Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!'
It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
At least you're aware of the issues now, no?
Most of them are doing it because they get off on having a tiny bit of power.
I couldn't care less about the API or the will of capricious mods - I hope Reddit will hand the subs over to other people
Honestly, I also think that public forums such as reddit shouldn’t build up a walled garden like this and the information should be free to anyone, regardless whether they use it commercially or for research.
Stop for a second and consider: why do these problems exist, and why should they stop?
Okay, and how will that help you to not get "capricious mods"?
> and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too
And when those ones make problems you get rid of them again? And then again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again?
Are you starting to see the problem?
> Most of them are doing it because they get off on having a tiny bit of power.
Are you willfully ignoring this point, or do you really think that magically it will work out?
[citation needed]
So my question is, if Reddit kicks off all the mods from a sub you frequent often, and ask you to be the new mod, would you do it? And, if it is a busy enough subreddit, would you spend the time those people have been spending, to moderation?
For me, that would be no.
Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if it wasn't for third party apps that are crucial to moderators doing their work. Reddit has consistently done an awful job on quality moderation tooling. They really don't seem to give a shit, and just do the absolute bare minimum. The only reason it has managed to survive in the state it is is because others have voluntarily picked up the slack and built the tooling Reddit hasn't bothered to build.
Just because you don't see it or use it doesn't mean it's not central to what you get to experience. Think bigger, beyond your direct experience and consider how that directly impacts you.
This is simply not true. I moderate several subs. 3rd party mod tools are not critical. Mods who claim this is so are really misrepresenting the issue.
Power tools for mods are nice to have for some. I make use of automod extensively. The tools reddit provides are adequate to perform moderation tasks.
Also, since I guess it needs to be said, I'm not a shill for spez. I don't like the dude, but I'm not a sock puppet. This is all winding up looking like an epic toddler tantrum from a small proportion of the higher-power mod contingent.
How big subs ? Number of subs you moderate is entirely irrelevant to the topic
I'd take that as an I dictator of a power hungry mod, not a mod passionate about the topic at hand.
But you can't algorithmically determine this. It's also my impression that a few of the biggest subs have all the same mods.
With all respect, that's something we are about to find out.
I find it hard to believe that there are so many people who think that Reddit looked at the mountain of data they have on user and mod behaviour, and API usage, and decided to do the opposite of what that data indicated as a good option.
All the internet posters making the claims you have just made are working blind. They don't have a single iota of actual data to support their conclusions.
Either way, we're about to find out.
1) Reddit says mod tools will remain free on the API (as well as disability tools)
2) Other moderators in this hacker news thread say the 3rd party stuff isn't necessary anyway.
Nonsense. I mod large subs just fine using toolbox and old reddit. toolbox doesn't counter at as third party app.
It seems most mods want to mod from their phones and will no longer be able to do so.
I know these things almost always blow over, eventually, but this has been just another part of the spiral. If you think your only relationship is with your advertisers... someday the advertisers will be the last ones you have left before they too take their business elsewhere.
Google is still pretty good when I try to use it especially because I have learned some of their search functions and operators. I haven't done vanilla search since I learned them.
Bard is nice but not for everything. It always gave me the wrong answer about dates and events for the next NBA game.
I love how many people who seem to complain about the blackout are like "stop whining and go back to produce the content for me".
Time will tell if the deterioration of the relationship will make that content you value less likely to exist, of less quality or more inaccesible.
Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1]
I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture.
Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2023 with no comment activity at all post, sure, that could be a lurker deciding to comment on this one very contentious issue. When you see a dozen in a sub that has 100k subscribers, that's odd but probably not unreasonable. When you see thousands, maybe something is going on.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/14av2z3/reports_of...
Or are communities federated also? Like all instances "Memes" communities get pulled together? Examining [1] that appears to not be the case.
Basically the federation is happening at the wrong level for that, since the whole community needs to be on a single server.
That being said, I don't think communities of that size should really be the goal in the fediverse.
If you had CommunityA at both, eventually everyone might migrate to ServerB; but then there's more room on ServerD for other communities.
Or is that totally off?
If you want low effort jokes, or memes, the most likely outcome is you're going to migrate to where the most people are. Similar to how some subreddits overtook others in popularity, there'll be a federated instance that "wins". We're sort of in a new frontiers phase where people are scrambling to find new homes and there'll be a lot of duplication until winners and losers are settled.
But in the end, if good memes come out of the most populous place. Reddit will probably just simply be the best you have. Anything else will be second rate. Perhaps 'the best' will make its rounds through all sites as reposts just as 9Gag stuff and Imgur stuff finds its way to Reddit or Twitter, or TikTok.
But back to the main point. Lemmy/kbin/etc likely will never be reddit. I'm okay with that because I found most value in smaller niche communities (similar to how HackerNews scratches an itch that Reddit never could). I think there'll be plenty of opportunity to drop my reddit habits as I find moderately active NetSec/Programming/Networking/etc. communities on Lemmy. I'll keep Imgur for lazy image humor, and probably nod to reddit for catching the beat on my local community/provincial subs.
I still see it perhaps as a positive for myself. Loosening my Reddit addiction will be healthy long term. I'll be forced to make decisions on what topics matter to me and how I'll consume them instead of blindly marching through reddit on another doomscroll because it was convenient.
It's a shame as I really enjoyed it while it lasted, especially in the early days.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this weaken Reddit's claim to Section 230 immunity? As in, they cross the line from simply being a provider of user generated content to being a publisher of it? We're not talking normal moderation but rather publishing what was marked for deletion.
I’m sure reddit will be a really fun place to suck up to big corporations now all the other content has left.
You're not entitled to the communities or their content. The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.
You don't control what they do and how they should behave. There was a social contract and it was thoroughly broken, so there's obvious instability now.
The "I couldn't care less, give me my memes" can take their own arbitrary advice and leave if they don't like something. See how useless that is?
Yes, the sum of all users are the community, not the mods themselves. Therefore if the community is truly aligned in a consensus to not reopen a sub, it won't matter if the sub is forcibly reopened by a newly installed moderator because the community, the users, won't come back anyway. So there's really nothing to complain about; the community is now dead or moved off reddit and it doesn't matter what reddit does with the subreddit that formerly hosted that community.
Unless of course the community is not nearly so united as claimed. Then maybe most of the community will come back to the subreddit. I think this is probably this is what will happen in most cases. And this is why people are mad about reddit threatening to reopen subreddits; because they don't actually have a community consensus to stop using that subreddit. They rely on the subreddit being locked to force the community's hand, and as soon as that leverage is taken away the community will be free to make a decision which is contrary to their own desires.
It's an ongoing situation but I love how you're trying to force everyone's hand to get to "how things were" for you. Funnily enough. That's what the protest is about, in a way.
> And this is why people are mad about reddit threatening to reopen subreddits;
I love how the self proclaimed casuals like you who "don't care" have this specific takes about the motives and reasons for things.
The motives are what they are and have been clearly laid out. The one throwing a conspiratantrum is you.
Go create the sub you want. The community will follow you, right?
And yes, that has happened plenty of times that mods go against a community.
> Go create the sub you want. The community will follow you, right?
I stopped using reddit 10 years ago, it can burn for all I care. Stop trying to psychoanalyze people (badly.)
If admins lift the blackouts and people go back to using the subreddits, then obviously those people were not committed to not using reddit. This is simply common sense. The answer to this problem is for you to stop using reddit, then reddit's problems won't be your problems.
Classic internet projection.
> If admins lift the blackouts and people go back to using the subreddits, then obviously those people were not committed to not using reddit
Backwards logic. They may be using it to complain or it may be intervened in a myriad of ways. You're set on dismissing while pretending you don't care but then make this claims that display ignorance of typical reddit behavioural patterns.
> The answer to this problem is for you to stop using reddit, then reddit's problems won't be your problems.
You keep going to this myopic well. Hey, if this bothers you shut up. Close your screen. Go to bed.
Basic b writing.
They are closely related imo to the PR firms that create wikipedia entries for people
I would have bought this line of thinking about two decades ago, but between now and then a lot has happened that seriously undermined any kind of faith that the post found on the internet is a genuine perspective or, indeed, that it was even generated by a human.
I think the last straw for me was FCC public comment ISP industry sock puppetry related to net neutrality ( not that there were no indications of foul plays before ) and the fact that nothing changed after those revelations.
That said, I absolutely buy that there are reddit users that are annoyed; I will also admit that I have yet to talk to someone, who does not support the blackout. Still, this may reflect my social circle more than anything else so I do not dismiss your point.
Average Reddit user doesn't care about APIs, they may not realise what it means or much more likely they don't even have a third party app!
To them their hangout just got taken away.
You are absolutely correct that it is a common sentiment. However, this doesn't prove that this sentiment is always wrong.
I don't even suspect it at this point, I just don't know if it's Reddit or someone else, but what motivation does someone else have to make new accounts that post GPT content unfiltered (and have since been deleted), that also just happen to push against the blackout.
Smoking gun: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20230611231119/https://www.reddi...
Other examples:
https://i.imgur.com/Aw8JUga.png
https://i.imgur.com/0seHYei.png
https://i.imgur.com/Q8Pl2Ms.png
https://i.imgur.com/IRAug6a.png
https://i.imgur.com/N88AxJx.png
Though of course what you probably intend to convey is that people who find the blackout annoying can be dismissed because they're just those weird cat picture people -- they just don't understand the importance like you do, and thus don't count -- and is a perfect example of my point.
I don't care about the API issue, despite being a professional dev. I find sharecropping on someone else's product a perilous path that eventually comes up snake-eyes. Like, the moment someone makes a third party app for Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, or anything else, they are on an expiry meter. Have people not learned this yet?
The blackout thing didn't work because most people don't care, so some people have stomped their feet and effectively started trying to vandalize the site and I think it's achieving absolutely nothing.
You are missing the forest for the trees here. The issue is not that they are charging for API access. The issue is that assurances were given that the transition would be reasonable but pricing withheld until the last minute.
Negotiations then proceeded in bad faith, with reddit never intending to allow them to pay the price asked (no methods existed to even make this transaction possible with a 30 day deadline, and other app creators were ignored completely when approaching reddit sales).
When the dev made the situation public (with a 'go ahead' from reddit) then Huffman appears to have taken it personally, and instead of engaging with the community concerns about lack of options for mobile moderators, went on a tantrum. He then discounts any concerns over his handling of the situation and doubles down on libelous claims that were proven false.
This is on top of using reasoning that is not only dubious, but contradictory. If they really care about making a profit, why not offer something of value and charge for it, like the 3rd party apps do? You don't win customers by making something shitty and then removing all of their options and then not even have a plan in place to make money with the shitty alternative.
Huffman has been unable to monetize reddit and he isn't presenting any way to. All he is doing is acting unhinged and destructive -- with both community trust/relations and the corporation itself being used in ways that can not be turned around.
Usually corporations burn their trust as a short-sighted scheme to make a bunch of money quickly (reputable brand cuts so many costs the reputation is lost, etc) and this is tragic, but at least they got something out of it.
This guy seems like he is just burning things down because he is frustrated that they exist successfully on their own using the same resources he has, while he cannot.
Ultimately we are ALL sharecropping where the majority of the web is "owned/gatekeeped" by a handful of big companies like google, meta, microsoft, amazon, twitter (?), visa, mastercard, paypal, yelp, cloudflare, comcast, cox, etc. You may agree or disagree with my list but hopefully you get my point.
It remains to be seen if it worked or not depending on what the fallout is. Will users, moderators and most importantly advertisers leave? Will reddit IPO? Will they be able to hire? Will spez survive this as CEO?
I don't even know what to say, some folk just don't know how to capitalism right.
Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)
But if a bunch of new, dormant or unused accounts start promoting the exact party line of an entity which is known to generate accounts on their service to seed stuff, in a battle they're determined to win, the probability of them all being unconnected individual people popping up to express their support for Reddit's management is pretty near zero...
He should have been fired for that
If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.
Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.
You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Most people lurk politically and are just pulled along by people who care.
And the people who care are working to make sure you recognize the right names.
People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.
Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!
yes, and fund service running. Looks like important part of the ecosystem.
does it exist and works on scale, or it is like communism where everyone will be happy, but it is never achievable and sustainable just because most of the people want money, power and free stuff.
And yes, the entire foundation structure of the platform and protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point. ActivityPub and Matrix protocol are similar in this regard. And yes the AP impls are seeing huge explosions in growth in the last 3 weeks.
Riku, I can't reply to you because this site is a joke, but I don't think I want to anyway, you don't seem to get the point, across the board. Not everything is about profit for bleep's sake. Also, I'll sign up for s month of reddit premium if you can find 3 subs that voted to re-open. Or literally any single person besides you and spez that think every single app dev is scamming, and nearly every single mod.
And no reddits infra is not a most, lmao. Their site crashes daily and runs on AWS, and every single bit of value is derived from the people you accuse of spamming - you know the ones that keep voting to keep the homepage looking like a wasteland of porn and AITA posts. You're completely out of touch.
I am not familiar with all those projects, but my understanding is that reddit's moats are:
- infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search and recommendation on top of them
- they have bootstrapped content volume and communities
- they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries
how far mentioned projects from that state?
Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11dgwzy/whats_up_wi...
> they have bootstrapped content volume and communities
Do you mean when the founders (including current CEO) posted as a bunch of fake users to create the illusion that it was popular?
https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/
> they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries
How is possible if Reddit has never been profitable/reached breakeven?
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...
Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand all of these comments talking about Reddit as if it was 100% free to operate and the only important users are the commenters
Why did they hire 2000 people? Nothing they have done in the last decade has provided new value to users. If they had simply accepted their role as a utility instead of chasing the mega-growth tech fantasy then they would be a (modestly) profitable company with 200 employees at most.
Lurkers (who did click join, but never posted) are included in the subreddit user-counts advertised on the protest subreddit. If they count as users there, they count as users here.
The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition vocal minority
All sentiment measurements going forward will skew towards Very Online users following the drama closely, which GP is arguing will ignore a silent majority of the subreddit's actual MAU.
...while also claiming they're clairvoyant and know about what silent majority wants.
Also arguably silent majority doesn't matter here because they are not the ones that *produce* any content to watch in the first place.
The whole point of blackouts is for them to put pressure on Reddit, whether actively (complaining) or passively (not giving traffic)
What is there for the mods to ignore, when the lurkers are - as you said - silent?
I think all the people posting stuff like "reddit is DYING" are in for a rude awakening because the overwhelming majority of users do not give a single shit. They wanna see memes that confirm their biases and maybe see what is going on in their city/locality, and they can't do that if all their subs are blacked out.
But I've seen both subs that asked mods, mods that unilaterally decided to blackout, and subs where users pleaded for blackout while power-hungry mods decided not to (presumable coz they were afraid reddit takes their playground from them)
If I were a power tripping mod, I would either just inform the sub about the subreddit taking part in the blackout. From the up and downvotes you can then already gauge the sentiment of the subreddit towards this issue and if the downvotes go south, you can always delete the post and do it anyway.
But then you can't go and ask the sub about continuing the blackout. But as a power tripping mod I can't keep the subreddit private as then I would miss out on my power trip.
So eventually I would open it up again, make a poll about continuing and as the sub will deny that I could keep it open and keep on power tripping while at the same time claiming that I only follow the sub's democratic decision.
Ultimately Reddit depends on moderators being able to do their job, if Spez chooses to pull the rug out from under their feet so that they cannot do their job (which they do without cost for Reddit) effectively, why should I not cheer them on? Especially since they are pretty much the only ones able to coordinate any form of protest after Spez lied (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36247130) about what the Apollo dev said?
Of course, but astroturfing is also a very real thing that those with money to lose have no moral objection making use of, and as such it's naive to take every comment at face value.
The method which one determines which comment falls into which category is variable and imperfect and always will be but it's a sense I've tried to hone. I like to try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it can be difficult to do that when, say, large number of comments parrot one of a handful of talking points with few linguistic variances or elaborations on why the commenter feels that way.
Not a pattern of hallucinated poetry posted to new accounts, that just so happen to also dislike the blackout[0-6], while also occasionally apologizing for not being able to generate inappropriate or offensive content[7].
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/Aw8JUga.png
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/0seHYei.png
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/Q8Pl2Ms.png
[3]: https://i.imgur.com/IRAug6a.png
[4]: https://i.imgur.com/N88AxJx.png
[5]: https://i.imgur.com/Ar8P95B.png
The only reason reddit continues to play nice is to prevent a mass exudus from disgruntled users. They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
That said, they're quite replaceable, it seems.
> They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
I'm not convinced. I think they want the _current_ crop of mods of big subreddits to leave, to be replaced by users who would never dream of protesting Reddit's decisions.
> That said, they're quite replaceable, it seems.
In terms of popping some users out, and granting others mod access, that's true. In terms of the quality of the subreddit as a result - that would remain to be seen. I've browsed under-moderated subreddits that are relevant to my interests, and it's not a good experience.
I agree that poor moderation is a problem. However, it seems that moderation on reddit is quite poor to begin with.
How about all the Apollo and RiF users? I'm sympathetic and supportive of the mods but I'm angry because at the end of the month the app I've been using for more than a decade will be no longer functional due to choices Reddit is making.
I've yet to seen a single coherent argument that supports this statement. Please enlighten me.
All of the arguments I see here on the other side are assumptions backed by nothing, i.e. "the majority users of subs didn't agree with the mods decision," which is patently false. Just go to the subs that locked down, look at their sticky thread explaining whats going on and why, and find a mountain of support.
Even if it wasn't trivially easy to prove these arguments wrong, they don't even provide any actual evidence for their claims.
What sticky thread? I get a note saying the subreddit is private, and a link to a news article. They certainly aren't asking for my opinion.
I do not intent to persuade you that these viewpoints are compelling and truthful, because that's beyond the point. I'm not arguing that the above arguments are subjectively correct, only that they are coherent. Whether or not you find these arguments persuasive, they are coherent. Whether or not you think they have the basic facts of the situation correct, they are still coherent. Maybe you think lurking readers shouldn't count; that's a legitimate value which others may legitimately disagree with, and depending on what your values are you come to different conclusions. That doesn't mean people who think lurkers should count are being incoherent. Coherence does not mean subjectively correct.
“I’m gonna make Reddit completely unusable so Reddit doesn’t become shitty”
Give it another year, and your little sub will have 3 ad posts per "actual" post and modded by the Tempe Chamber of Commerce.
This is false. Stats showed 3rd party app users were an extreme minority of users.
It's more like mods are a disproportionate number of 3rd party users due to wanting to mod from their phones, and are making the blackout decision for everybody.
We don't seem to agree on the definition of "many".
Apollo had 1.5 million users. RIF about the same. That's just two of the biggest 3rd party shutting down basically overnight.
That's 3+ million users. I'm fairly certain that 3+ million people counts as "many".
So sure, it's many, it's also a very insignificant number.
Example of a subreddit I was in: Moderator opens a poll on whether the blackout should continue. Lays out why it should continue. Doesn't allow discussion about the vote.
A lot of talk about "unpaid labor" of mods while they pay little mind to the "unpaid labor" of the people actually creating the posts.
I'm really not worried about this not because I'm a fan of reddit because there is really nothing stopping a subreddit from coalescing somewhere else. The arguments against this really start to show the value of Reddit, though.
I think this is characteristic not of Americans and not even of terminally online Europeans, but rather of reddit users specifically (and heavy users of other systems that operate similar to reddit, or which had very biased moderation for a long time but no longer do, such as twitter.) Reddit is all about forming the illusion of overwhelming consensus; an opinion shared by 49% of users can be ruthlessly suppressed by the 51%, downvoted below zero and hidden from view. The fundamental nature of reddit's comment system encourages this warped perception of people who disagree with you being unreal.
The easiest way to resolve this is to perma ban all the mods of closed subs, then remove the ability for subs to be closed.
“Go outside” is an ironic comment, given that the subreddit blackout doesn’t appear to be all that popular among casual Reddit users. It’s popular among the chronically online people who use Reddit so much that they’re intimately involved in every detail of the site, but 98-99% of users don’t use 3rd party clients.
> I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
It’s getting weird that Redditors are turning into conspiracy theorists, believing that anyone who disagrees with the popular narrative must be a shill, a plant, or the CEO himself speaking to them.
No, the CEO of Reddit isn’t spending all day coming to your niche subreddit, creating new accounts, and sockpuppeting opinions to the handful of people there.
Speaking personally I've had maybe one or two bad experiences of mods in the ~11 years I've used Reddit, and that time wasn't exactly spent lurking, with my account having accrued ~35k karma.
Remember - the top subs were being modded by epstein’s gang. If that kind of absurdity is happening then imagine when a political party offers them 10m to rig an election.
When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived.
For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far.
There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
Because the current batch of moderation work well enough.
Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.)
Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left.
For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew.
You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later?
As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities.
>It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse because of this action by the CEO.
Edit: The parent post edited his post so the arguments are now don't quite directly counter his points. Now it seems like I am strawman-ing. Why would you do that?
X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more.
Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme.
>As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up.
No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away.
>And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse
Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.
I'm not a sock puppet, I just don't see the validity in saying over and over that the mod tools are bad, when they are clearly not and work for quite a lot of mods.
Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like:
check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other.
you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats.
rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions.
finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. 90% of your problems in Reddit are caused by 10% of the people. Get rid of the trouble makers and your job is a cakewalk.
Is this really that difficult to reason through?
Have you ever moderated a sufficiently large community?
threats always come after the ban and is trivial to create a new account and continue the threats. the complaints about mod harrassment are as old as reddit but spez always promissed solutions and never delivered. heck, my sub had its mod discussion archive leaked - on reddit!, we reported it to admins repatedly and they did a big nothing.
one of my mod colleagues got doxxed and had a banned user ringing at his very physical door demanding "to discuss the issue", how would you feel about it ?
edit: and this is a boring country sub, I can't even imagine what modding a political sub is like.
have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics
People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing
edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted
Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad?
Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account
Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.
Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).
Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?
This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.
Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators.
So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first.
So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized?
>Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
You (user) can most readily address it by not using reddit. That is the ultimate answer to all of this. If you don't use reddit, then problems with reddit aren't your problems anymore.
voting certainly ain't the answer.
that just means that the mod teams backed by the best AI bots will win.
(which probably means spez and reddit itself will just control the mod teams of all the highest traffic subs)
And the powermods will run ban scripts on anyone who won’t vote for them… because banned users won’t be able to vote in the subreddit.
This ties back into how "freedom to listen" is way more important than "freedom of speech" Though freedom of speech is a prerequisite for freedom to listen. If person X wants to say something and person Y wants to read it, moderator Z shouldnt be allowed to interfere. But you still need moderation or the webpage gets filled with spam and crap. So the solution is simple, if you don't like a moderator, unsubscribe from them and it's done.
Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
And then you will find out that most users don't configure their apps. They will complain loudly though. Users also don't know how mods moderate. They would have to see what gets moderated otherwise they can't make informed decisions.
> Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
Opt-in is too cumbersome for most users. Most users don't configure their apps (again). That's why good defaults are important.
You can't solve social issues with technology. Technology might help but only so much.
Don't make the mistake of thinking a mod is above people and needs to tell users what they are allowed to see.
I included in my suggestion that you can see what gets moderated, obviously. Any website with non-public moderation logs tends towards horrible abuse of moderation powers.
They are not above people but they are the ones curating the content in the subreddit. If people don't like that, they can vote with their feet and leave. I've seen this play out several times. Communities leaving and building new subreddits, sometimes overtaking the previous one, sometimes not.
> I included in my suggestion that you can see what gets moderated, obviously. Any website with non-public moderation logs tends towards horrible abuse of moderation powers.
Why should that make a difference? Most mod stuff is boring mundane stuff. Finding the juicy stuff is not that easy. And even if you have unfair mods, you can't remove them even if you can prove that they are abusing their power.
Reddit mods with seniority have power over those with lesser seniority. Changing that to say democratic votes from all mods to oust another mod only leads to more politics and drama.
You can't prevent drama.
You know, I think he may be on to something there. Maybe someone should look into that for oh, say, the CEO of Reddit.
Investors are happy to preach and virtue signal about the 'S' in ESG until hundreds of millions is on the line. Then you won't hear a peep from them.
Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit.
If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.
If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing.
But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?
The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.
That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor.
reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years).
As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.
I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things.
Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes.
That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.
What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.
Instagram and YouTube seem to be examples of social media sites led by non-founders, though those are also subsidiaries.
Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs.
If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, and tolerating ad blocking. Bring in a new CEO, chosen by the board, and it would likely be a full on squeeze toward making money even if it costs them a vocal minority of users.
Even the Apollo dev said that he might have been able to pass down the ridiculous price tag down to his users. But not on such short notice, especially after been told earlier this year that no change in API usage would coming this year.
This is just bad management and now really bad PR. I can't see that this is good for the IPO. Who in their right mind will throw money at this site now?
Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want.
Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.
I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved.
The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.
This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.
They're going to sacrifice quality. In the short run, that will work. The smart move would be to moderate with a small, expensive lead and cheaper offshore, arund-the-world talent. (The brilliant move would be to negotiate, but Huffman has made this personal.)
Keep in mind the power law nature of content. What makes Reddit charming is the long tail. What makes it profitable, in the short term, is the short end. They don't need to hire mods for every subreddit, just the large ones, and among those, only those rebelling and unwilling to relent.
Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.
Something like r/SmashBros closing the subreddit for a weekend when the new game launched and funneling new users (ie casual normies) into an alternative subreddit is sometimes the best thing moderators can do, but getting an AI to intuit when/whether to do that would be nigh impossible.
Thank you for your perspective. In one paragraph that explains so much about why Reddit sucks.
> Researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the amount of hours worked by mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.
That's not a lot. Reddit's annual revenue is ~$500 million.
Mods hurt potential profits: "mods too powerful, need to act"
If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods.
If mods are going to permanently set subs private then they should be seized and given to someone who will use it
Eg. /r/gaming became a meme ridden shitshow and someone made /r/games which bans memes and it's great.
No need to seize anything. Let people go where they want.
Good luck finding people that will work for free without a sense of ownership.
Any community that operates with strict structure is done with dedicated mods and bots (which the mods manage).
The moderators who consider the lack of "a sense of ownership" a deal breaker are precisely the people you don't want as moderators. They're the ones who are likely interested in that power for the sake of abusing it to serve their own personal agenda rather than the good of the community. It's no different from why we don't want cops to be able to make their own laws (and why laws that are vague enough to give them discretion to act capriciously are bad laws).
And the obvious next step is to sell control of subreddits to the highest bidder.
"Huffman said, though, that he’d like to see some form of revenue-sharing.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
You may not be far off...
It's pretty difficult to coordinate moving even dozens of people in a community to a new place; subreddits can have hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands.
There's not a particularly great way to move, for example, r/askhistorians elsewhere and ask people to follow. There will be a tremendous drop-off, as well as loss of historical (hah) posts, community knowledge, etc., etc.
But also: yeah, users will probably end up going somewhere else. It'll be a diaspora; Reddit arguably prospered because Digg's users migrated there en mass after the redesign fiasco. Tumblr and Twitter have been seeing migration waves back and forth. Other communities will come, and grow - but it won't just be a "move".
without the ton of unpayed moderators they wouldn't be able to comply with hate speech laws (or comply by having moderation systems which are "out of context of the conversation" enough to drive a lot of users away)
without it all the good content would be drowned by spam and other bad stuff
in turn without moderators the most users would leave sooner or later
Since Huffman thinks moderators should be able to be voted out by users because the users are the primary "shareholders" of Reddit, the parent comment to yours is asking (rhetorically) whether they will extend those policies to the CEO and other administrators.
This is always so annoying, when sites are stagnant for years and then suddenly they can pump out new features when it helps them even if people have been asking for forever.
See also mod tools (though they have broken that promise more times than I can count) and shit like NFTs. "Can't improve or fix basic bugs but we have time to add the scam of the week to our platform". Reddit doesn't deserve to continue.
So if I made a sub and I post to it, I build the content on it, some group of users can just vote me out randomly?
Fuck that. They do such a thing and reddit becomes salted earth for anyone wanting to post their content on it, and for anyone wanting to run a community where they aren't popular/don't have an opinion in line with the hive mind.
They needed to allow a more flexible moderation system and separate names of groups from the communities so that /r/games could dynamically change with time, but allowing the community to evict people from what they created is downright asinine.
But I just see this as a bunch of hot air, Huffman has a long history of not delivering on reddit promises, unless they effect his wallet.
I'm really not happy with reddit and participated in the 48h blackout, so I'm a good example of what they're talking about.
I'm done with them, but this shows you how much he's out of touch with the situation.
> He said he planned to change the rules so users could vote them out of subbreddits.
I've already posted my resignation notice and have stickied a post requesting applicants to take over the sub. People drunk on "power" do not relinquish their power voluntarily. Mods being "too powerful" are not the problem, because we are not interested in "power".
Reddit is in deep trouble.
I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...
1. not stay moderators a long time, while a lot of people want to be mods most severely underestimate how time intensive it can be
2. want to be mods to abuse the power
3. would be quite bad at the job
4. would continue the protests sooner or later, because they do agree with the current mods on this point (but not other points so they take advantage of it)
All of which would drive users and high quality content away long term.
Not saying that there hasn't always been a lot of drama and power struggles around mods in reddit and that there aren't already bad mods and that this would be true for all new mods.
Still in my experience while there are always scores of users who want to be mods you really don't want to give mod powers to the huge majority of them and doing so is a grate way to destroy your community.
I think what they are betting on is those new mods will be completely inept compared to experienced ones and it will lead to the site becoming worse overall.
In case of Reddit it's just beginning. I don't really care about API access, but they send clear signal that they only care about profits, not about users and community. What's next? They will require paid subscription to browse content created by users for free, because traffic generates costs and they "have to be profitable"?
Today they still have huge userbase and it's their only advantage. There was Digg, there is Reddit and soon there will be next thing like lemmy.
Is it any surprise we see yet another socially awkward tech CEO value the only thing that makes sense to their brains: money?
The CEO et al I would say have no concern about this issue as such - or it would have come over years ago - they are concerned, and concerned now, only because it is getting in their way.
Reddit management to my eye has lost sight of the fact the Reddit exists because a very large number of people decided of their own free will to be there. The content generators do not belong to Reddit, nor is the content generated by Reddit. When large site owners come to imagine they own their site and can do what they like with it, as if the users belong to them, they can break their sites, because users leave - mySpace is the case in point.
If mods want to withhold their own work and resign in protest, power to them. But right now they're hanging this all on mass censoring the work of their users. Screw that.
Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them.
Except Reddit appears to be taking away that power and un-deleting/un-editing comments that user's are deleting/editing in protest.
(1): due to protesting, also somewhat due to the API changes but that is more complex
It would be pretty funny if Kevin Rose bought Digg back and turned it into something not sucky that let’s people post links and comment on them. This could finally be his chance to make the twitter clone he always wanted.
I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).
I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment.
I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.
The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap.
Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video.
It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that.
Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far.
I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.
I understand how on the outside it looks bad but I also know from experience what mods put up with and I totally understand reaching for this tool to avoid it.
[0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/11/10/21559458/dean-brown...
At least let downvotes do their thing. Deleting posts and banning users should be reserved for spam, persistent troublemakers, or actually-abusive comments.
I've had people walk right up to the line of the subs rules (breaking the spirit if not the letter) time and time again and it's exhausting to deal with. I've had about as close as you can come to death threats (without directly saying it) for temp-banning someone after repeatedly telling them to stop doing something. I've heard the cries of "censorship" for removing what is clearly spam. And all that was on a tiny sub. If I had identified a common source/overlapping interest with those people and it was easy to ban/block them I would have done it. Moderating is thankless work that I fell into (and thankfully got out of) and felt obligated to continue/see through to the end. I had no interest in "power", there was no "payday" or similar, it was just me trying to give back to my community and I got a ton of shit for it.
I wrote, pre-blackout, what I thought was an innocuous comment stating that I would not be offended if someone called me gay (why would I be?) and I eventually received a site-wide suspension for it. No concern was raised from the moderators of the subreddit it was posted in despite the fact that their rules dictate not violating the site rules, which I apparently did.
The panic over there is fascinating.
Look, we all know that going to war with your volunteers is a bad idea.
But the Mods, as individual people, are not easy to deal with. To me, modding any sub on reddit sounds like an insane thing to do. Why would you subject yourself to such a task? Especially for free?
Anyone remember this interview?: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6294058584001
Those are the real human people that reddit's ownership has to deal with. Only a thousand-fold and self-interacting. Herding cats seems like a very simple job now.
Look, reddit is fundamentally changed. We all know it's going down. But Mods aren't the easiest people either. Reddit got fat off of the labor of, to me, people that are just built different.
That check is now coming due.
Confidence implies inaction, so the fact they want to undelete things says to me that it's having a real impact and they are scared of it.
Mister "this will pass" certainly doesn't seem to believe it's going to pass.
And they could have capitalized quite a lot on Reddit, but I think they've screwed themselves over the last couple of years by pushing a bunch of features no one liked and not actually focusing on anything that would make them money.
Like, I should be able to pay Reddit to be able to post high quality images and have them posted to all the users of the website without reliance on their shitty mobile app. I shouldn't be able to upload high quality images without paying, and that incentivizes me to give them money.
What are they doing instead? They incentivize their shitty mobile app.
I think they've dramatically overestimated their ability to make money and they've expanded the site to the point that they cant actually sustainably continue to maintain it.
I have half a mind to believe they actually expected the third party developers to pay the outrageous fees and that that would help cover the costs of them running the website.
I think Reddit is unsustainable and it's going to collapse in on itself and go into bankruptcy eventually.
They will continue to fail to make money to support the bloated and shitty infrastructure and hiring practices they've put in place, and when they inevitably fail they will blame these terrible moderators and users for ruining the website.
In reality it was their own greed and shameless lack of self-restriction the wind in terms of establishing their bloated and terrible infrastructure.
But hey, they have an office in San Francisco so they're quite the lovely san francisco high-tech company that's making all sorts of money. And by money I mean investments.
For whatever subs I subscribe to, that means the mods went against my will. Maybe I was a small minority. Maybe I was in the majority. Not sure how to tell...
Let me acknowledge the obviously self-serving nature of this declaration, wrapped up in Truth, Justice and the American Way at a highly convenient time for Reddit, and dismiss it for the remainder of my post here, because I find social network game theory interesting as a hobby and want to discuss the mechanics and implications of having dislodgeable moderators.
The problem I see is that there is no way to build this structure that isn't gameable in a world where everyone uses free emails and has ever-increasing access to an army of LLM and other sorts of bots. You can't build a system where a single person with a bee in their bonnet about some mod can simply marshal an army of bots to get them dislodged. The entire thing about moderation is that it produces a stream of people with bees in their bonnet, and the people who tend to get moderated are disproportionally those people. The bigger the sub, the larger the stream of such people. The nice guy who can't be bothered to start a vendetta probably wasn't a problem poster in the first place.
You can't just "vote" them out by handing everyone in the world a vote. You can't hand a vote to everyone subscribed in the community. You could set a cutoff date but that is weird too. You could give participation points (voting, commenting) but those are easy to game too.
There really isn't a way to define a "community" in a way that code can get a hold of it. Which means that in the end this is just going to be Reddit imposing its central views by fiat. That is not intrinsically morally wrong. The problem is that it's not Reddit today. I expect Reddit is calculating the result of its moves with a simple multiplication of how much money they expect to make on the same community, but if they manage to contract it significantly in the process the calculations won't hold. Moreover, even if they do lever open every single community tomorrow, the damage won't be visible tomorrow. It'll be slowly over the course of the next year or two. There won't be a day where anyone external will be able to point at and say "Look, this proves we were right!". There won't be a day when I'd be able to counter a "Citation?" with objective proof. Reddit will just... fade. One interaction at a time.
Now if only Twitter would do the same in a prompt fashion. Musk tries hard, damn hard, but not has hard as Reddit to scuttle themselves.
If nothing else so fools here stop posting twit links to twit news. Twitter gets no scripting access here, it doesn't really work anymore otherwise, so for me already dead, just wish others would catch up.
"More democracy" seems like a good thing, as long as it is balanced. There should be some recourse for a mod that actually enforces the rules of the sub (like removing political messages from subs that have rules against those sorts of things).
I don't know how you'd do that on Reddit. All mods in a sub can vote to veto? That seems like they'd still have too much power. Appeal process? To whom?
It is often said that if a product is free then you are not the user, you are the product.
Here it is true, just the wrong way round: users are Reddit's product! And Reddit seems to have totally alienated its product! The product is saying, "go f*k yourself Reddit, we're not backing down".
What is left of Reddit the company after they force their will on the users? No product I would think. Just managers and C-suite.
Will 2023 be considered the year of the Great Social Media Purge?
Now that it's affecting them they do, so I hope they improve things even if it isn't for exactly the right reasons.
There's no perfect solution. If you suggest "let users vote/democracy", then you'll start getting propaganda convincing people to vote for their agenda. If you leave the mods in charge then you get these mini dictatorships. If you let Reddit control then you get a profit seeking algorithm that stuffs any criticism of people who pay Reddit.
One of these solutions is probably better than the others, but there are some major tradeoffs.
Unless you're in a very free speech leaning place, which are unfortunately and increasingly harder to find, every forum is modded and the mods hold varying degrees of influence.
And the site wide admins, when there's such a thing, hold more.
They aren't hard to find. The reality is that the people who want to say 'whatever they want' are usually just looking to spout endless conspiracy theories, vaccine denial, pro putin propaganda, election denial and lots of other nonsense misinformation with no evidence behind it.
The problem is that these people don't just want a place to say it, they want to find a large audience to broadcast to normal people trying to have normal discussions. Normal people don't want them around, people running sites don't want them around and talking to each other isn't what they want.
Finding a place to say what you want is easy, finding a place where you can foul up normal message boards and everyone just lets you do it is the challenge.
I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.
Over years of inaction, or bad action. Chasing bad product ideas while ignoring key features.
Either in USA or global like in Ph, Nigeria, India, or E Europe where English is commonly spoken?
At least for the main/top100 boards
If anything the users creating the content should be the ones being paid.
Your neural nets (which are not intelligence) and 3rd party apps wouldn't work at all if normal people didn't take their time to post useful content.
You're also paid.
"I get to be a mod forever though"
Most of them are absolute losers. Almost every single powermod that is open about their real life identity turns out to fit exactly into the "usual suspect" mold (middle aged, usually white, usually nerdy and terminally online). There are screenshots of mods that moderate the most on Reddit begging and crying to not lose their moderator position. Here's a direct quote from one of the most powerful mod on Reddit on hearing they lost mod powers on a single sub:
"I have no job, I dont meet people, have no money.I only have reddit. Please dont take reddit from me"
Sure sound like a qualified, well adjusted moderating staff overall.
probably why you were down voted, I think the mods provide a decent service preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social
>Just pay someone to do their job
This I agree with, if the mods were paid well, maybe things would be better. Maybe a rule change like "If your group gets xxx many unique users posting content per day, you get paid X". But that can be abused too.
I can’t compare to truth-social as Ive never used it. But big subs like /r/politics are definitely echo chambers and I think they are that way because the mods like it that way.
This is based on experiences with community centers, game meetups, marathon planners, and dev communities. You usually have to have someone on the payroll, but having a high ratio of volunteers usually means higher quality community.
My most clear example is the difference between hiking meetups that are just some people planning stuff vs the ones planned by REI. The REI ones are pretty fun, but the meetups are more thought out and better, I think.
Reddit mods are notorious for creating echo chambers through 3rd party mod tools. You know, those tools autobanning about any account who happens to post on a sub they consider no-no, often regardless the context. If those tools weren't on the line, they wouldn't care to join the blackout.
I'm sorry, what?
Just my opinion: most mods I've encountered seem like smarmy, smug, and sanctimonious petty tyrants who need to touch grass.
There are definitely a lot of bad mods, even more in popular subs, and even more in popular subs that are not centered around a community of hobbyist and/or fans. The value of reddit is not this trash though, it's the subs that are well moderated and curated to avoid the spamming, low effort/low quality content and so on. Because the torrent of low quality meme-like content can be found in any number of platforms: 9gag, imgur, etc. but very few places have a /r/askhistorians or a 30k active users community for a niche hobby.
IMGUR should pull a protest and charge reddit (although I assume they are already deep in bed together... you can type in any /r/ into IMGR.com/r/pics for example and get all the pics posted to /r/pics -- or any other sub....
The point being that IMGUR should be charging reddit for all the "infra" costs their traffic has on their "infra"
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EDIT :
Can I sell my reddit accounts to some EU citizen for $1 (eu) such that you then own my account and can use GDPR laws to demand reddit delete my account/comments/history? (I have 17 years worth of comments on there) GDP-[REDDIT-COMMENT-DELETION-AS-A-SERVICE] GPT-GDPRCDAAS
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EDIT2 :
/u/spez was again on NPR, where NPR stated that still "50% of the largest subs are still in protest" -- and then Spez stated that the business hasn't been impacted.
So riddle me thus ;;
If you can shutter 50% of your top subreddits without "significant impact to the business" , then how can you claim that you're paying "10s of millions" to "support" 3rd party API call apps, in 'infra' -- and this is 'unsustainable' yet killing '50% of top subs' has no impact on the business?
/u/spez might want to consider subscribing to /r/theyDidTheMath
EDIT3 :
"https://gizmodo.com/subreddits-retreat-api-war-as-ceo-steve-...
Has Reddit paid mods for un-blocking? Has Reddit paid ANY MODS EVER? Shouldnt this be in an SEC filing, if they are hedging for an IPO payout so /u/spez can go off into the tech sunset?
Shouldnt Reddit be required to report which mods they paid off in the past? Should reddit be required to announce which MOD accounts are held as alts by actual employees (admins) of reddit?
If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly".
Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.
There is a well-known cabal of reddit mods that control many of the most popular subreddits [1] and many of them act like the subs they mod are their personal fiefdoms. Some of them have been alleged to exploit their subs for financial gain, or personal karma gain [2] at the expense of regular users
Some of these mods have operated in cahoots with Reddit Administration to squelch stories they didn't like [3], to push a political narrative, or to stop grass roots issues. While I recognize people should live harassment free, they need to operate with a great amount of editorial discretion to keep conversations on topic and apropos.
[1] https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against...
[2] https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war
[3] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2...
The simplest explanation to me is that they protest because they care. It is not just Apollo. They don't like the overall direction Reddit is heading in.
Reddit mods doing things like this is well known [1] [2]
What is really strange is how the mods will tend to infiltrate a subreddit, get mod rights, and then bring over a bunch of other mods that are already cross-modding important subs across Reddit.
This has led to weird situations where a few mods control much of Reddit's top subreddits [3]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modabuse/
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/zk39a1/cmv_mo...
[3] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/reddit-92-of-the-top-5...
Pay Reddit and you can do whatever you want. Maybe even buy a subreddit or two.