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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning.

The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

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The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry":

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

The mods in /r/anarchism are selected by voting.

That's amazing and wonderful. The only guys who use a vote are anarchists.

Makes sense, it's not that they don't follow rules/code it's just they do so randomly which breaks all rules

You should read up on anarchism. You're in for a huge surprise there.

Not really. It's usually twenty somethings that somehow think the world wouldn't devolve into chaos if there wasn't a structure to organise society and secure it.

That's as close to a correct description of anarchy as using North Korea to describe Communism. Or a republic for that matter.

Ah yes, because all these concrete implementations of anarchism are able to disprove my description. Classic dogmatism.

There's no need to devolve into Reddit commenting style. My comment is not defending any *ism and I won't reply with anything worthwhile when the tone is mudslinging.

I've read up on it and while the ideas are interesting, the wording is incorrect, you should not use a word that means exactly the opposite of what you intend. The moment you want to impose a system of any kind, you stopped being anti-system. But I guess that's the essence of anarchism, using confusing terminology to a degree reminiscent of doublespeak.

Anarchism is to its core, like, small committees voting on stuff all day. For some reason people think of Mad Max.

My understanding of the term "anarchism" changed drastically once I started reading sci-fi novels by the likes of Le Guin and Ken Macleod.

The Dispossessed is one of my favorite books of all time.

Anarchism is the absence of power structure. A comittee vote is a power structure.

>that is not democratic

Lol like he cares about democracy.

Out-of-touch CEOs and pretending to give a damn about democracy, where have we seen that one before: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-users-vote...

Charles

(You choose which one!)

> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

That is some hefty fucking projection from him.

It is funny and almost the same level of funny as CEOs saying WFH is not fair to people can't do WFH ( why won't you think of all the poor people, who are not laptop class you awful person )!

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

I can think of roughly 100,000 people that would be better suited to run reddit than spez.

    The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

Land is finite and subreddits are not. You can fork off and make your own subreddit whenever you like

If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.

This seems like a broken analogy.

Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.

Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.

Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones.

Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)

If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work.

(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)

If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.

For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.

Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.

Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.

This is the same website where the "marijuana enthusiast" sub is for people who like trees, right?

Sure, but it's a reddit joke, because r/trees is devoted to marijuana(which exists because of a protest against bad mods on r/marijuana).

Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.

r/videos gets more natural traffic because it's a default sub. Regardless, making a subreddit isn't some competition. You don't need to be bigger than the subreddit you're forking from.

Good names that pull traffic by themselves are what is finite. /r/startrek is much more valuable than /r/startrek1234 or any other forked variation.

Now that's a solid analogy.

He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.

If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.

Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.

Odds are exceedingly high that spez is doing the Board's bidding.

The Board is not your savior here.

The reason for spez to be out is less the decisions and more the execution and communication. He clearly sucks at PR.

But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.

CEO-as-ablative-shield.

Though usually that's a hired gun (e.g., Pao, Wong) rather than a somewhat-harder-to-replace returned founder.

In retrospect, I think Pao earned a bad and bum rap.

how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?

you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?

no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.

And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...

Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.

It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.

The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!

Shareholders need to accept that either:

the mods and community have power and control over operations

Mods get PAID

Really.... Volunteers have a reasonable expectation of influence on how their work is used.

The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.

This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?

In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.

If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.

There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.

Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?

And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.

You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.

But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.

That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.

Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff

> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.

Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.

Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.

I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.

>Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.

>They merely got there first, finders keepers.

That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.

> What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.

Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.

If the mods are the landed gentry, the regular users must be serfs, which would make spez some kind of untouchable god-emperor..?

Reddit (spez) created that "landed gentry"[1], and was more than happy with its existence until roughly two weeks ago. It is Reddit's policies, procedures, and practices which created a first-come, first serve, seniority-based moderator role. Not the volunteers who stepped up and assumed that role, uncompensated by Reddit.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.

There's a first time for everything. I agree with spez. That is a very on point description of Mods, and it needs to be fixed. Just because you came first to /r/news doesn't mean you should rule like a king on Reddit. It is too open for abuse and politics.

Your argument belies reality, where moderators even on the very large subreddits turn over all of the time.

The oldest moderator on r/news has only been in their position for slightly more than 3 years: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/about/moderators

No, it really doesn't. Both what I wrote and what you wrote can be correct. A moderator on a single big sub can, for example, turn it in a red or blue political direction no matter if s/he is a mod for a week or a year. As Reddit is a Corporation we will never see a democratic style mod selection, but in my opinion it is one of the big changes Reddit needs.

I'm glad u/spez cares so much about "democracy". For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.

> “and that is not democratic”

Whose fault is that?

Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.

I can't believe I'm reading this bullshit about democracy and "landed gentry" from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those "gentries" keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.

The king.

>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.

It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.

The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That's why HN looks like this.

A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.

Not the target market for a site who requires free writers with something to say

> A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.

That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?

If friendly UI attracts everyone but the other attracts specific type of people, then you will have different concentration of user types. It's a bit like casual games Vs games which are hard to master - completely different types of users.

The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist.

One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.

Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?

I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.

McDonalds is friendly, their workers all smile at you and wish you a happy day, may even give you three sauce packets for free. Their adverts are cheerful and positive, full of platitudes about how great everything is and how they contribute to your community... But can you honestly say McDonalds appeals to everybody?

Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.

I think 'friendly' is the wrong way to look at it.

I'd characterize it as "text-dense" vs "spacy and image/video oriented".

The second is more immediate, it takes less concentration, so it attracts more people and more information that's not very meaningful.

By keeping things text-only, you keep the information more meaningful.

It's also important to remember they didn't just 'build an app for phones'

They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.

Alienblue was the first app I bought. Then reddit bought it and latter canned it for the offical app. They kept changing it until it became the monstrosity we have today. On mobile, I browse reddit through old.reddit.com - anything else is an awful experience

To be fair, it's all consistent with Reddit's entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.

The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less?

I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.

The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.

The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.

Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.

What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.

Various sovereign wealth / fund manager types like the idea of a compliant userbase under their thumb. Taming the internet is the whole point.

That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.com

As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.

I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.

Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.

Remember when Facebook had a thriving app community? With that farming game and the Scrabble thing?

It's certainly a pattern.

That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving "You might like this" into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not /u/spez too?

> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

Its this. It starts at the top:

> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]

If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.

Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.

To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.

What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...

>Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need.

I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.

Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it's sticking around.

Mod tools isn't the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.

Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.

And the.. avatars with micro transactions and possibly some NFT nonsense

Yeah thank god the avatars are NFTs somehow.

Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.

With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels.

I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.

No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords).

The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.

Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.

> Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting

Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.

Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.

Uhh, not according to mods as of two days ago...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided.

Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.

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