolisations.

They understand, the issue is that in the long term, this is unlikely to harm the quality. Eventually, everyone will get used to the new world order. If reddit really hurts from the loss of "talent", it won't take too long to replace them.

> When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.

I disagree, I see tons of people blaming admins for moderation actions and vice-versa.

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