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Comment by sdflhasjd | Hacker News Reader

I take it users will be able to vote out Admins and the CEO as well?

Why should the users have any vote over anything?

To actually answer: Huffman's argument is that mods are like business executives and users are like shareholders, and therefore the users should be able to vote out moderators who are not acting in the users' best interests. He said this while also implying that the blackout was only supported by moderators, not by the regular users, and that this means that Reddit administration is having to step in to save the users from the evil, sinister "inactive" moderators who enacted the protest.

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.

Which doesn't make sense as instead of voting people out they could just create a new subreddit. Unlike in real life landed gentry works due to limited space. Not so on the internet.

Yeah Huffman's whole argument is disingenuous from the start, which is to be expected from a guy desperately trying to convince people that his platform has profit potential even though just this week he stated that it is not profitable. Uphill battle, y'know?

I vote with my feet. I don’t use Twitter anymore because of Musk and now I won’t use Reddit because of spez. Tbh, it feels great getting these sites out of my life.

Well, for one, they're the sole value prop for the site. They generate, rank, and curate the content in concert with mods and admins.

Why don't the users go and do that somewhere else? genuine question, I don't use Reddit.

Network & lock-in effects.

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".

Seems like they might. The weird/confusing thing is that Reddit seems to be doing their best to incentivize them to.

They did before, they are now, and they will after. Reddit contends with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, blogs, etc. We're doing it right here ourselves.

I think that's the emerging plan, yes.

It's their content. Reddit wouldn't exist without user contributed, moderated and 'engaged' content.

especially not without moderation

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

The entire point of reddit is that users vote on posts and comments. Idk what the site would be if you took out the user voting.

... the entire product is based on voting

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