Reddit plans to ask users to vote out protesting mods
techradar.com
techradar.com
The goal that reddit is trying to accomplish is to reopen the closed subreddits. I think that this MIGHT accomplish that. What I think it may also accomplish is kicking mods who have been committed to their communities for years. Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.
Especially for large communities, signing up for a moderator position without the API-supported mod tools just makes me think you're going to get inept moderators. Nobody who knows how to effectively moderate would take that job. It would be like signing up to build a house with only a screwdriver.
Yeah that's why HN is good. Not the case with reddit mods
The currency of good moderation is respect, and if you tell a mod you don't need them, there's a high chance of them calling your bluff
It very much depends on the sub. There are some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks who do it for all the wrong reasons. Their replacements could well be better.
Obviously many will be worse also, but I think reddit admins will do at least some level of vetting before assigning new mods.
I've seen this complaint, but never the reality. I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two. Some subs have strict rules, but I've never thought they were fascistically strict, just that those mods were deliberately cultivating an alternative to another subreddit (usually from the "posts only" alternative to a larger sub that allows image posts, like r/games vs r/gaming).
The heavy-handed moderation isn't typically visible, which is intentional. You'd be surprised how many comments and submissions are silently removed, or how many users are explicitly or "shadow" banned (by automod, not site-wide) for simply posting in a subreddit one of the mods disagrees with. A lot of mods used things like MassTagger to bulk-remove "toxic" users.
Someone in /r/subredditcancer created a transparent mod log project, but they were driven off the site by mods and admins.
Well, it happens, more often than you might realize.
It happens enough that there are entire subs devoted to complaining about it, but not so often most of reddit is unusable or affected.
A lot of these examples are suspiciously lacking in precision. Exactly what kinds of things are you disagreeing with mods about that got you in trouble? Posting in exactly which subreddits got you banned from others?
I disagreed with a mod in a city subreddit about the best cinema, and was banned for doing so. Didn't insult them, just a difference of opinion. Just for example. This is a pretty common thing which is why there are entire subs dedicated to documenting the behavior.
And there is the crux of the issue.
Reddit leadership cares about looking good for the IPO. That is it. Whoever is left holding the bag after that isn't their problem.
Reddit has no credibility left.
From their roots they used sockpuppets to make the site seem like it had more users than it did.
They were caught manually editing comments in the live production database.
They got caught telling lies about the Apollo developer.
That entire interview from yesterday was full of all the same lies Reddit has been telling everyone from the start.
I've dipped my toes in federated networks, and am now jumping in 100%.
My experience has been surprising. I expected more civility, but I also feel within myself an obligation to be a good netizen- a feeling I haven't had in a long time. (Being more active on HN has fostered some of this feeling, btw.) I know this is a good path to be on.
I loved the best moments of being on Reddit, but I hated the worst parts- they felt like an added burden and I carried it around at least the rest of the day, if not the whole week. No platform is worth that kind of grief.
I feel like I rewriting some pathways here. My mind is more clear, and I feel more confident in the real world. As each day goes by, I recognize more of the toxicity I experienced and the itch to dive back in is receding rapidly.
I'm glad. I know now I won't go back. They can have my ten years of comments and train AI on it, if that's what indeed happens, and make all the money they're hoping to make. I'll gladly calve off that part of me to be free and clear.
It was really strange going back because I realized how much I hated it and how much Reddit aggravates me. It seems to make me angry all the time. I mostly participate in smaller subs, like my local city one, but the experience of it has gone sharply downhill this year because of new rules that the moderators added.
My time off also gave me a greater appreciation for this site and the lack of notifications. On my days of heavy Reddit usage and my notifications going off I accomplished absolutely nothing except arguing with people and I realize that's all I do on the site. Even disabling inbox notifications wasn't enough because it was so friction-free to get to comments and check the context. It's much easier here to ignore comment replies and not get into arguments with everyone. I think it's because you don't get notifications, there's a couple of clicks to see your comments, sometimes you can't even reply in the thread of a story without going to the comment directly, and sometimes you can't reply from your comments page.
I think that's a great thing to. It gives you just enough friction to think "Is this comment really worth it?" and not reply. Or you forgot about the comment until 2 days later and it's not worth replying back because that person won't get a notification and is unlikely to check their slapfights from 2 days ago.
It made me realize I really appreciated the slow pace of forums back in the day and that little bit of friction. It's effective in stopping a lot of snap replies the instant I read a comment. Even deleting my Reddit app helps a ton because I can't stand the mobile site on new or old and trying to type a comment on the site is a huge pain especially if it's longer or needs formatting.
edit for a joke: on Reddit I'd fear and expect a clapback like
> I think that's a great thing to.
If you don't know the difference between two, to, and too how can you possibly understand how to <insert basic task>?
That doesn't exist here. It's pretty likely I'm going to get a reply back that's a well reasoned and mostly airtight argument. It's probably going to contain something I will have to fully read and think about. When your substantive comment is met with an equally substantive comment it's more likely for me to think "am I the one who's wrong here?" and actually consider that. When I read a flippant clapback the answer is "no, it's the kids who are wrong".
Sell all the subreddits to Elon Musk. I heard he likes to buy social media platforms.
What's OpenAI going to do, raise prices for the API?
/jk
17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. Sure there are powerusers and casuals, lurkers who never comment etc. but to say that it's a "community decision" is far from truth when you can't even make 1% to vote
I mean I live in a country where voting is compulsory and there is nothing wrong with that. Better than the 1% deciding (and a lot of countries have a threshold to make votes valid)
Anecdotally, I have 3 accounts subscribed to that sub and I've made just one comment there in the last 3 months. I open the actual sub maybe once a week and that is generally through Relay, a third party app.
There are likely millions of subscribers who have not visited that sub in the last year.
No, because everyone of those 5 million had the option to participate. They choose not to, likely because the did not know/care enough.
So the active users decided - and they are the ones making the community alive. Communities are made up of living, active beings - not lurkers. And even they had the same vote.
(Nothing against lurking, I never participated in reddit communities, but got enough information there)
https://subredditstats.com/r/minecraft
2k comments per day suggests an engagement-DAU of less than 2k. Suggesting the 17k might at least be more than those that actively comment. (Though it would be cool to see votes/day as a metric.)
If we’re going by this idea that “only power users vote” it’s similarly hard for me to imagine a casual viewer reading the details of some Reddit-proposed poll and not just exclaiming “reddits broken” and bouncing.
Condé Naste is a minority investor in Reddit. They have one Board member, as many as Y Combinator.
No, it doesn’t. It owns stock in Reddit. After multiple rounds it has influence—it still has a Board member— but it’s far from that of an owner.
Hitting Condé Naste makes sense. But it should be part of a broader campaign to pressure the Board. That means J.D. Power (David Habiger), Joy (Porter Gale) and Y Combinator (Mike Seibel). It might cause someone to notice were, say, an entire subreddit to call their investor relations lines… (Joy is privately backed by Avalon Ventures. Their LPs include Calpers, Harvard, Michigan State, Rutgers, Washington State and the State of Wisconsin.)
Not sure where you're getting your information. This is incorrect.
Private company shareholders, particularly when they collectively own a majority of the company, have significant rights. In Reddit's case, these are shareholders with preferred shares, Board seats and votes.
> AP could defund and dissolve the board
If you sell a company to someone else, you don't get to dissolve its Board because you once controlled it.
> where their money is made (CN)
Again, Condé Naste's entire leverage is their one Board vote. Nothing more. Reddit is a Delaware corporation with a publicly-filed COI.
This was really the only viable vector for redditors who care about the changes.
It also lets them optimize the shared infrastructure. The content in Wired and Vogue isn't all that similar, but the basic printing of magazines doesn't change enormously depending on what's printed on the pages. And I can't find anything specific, but I'd be surprised if Wired and Vogue didn't go to print at different times of the month.
Basically they're a major media company across the board, so a stake in Reddit doesn't really seem out of place.
Why don't you take the initiative?
There are a few large subs with moderators that are basically in Reddit’s pocket. This has the potential of those mods getting voted out and Reddit either losing control of those subs or ignoring the results and angering users even more.
If they are in Reddit's pocket, why are they protesting?
This seems like a really communist take, but it seems to me that if a site derives essentially all of its value from UGC and the work of moderators, it would be much more fair, if valuable contributors and mods had a significant ownership stake in the site. Perhaps a site will someday emerge with that model. Obviously, such a site would also need to actually BE at least mildly-profitable of course for that to make sense, which is not a trivial achievement.
-reddit's CEO
The reason they want to kill third party apps, goad you onto their app from the web on mobile, and will probably kill old.reddit is because they want to gather as much telemetry as possible to optimize for engagement.
That means doing things like watching the exact patterns of your fingers on the screen as you scroll, measuring exactly how long you pause on things, etc. to get as much data as possible to tune that dopamine loop.
They want to be more like TikTok.
It means they are following the rest of the industry away from actually social social media and toward modern addictionware where any content you create is mere filler to drive the dopamine loop. There’s no actual community, just random content cut and shuffled and remixed to keep users scrolling.
This kind of media is social like cigarettes are a breathing apparatus.
This is why they really don’t care about the mods or the community that much. They don’t need them for this model. They don’t need the long form posting either. What they really want are the memes, videos, short form snarky posts, and of course the influencers.
Influencers won’t leave because they love platforms like this. An influencer is not a member of your community. They are the obnoxious asshole you would not invite to the next party in real life because they’re a creep and seemed to be trying to sell something.
Having quit Facebook and quit smoking in my life, I can say with 100% certainty that quitting social media is a lot easier.
I do not believe that anybody who keeps having a smartphone can really quit a social media. It is just impossible that the only beeps it does is from GSM/CDMA activity (calls and sms) and there is no even one Telegram group who use to send you some news. I used to mute all Telegram notifications and delete all Telegram groups and what happened is that some coolhackers used to add their spam groups (very similar to real group I was involved in) into my group list and everytime my smartphone has a connection to Telegram servers it just filled itself with some groups. Only abandoning smartphone with really clear signal to every single friend of mine that the only way to access me is phone for sound and email for text - did the job.
I also quit smoking and that was way easier for me that quit using smartphone. At least nobody argues that I must to return to smoking.
I just quit Facebook, not all social media. On my phone, I have three Telegram groups (one tracks the war, the other is my family, the other is my extended family), a Twitter account I look at every 3-4 days (and that may go away because Twitter just isn't interesting other than a few friends telling jokes), LinkedIn because my company sells software to recruiters and HR (and that's where they all are), and SMS. I run with notifications only on for emails for business from customers and employees, SMS and telegram from family.
The thing about reddit mods... they're power hungry.
I don't get the feeling that many have any self-worth outside outside of being reddit mods.
A job that pays nothing... and takes up your entire life... you kind of have to do it because you love it, or because you think it's important, or because you love the way it makes you feel.
I've seen mods take posts down they disagreed with, I've seen mods ban people on a whim, and I've even seen mods ask for money to un-ban people.
What I haven't seen mods do? Consistently behave like well-balanced adults.
Anyway the threats seem to be working, most of Reddit seems to be back online now.
So I guess Hoffman wins, and gets to lie about 3rd party devs, and nothing really happened. Hooray... the system works! =P
Except it really opened my eyes about how horrible a place Reddit is. I don't know, like I had a few communities I liked, but ever time I ventured out of one of those I seemed to find filth covered filth.
If we're training AI on how people behave on Reddit... I think we're fucked. Get ready for ChatGPT-5, now with 50% more dishonorable, deceitful, and anti-social tendencies!
But people who agree with the mod and the protest are less likely to log into Reddit at all, and thus they might not vote.
So the expected turn-out for the two opinions is going to be quite different; in favor of Reddit.
If you were to poll the millions of subscribers or casual browsers of big subreddits, I doubt the majority would vote in favor of the blackout.
At the same time, good dedicated moderators are very important.
But the moderators are operating with a "democratic deficit", no need to try to sweep that under the rug, so we need to be careful not to conflate their position with the majority of users position.
You can debate who should "own" a subreddit, the moderators or Reddit, but it's not the users either way.
Given the pressure from revenue objectives, it will be hard for Reddit to identify and prioritize the right safeguards. Failure here would lead to a more homogenous Reddit.
I'm happy to make this bold prediction: they're never going to have democratic voting for subreddits. Huffman is only using words like "democratic" because he wants to break the strike. If this all settles down again those head mods (whoever they be) will remain little kings.
I've seen some people argue that the mods are legitimately on strike. I disagree - it would be different if all the users of a subreddit decided not to comment and post for a while. That would be equivalent to a strike. For the moderators to decide to block the subreddit instead is more like some middle manager padlocking the building gates shut so no-one else can get to work, just because he has a grievance with the company owner.
If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
I guess I use the site less anyway these days but it'll be kinda fun to watch this play out.
If power users move to some more reasonable decentralized platform, this problem disappears.
> If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
Are you seriously saying the private companies should be legally compelled to provide api access?
Let them bring out new people, heck i'd rather jump ship and technically i already have but these new people should know they are and will be spending time and energy and paying reddit to give them the privilege to moderate reddit while reddit earns money. Till now, reddit earning from donations, awards was for survival of the site while all the mods volunteered to keep it a nice place. No one was making money, everyone was working as a community and people were keeping reddit alive by donations.
now, reddit gets to earn while we (or someone else) gets to work for their benefit. nice.
its like they took the concept of gig workers and paid them nothing. heck, the gig workers are being made to pay to do the work. great business
That would imply that current mods are irreplaceable which is not the case
Also, Reddit may be a private company, but their content is generated by their users and most of the labor is done by volunteer mods. If they want to leverage their network effect to extract money while ignoring those facts, they can get fucked. If they'd honestly been pursuing profitability in a non-idiotic and community respecting way (better ad targeting to subreddits? Build an integrated Patron alternative to support creators?) that would be one thing, but they've squandered their VC on nonsense like NFTs while making the whole site worse. I hope they implode, but expect they will just slowly decay.
Either way, and given the subject matter is a "community", this is a sure way to win a battle but losing the war.
TIL this is apparently an universal thing. The new account with 14 points of karma makes me suspicious. But, heh, we have a "don't assume astro-turfing" rule.
These Moderators have been working for free for years, IMHO they can do whatever they want. And yes, I'm annoyed by it since I cannot do half of my searches, because I append "reddit" at the end of half of my google searches. But I cannot blame moderators for fighting for what they think is right, with the little power they have.
Sorry reddit search does not work for you. But moderators did that, not Reddit! There is 2 TB reddit dump on internet, there are services that provide search over that.