> Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power.
Who do you think the existing mods are?
Who do you think the existing mods are?
I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread.
(We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.)
Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.
No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good.
Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.
I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.
I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO.
My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.
I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space.
In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine.
That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it.
So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!"
For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago.
In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place.
If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.
I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.
Yeah, shadowbans suck.
On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.
It’s a difficult situation.
Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.
How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.
That’s pretty much what Reddit is like already. If you dislike the mods of one subreddit you can join another competing subreddit, or start your own.
Likewise, with Lemmy if the people on one instance are bad, leave the instance and join another or run an instance of your own.
It’s not a difficult situation, you are being willfully ignorant.
Another constant criticism of fediverse sites I'm seeing here is equally weird, this idea that responsibility for finding the right instance is given - not forced upon, but gifted to - the user, and that is a problem.
It's a feature, it's the feature that makes the system invulnerable to the sort of enshittification that this forum's parent organization specializes in. therefore, in the minds of quite a lot of people here, it's a bug, and frankly, of course VC heads would think that way; never mind the petty dictatorship of the moderator, if there is no market capturing endgame where you can either cash out or seize a community and abuse it as your personal platform (Hi, Elon), that definitely is a bug, I suppose.
My thinking is that having a slight learning curve barrier to entry, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having a zero effort onboarding process, maybe THAT is the bug. Because who does an easy onboarding process serve, if not the VChead who wants to capture as many eyeballs as possible and turn them into income? It certainly doesn't seem to help the mods who have to deal with people who can very easily create a new account once banned.
And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.
(edit: thinking about it, though, I had nothing good to say about r/Winnipeg in the days after the shadowban, and I did speak about it in other places as a factual thing that I could demonstrate to be true. As such, their action along with my reaction was ultimately corrosive to the legitimacy of the subreddit. But at this point we've moved on to discussing the legitimacy of the whole site, and in my mind, it lost its legitimacy when it enabled shadowbans...)
But, I can see why reddit moderators have to resort to it: they do not have the ability to ban IPs, and Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs or IP blocks, because that runs contrary to their primary purpose, to capture and monetize eyeballs.
Compare to an operator of an individual Instance: of a sub is having issues with a persistent individual troll, they can appeal to the sysop (I just decided I'm calling them sysops and I don't give a shit what anyone else does) and have that individual's IP banned. If other instances allow him to return through them, well, we have defederation for instances that don't keep their houses clean.
Moreover, the sysop has zero motivation to build up as many users as possible, and that is going to do more than anything else to ensure that the only instances which tolerate trolls are going to be the ones setup specifically for that purpose, and that problem is already more or less sorted [edit: on the fediverse, anyways...].
Bottom line, the problem you're describing arises from the attempt to make content moderation compatible with scale, and that's just never gonna work, and without scale, you have no capitalism.
If the user doesn't post, then shadow banning is much harder to detect. I regularly see comments from users who were shadow-banned by Reddit; it can take months for them to figure it out. We use shadow-banning only on spammers and trolls. Our process requires peer approval and evidence; there's also an audit trail. We used to ban these accounts, but shadow-banning them instead substantially reduced the amount of harassment we receive. Conflict is inevitable when moderating a subreddit, and we'd rather spend our effort on users who participate in good faith.
I outlined in a different conversation in this thread that I can see why you have to resort to this: Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs, and I assume you are likewise not empowered to.
Reddit needs as many eyeballs as they can get, and that is why if you simply ban an account they are able to create a new one; the problem for you, the cog, is unfortunate, but from their perspective they get a new user on their balance sheet every time.
Reddit is incentivized to make your task a struggle that never ends. So it's not that I judge you for it, I judge Reddit's conflict of interest and complete unsuitability as a public square.
That said, I still see what you do as fundamentally cowardly.
Edit: It is intended to be a process with no appeal as a feature. Would you sign up to have your relationship with a community forum severed, secretly and capriciously, and with no appeal or review intended to be possible, at the whim of someone you have never met? And even if you had an attack of integrity, it will never not be a Reddit feature for the reasons outlined above, so your only course of action would not be to stop shadowbanning, but rather, to simply leave the forum for a better one. If Reddit survives as a place where Geographical locations keep their community forums, that will be a horrible fate for us.
I think they can be justified under select circumstances.
For instance, I think a shadowban is justified for accounts that exist merely to post spam or purposely derail every thread, and obviously aren't being used by a reasonable person. If an account represents a long-term existential threat to the quality of the community, then almost any legal means are justified to take action against it. Whether it's a bot or a human who just wants to watch the community burn, let them shout into the ether.
On the other hand, shadowbans against people who accidentally break the rules a couple times, or call someone a doodiehead, or have the wrong politics, or are subscribed to the wrong communities, are largely unethical. It's a form of disembodiment being imposed on an individual who has a reason for wanting to communicate with others, even if their communication is considered disagreeable.
Sadly, the latter is far more common on Reddit.
Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.
This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me".
If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.
I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil.
Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period.
That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.
It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after.
Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.
But I wouldn't say that's the case for the majority of comments on complex, charged, and/or politicized issues. Most of us are morons about most things; and most of the time we don't even know it.
And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.
This issue is very clear - Huffman is 100% in the wrong. He's been caught lying about some very serious issues, like utterly falsely claiming blackmail - and then doubled and tripled down it. He has made his character known over the years, un-personing Swartz, editing users comments for giggles, letting bots and advertisers swarm the site, etc.
Most mods AND communities on Reddit are against these changes, strongly, and have made that abundantly clear.
Afaik that is just one and the community helps out as well.
Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:
- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.
- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.
- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.
- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.
- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.
- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.
- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.
I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.
Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.
I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.
So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.
I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).
The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.
Huffman is and always has been an absolute tool; in fact he's a big factor for much of what you're talking about.
And this is an awful policy, that make giant steps toward a level of enshittification that I won't tolerate.
It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".
The people invested in the community (or their vision of the community) enough to do that job for free, and do it well enough the community accepts it. I.e. people either not from the group I mentioned, or the least bad cases from it.
Right now (or at least before the blackout), you were looking at subreddits in a steady state. Some had excellent moderation, others less so. Users moved around according to their tastes, and as things settled, every subreddit ended having its own kind of flavor and quality level.
With the existing moderators leaving in protest and with Reddit shaking things up, everything is in flux again. It will take time for the worst, power/status-seeking mods to eventually get bored and drop out (thankfully Reddit isn't actually paying the mods, thus giving the bad ones little reason to stay), possibly destroying whatever subreddits they took over in the process.
People are always stepping up to be mods. Most shouldn't be.
The existing mods of successful subreddits are the ones who stepped up, should have been mods, and who demonstrated it by creating a successful community. If you replace those by random wannabe mods, on average the result will be bad.
And in many cases the results will be catastrophic. In other cases the people stepping up will have no idea what it actually means to moderate the subreddits of the larger sizes, and will subsequently fail.
Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.
Mods should be servant to their community; and not use them for whatever purpose they see fit. It's a thankless, ungrateful job. But here is the trick: no one is forcing you to take it. If you think Reddit changes are the straw that broke the camel's back, and that it's not worth it anymore you do have an option: step down.
But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.
I'm not a mod. I used RiF. Same goes for many Apollo users and others.
The attempts to set forth the narrative by reddit are very basic but it remains to be seen if effective.
honestly this is reminiscent of a certain group of people unhappy with the results of how The People voted in a certain election, and consequently complained that said results were illegitimate and should be overturned and the people they disagree with should be removed from power
If the participation rate in the US election was 3.5% because they announced it 3 days prior to the vote and only to a fraction of citizens, there would be good reason to be mad at the results
if you ask me, all those nonvoters would have voted to close down the subreddit. I'd guess you think differently, but since they didn't vote, we'll never know, and they don't count for either.
as a side note, if the result had been the opposite, would the same people be similarly rallying to have the vote overturned and flipped to "blackout" due to the low "turnout"? I doubt it.
Yet I'm not hearing Reddit talk about hiring professional moderators
>Mods should be servant to their community
Why? They're not working for a charity. If Reddit expects free servants, there's regulations on things like internships, which Reddit doesn't appear to be remotely in compliance with. Servants generally get paid when working at for-profit companies or are otherwise subject to specific labor laws for things like internships. How many IPO shares are Reddit's servants getting?
>But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.
Yet there is a long history of labor strikes. Reddit could find itself facing a class action lawsuit by ex-moderators over unpaid wages. The more Reddit gets itself involved in managing free labor, the more it exposes itself to liability.