The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen | Hacker News Reader

The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

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583 pointslewisflude458 comments

They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods. It’s a thankless task to begin with - a marginal proposition at best. Add some threats as a thank you for the unpaid work and it becomes downright abusive

Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?

Mods that were pushed out by other mods in the past

People with vendettas and power vacuum opportunists

People that want a different narrative on a subreddit

There are tons of people that have other causes and interests than API tooling or company drama

You know, this is all quite ignorable

That's not exactly a list of people who are likely to do a good job.

I think that's part of Reddit's problem - They can replace the mods with random people if they want, but the likelihood that those people will put in the work and do a good job is not high.

> That's not exactly a list of people who are likely to do a good job.

based on what? is the control group the current mods because that's already a laughable set of people. there is no criteria before and there will be no criteria after.

You forgot people that don't want any narrative and would prefer to see all the content as long as it doesn't violate site wide rules.

This was my thought as well. To answer your question, though, I imagine bad faith actors of various flavors will be flocking the site:

1. Corporate marketing departments

2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"

3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a result

Finally, I can fulfill my destiny of taking over r/television and banning anyone who says anything positive about a show with a laugh track. It should never have been allowed to begin with.

same, but for r/music for praising songs that have fade out endings

Add drum mixes panned from the audience perspective instead of drummer perspective and you’ve got my vote.

I always mix audience perspective because I usually stand in front of the drum kit when I see bands live. Do most people stand behind them? Am I doing something wrong?

I'm assuming OP is themselves a drummer.

yes, you are doing it wrong. drummer is not drumming from the audience perspective

Duly noted. Next time I mic up a speaker cab I'll stick the microphone where the guitarist's head is instead of on the speaker grill.

In all seriousness this topic falls squarely into the square of "strong opinion, weakly held" as far as I'm concerned - nobody except people like us actually cares. That being said I've yet to hear a cogent argument for the contrary position... I make music for the audience, not for musicians.

I think a rational argument for it is that stereo panning of drumkit elements are not something you can hear from the audience, and maybe even from the stage. Can anybody even remember having the "audience" stereo experience in real life? You'd have to be standing right in front of the drumkit.

Whereas drummers actually experience this panning configuration in real life, and when you're placing the mics in the mix, that's the set of ears you're trying to mimic, really because there isn't any _other_ set of ears to opine. And it's an important one because it provides the lion's share of the stereo image.

Speaking as a drummer and sometimes producer, the only people likely to have strong opinions about this are drummers. All of my drummer friends agree: audience mixes make some albums unlistenable on headphones. Nobody else will notice either way, so mix drummer perspective on the off chance that the drummers listening will appreciate it.

Live albums get a pass, of course. And yes, lefty drummers exist. If a lefty drummer wants their kit panned the way they hear it, that is of course fine.

How do you know the drummer isn't left-handed?

And CDs where the track actually starts five seconds into the previous track and it’s never been fixed in any digital version ever.

blame Bob Ludwig for that

More seriously, the other day someone spent significant time and effort trying to convince me that the new version of The Wonder Years featuring a black family was anti-white propaganda by The Jews. If he's a reddit user I'm sure he'd love to mod a sub with such a large community.

Ohhh, it's a new version of The Wonder Years... I had never seen the original show, but I was vaguely aware of it, and it was playing in the gym the other day and I saw the main characters being black and I felt like I was deep in the Mandela Effect or something.

I feel like the crazies ranting about "white erasure" are making it harder to criticize these race-reboots on the grounds they should be criticized for: laziness. Mediocre products where the selling point is, "we swapped races, give us points," remain mediocre and are unbelievably lazy compared to what we should see... which is new and interesting things with diversity baked in.

Unfortunately the hysterical racists are so loud and pervasive that this is yet another issue we see broken down in a Manichean battle to cover for a total lack of new ideas.

I just let it be "lazy" as you say as the rest of tons of other stuff is lazy and don't bother to think to much about it. I'd rather focus on stuff I actually like.

That's a good default, I think people who spend all of their time obsessing about what they hate are really missing out.

It's extremely hard to take any middle of the road position now. Extremists on either side just won't allow it.

It's like calling a song lazy because it uses the same chords as another song. Gender/race-bent remakes are still entirely original works with new scripts and new shots. Even if they were to keep the script the same and make a shot-for-shot remake with new actors and a new crew, that's still 99% new work that's being done. I'd watch a shot-for-shot remake of something like Star Wars with a gender-swapped cast, that sounds like a lot of fun.

Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.

I'll go on the record of being in favor of species-swapping Ewoks and Gungans, with Rancors and Gamorreans respectively.

Its lazy on the plane of 'what kind of show should we hire some one else to make'.

Good shout on bringing it up though

> Gender/race-bent remakes are still entirely original works with new scripts and new shots.

That's not what the word "original" means.

Sequels, adaptations, remakes, reboots, etc. are not "entirely original" because they're using existing stories or characters.

Whether you like those works or not, it's flat out _false_ to call them "entirely original".

Rather than arguing with him about racism I tried explaining the commercial logic behind the decision, pointing out that advertisers would like to reach black consumers and if the original show was popular with a black audience then recycling the successful formula was a safer commercial decision than trying to build a new brand, but he kept going on about his heritage being stolen. I guess this means all the Fred Savage statues will have to come down.

I don't watch television much except for a little bit of news and local weather, but it seems to me there's always about the same number of family-centered sitcoms and dramas set in the present, about one's parents generation (nostalgia aimed at 30 something starting a family) and grandparents or older ancestors (mythmaking, culture reproduction). Sitcoms are like the McRib of television; they generally don't age well but since they come and go as the cast ages out it's easy to get teary-eyed at how great they used to be.

I admire your attempt to reason with the unreasonable!

A lot of people end up as neo-nazis or similar because they're anxiety-ridden losers who take refuge in cosmic narratives. Aggressive and violent ones need punching, but lot of them are confused and need a way to vent to a non-judgmental person. Moralistic approaches tend not to be very effective ime - horse, water etc..

I agree with you, but I've never had the patience to make that work in practice.

I support you in your quest.

I’m gonna ban everyone who complains about Ted Lasso.

Barbecue sauce.

The worst part about Ted Lasso was that there wasn't more Ted Lasso in it!

Your account has been suspended for 24 hours.

I need someone to make an AI-show filter for removing laugh tracks.

It doesn’t work.

The pauses are built into the script. It’s worse, it’s far worse. It highlights that the scripts are usually pretty bad.

Classic example of a completely unfunny basic show https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs

As uncomfortable as some of the timings are without the tracks, it still feels a lot more bearable.

If the timings could be adjusted I feel shows might actually be better off.

Agreed. As weird as that was, I prefer it to the original.

They already have tools to cut down based on silence. So, remove the laugh track to enable this silence, then cut based on the silence. If there was a filter for ffmpeg, you could just chain them together in a single command.

that show is hilarious without the laugh track

just not in the way the creators intended

But what about Seinfeld??

> 2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"

How would that be different from the status quo?

This was my thought exactly.

The front page politics of even my local subreddit are completely divorced from the concerns of my neighbors and other millenials I know.

Comeon man. Sure, there's a lot of evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the elite super-mods and gently pushed acceptance of pedophilia, but it's all circumstantial at best

I think it’s a complete mistake to think Maxwell who definitely was a Reddit powermod gave a single shit about pedophillia or the girls she trafficked.

It was a blackmail operation. I am certain it was a means to an end.

Same as being a Reddit power mod. It’s about control.

Despite the fact I think I have an answer, let me say this is a good and important question.

In the status quo, Reddit, the mods, and the subreddit users have all coevolved with each other.

https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution

They may not be entirely happy with each other, but they've developed with each other slowly over time, developed callouses, and generally worked out how to live with each other. Even if a mod here leaves and a mod there joins, the incremental changes to the community can be absorbed.

A complete replacement of the mod structure of a subreddit, especially a lot of subreddits at a time, will cause more chaos than you may initially expect. In ecosystem terms, imagine simply yanking out an entire species and trying to replace it by engineering fiat. Yes, eventually the ecosystem will resettle into some new equilibrium... but there is no guarantee that that equilibrium will be similarly healthy, biodiverse, etc. There's no guarantee it will even be an ecosystem at all; the Sahara Desert is basically an ecosystem that was so disrupted that it just straight-up collapsed. It is theoretically possible for it to end up healthier, but, well, look out in the real world at what ecosystem modification tends to produce and I think you'll be on the right track.

Replacing all the co-evolved mods with brand new ones is going to be intrinsically more disruptive than you may think. Moreover, the selection mechanism for the new mods is also likely to be highly disruptive; however they do it they're not going to be taking some mythical random sample, there's going to be some sort of systematic correlation between them all that will further tend to result in the communities experiencing rapid and non-trivial change. Plus, new mods will have no habits, no tools developed, no support structure from other existing mods, etc.

Continuing the biological metaphor, this is all coming at a time when Reddit is inflaming the entire community. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly passionate about the API issue, I've just been following the community lead on it for the subreddit I'm a mod in, but I am definitely taking note of the loud notes of contempt coming out of Reddit in this drama. If this is the level of contempt they have for us all in vetted public statements, how much more contempt we must all be held in inside the organization when they can speak freely with each other. Consciously and otherwise, people are picking up on this, and things that a user might otherwise have pushed through will become reasons to leave for inflamed users.

The sum total of all of this is that while Reddit has the technical ability to remove and add mod status as they see fit, the community dynamics are more complicated than someone simply modeling the community as "the given set of people" may understand. They are living organisms of their own, if not ecosystems of their own, driven by a complex mishmash of relationships between the participants, and the level of disruption will be greater than you expect. Moreover, if you are not looking at the situation properly, the disruption will initially be smaller than you expect. The first day the invasive species is introduced into the ecosystem, nothing appears to be wrong. The first week after Reddit just boots all the mods and installs their own may seem like nothing much has gone wrong. The initial sound and fury will die down. But the sound and the fury isn't the damage; that's just the inflammation. The damage will only be seen in the weeks and months afterwards.

One of the most challenging things about managing communities is that for the most part, in my considered opinion, mass exodus is not the beginning of the trouble. It is the end. If you judge the quality of your community management simply by the membership numbers, you won't be getting any alarms until well after it is too late. By raw numbers I doubt in 2-4 weeks that Reddit will appear to be in any trouble. But the processes set into motion by such a drastic action will play out nevertheless.

Among the many disruptions a community may experience, rolling back to your original question, is a surprising shift in the community consensus, one that has not necessarily co-evolved with all the rest of the membership. A comfortable egalitarian community may become very doctrinaire about certain political matters, or, equally shocking to an established community, vice versa. It isn't just a question of whether a community is pushing a particular agenda, but which one. A sudden shift can be disruptive to the entire community ecosystem, even if there's a community right over there with exactly the same agenda happily functioning, because they co-evolved with it.

Well, Apollo and Boost will stop working...

There's been no "make the cut". There's been first-come-first-served, followed by obtaining the favor of the first-come.

This is what I don’t understand about the claims that any next generation of mods would be incapable of doing the job.

I think it will be exactly like the current status quo. You see subreddit and mod drama happening all the time.

So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.

> So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.

Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.

It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.

Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.

> The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views.

Do you mean three segments between pretty left and extreme left? Because I am kind of skeptical there is a conservative mod on the Seattle sub. I saw how much of CHOP and the murders there were covered up.

Inquiring minds (and a future resident) need to know -- which Seattle subreddit is the best? Or at least, what are the flavors?

The Seattle subreddit is pretty calm. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote democrat' values.

The SeattleWA subreddit is pretty angry. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote republican values'.

I prefer the Seattle reddit but don't much like either. The Seattle subreddit can have too much holier than thou sniping for points for my taste. Its the kind of place where if you expressed some doubt about this 'defund the police' thing you've heard about you might get some thoughtful responses and you might also get a breathless history lesson that accuses you of supporting chattel slavery. The SeattleWA subreddit is too full of violence for me - many posts are about violent crime, conversations about street people frequently have people fantasizing about using violence to resolve the issue. Its the kind of place where a post asking what post-covid seattle is like mostly has people expressing contempt for masking policies in the abstract and deriding people they have seen wearing a mask, a few folk addressing the question, and one person who has been around long enough to compare it to the recession in the 80's (which I thought was neat enough to mention).

I don't know of a third, but those two are different enough that I think even a casual inspection of both will give you an idea of which you might prefer.

Those both sound pretty boring.

Curious in general, has Seattle as a greater entity mostly split into red & blue lines?

Last time I was there, I remember there were more independent (and interesting) anti-WTO/globalization and anarchist contingents.

Well, in this case it'll be interesting to see the power-hungry betray the higher ups on the mod team to get a better position.

everyone always says this yet getting a mod to relinquish their position is nearly impossible. Reddit mods desperately want to be mods and will do everything in their power to hold on to it. I know its a stereotype, but for many it is literally the only semblance of power/control they have over their life.

>everyone always says this yet getting a mod to relinquish their position is nearly impossible.

There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.

> There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.

There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds.

When questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again, hundreds), such answers of course completely evade of the question.

>Reddit mods desperately want to be mods and will do everything in their power to hold on to it. I know its a stereotype, but for many it is literally the only semblance of power/control they have over their life.

Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.

Wouldn’t a properly prompted LLM be an OK mod?

It would, but spez doesn't have OPEX for the GPU hours it'd require. Both for fine-tuning for per-subreddit rules, and running the model itself.

I don't see why he wouldn't. Top of the line hardware is in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. He should have the OPEX-budget to buy enough cards to distort the market.

I wonder what dang thinks about that for HN?

I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.

Alright, I see. Reddit is not my thing, but I can see how this gets complex (and costly) fast.

My understanding is Reddit the company actually already uses openai's moderation api[1]. Not sure they expose that to anyone (even mods) outside the company. It's not an LLM I don't think though, it's just a set of classifiers to give a probability that something violates various categories of their TOS.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation

A few-shot prompt should be able to do it. Now, I will admit I have not tried; but you could have the prompt be some posts that are considered "on topic" (of the sub) and others that are "off topic", and let the LLM rate these posts. Limit the number of new posts to a small number to prevent probing and spamming.

And handling the 11th unique story on a single topic being posted and voted up by brigades that week? Considering people's user history when making moderation judgments? Having the context to understand new dog whistles? All things that are technically possible, I guess, but it requires a lot of complex prompting, long context windows, and effort placed into moderation tools that Reddit doesn't seem to have put significant effort into before.

That's going to be very costly

"You are a bad user. I am a good Bing."

This kills me, everytime.

Will the future be Star Trek or Dune as far as AI is concerned?

No. It would be able to do some of the parts of moderation everyone would find easy, none of the stuff people would find hard and would cost a lot.[1] There are AI-powered companies and tools[2] that help with moderation but nothing that can automate everything that human mods do on any site with a reasonable user community.

[1] Source: am responsible for trust and safety including the tech solution and the moderation team for a 1bil+ views site. [2] For example https://hivemoderation.com/ or https://www.openweb.com/

Don't believe me? OpenAI themselves use a special-purpose model and not an LLM for moderation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03274

If they don't think this is a situation for an LLM, you can probably safely assume it's not.

Oh, I believe you. Thanks for the references.

I have a feeling they won't have a hard time finding deranged weirdos who want to mod and will remove anything that could in any way raise an eyebrow of advertisers/payment processors/etc

The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.

>The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.

As if the current mods are any different?

Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.

>There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation

Whenever I see this sentiment I'm honestly stumped as to how anyone's experience can be so different from mine. What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.

Different subs have different rules and different formats on what they expect. Casually posting as you would in one thread might get you banned in another.

Here is a good example. As a new user signed up for an account and posted in a sub got a lot of replies but didn't come back for a few months. Tried replying and was forbidden because of low karma points. Never came back..

The reason why you as a long term reddit user are stumped is because your experience is different.

> Different subs have different rules and different formats on what they expect

This is a core feature that distinguishes Reddit as a "Community of communities". It's not a bug, it's a feature

It's false barriers that setup this tribal mentality where you think you have ownership in a community that someone else owns. Many are discovering this week that their ownership is fleeting

It wouldn't be the first time in history that stewards attempted a popular revolt against the real power

>What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.

That's the problem, it can be anything. No, I'm not going to sit down and read every single bullet point of your specific subreddit rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult. I don't know how many times I've seen an interesting thread from a sub I've never visited, tried to add to the conversation, and got auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.

So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.

> No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.

Good!

I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.

If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.

So thank you for staying away.

>So thank you for staying away.

And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."

HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.

> And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."

You can always create your own and be the first over there.

I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.

> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.

HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.

> If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.

Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."

> You can always create your own and be the first over there.

And be the only one over there.

If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.

"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.

"I absolutely refuse to even read the guidelines for participating in this community. 30 seconds of mental effort is too much for me to invest." "Gosh why does this community seem so upset with me, I did my best to be insightful and helpful"

>No, I'm not going to sit down and read [...] the rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult [...or] step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.

(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)

So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.

People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.

Also:

>auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post"

You literally listed the recourse you were offered! In the next sentence! And said you refused it.

>the rules used to curate a specific community

Or ensure group think.

Same question, what specific "group think" are you so concerned is happening on reddit?

(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)

> Same question, what specific "group think" are you so concerned is happening on reddit?

Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.

I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.

Once again, I'm astonished at how different our experiences can be, since I'm a frequent commentor and I literally cannot remember the last time a comment of mine got deleted.

I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'

> Same question, what specific "group think" are you so concerned is happening on reddit?

For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.

I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.

> So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.

Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.

My local subreddit has become a proxy for /r/fuckcars and is also pushing a strong pro-new-airport narrative, among other things. There is a subreddit rule against “creating drama in the community” and any comment against the hive mind on these topics is interpreted by the mods as creating drama and removed, sometimes including a temporary ban. They more or less enforce the echo chamber. Disagreement is futile.

Meanwhile, reporting comments that clearly violate the subreddit rules for things like ad-hominem attacks and spam in turn get the reporter reported to Reddit admins for abusing the report button.

From my perspective a few of the elder mods stepped down and were replaced by activist mods that are moderating with strong, shameless ego to reinforce their preferred viewpoints and narrative.

That's unfortunate, and you've managed to present one of the few good counterexamples there. Unfortunately, "<city name>" isn't really a great topic for a singular community, since cities, by nature, host multitudes, and are inherently political entities. The best alternative is probably to create your own sub, or try to talk to one of the mods about it in private so as not to create drama.

Unfortunately messaging the mods about moderation activity is also against the rules of that particular subreddit and will also result in a ban.

Okay, you got me, those mods are on a power trip lol.

Although it depends on the size of the subreddit - you tend to get a lot of idiots who complain incessantly about plainly justified moderation, and we have to remember that these are literally unpaid volunteers, they're entitled to take actions that make their job easier.

>As if the current mods are any different?

People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing. I think there's a lot of general discontent about how reddit works that saw people more likely to support this strike. Some because it was the last straw, some to watch it burn.

While I do think reddit is blundering and taking their free labor and content for granted, I think the power mods and more generally the karma system create a lot of anger that has piggybacked on this.

I think you're right, but I think the new ones will be even worse and may actually cause the user exodus that will hurt them. It's these second order effects that Reddit doesn't seem to be taking into account because they're so confident this is mostly inside baseball to the average user.

Yes, as far as API pricing. No as far as the enshittification with "new" styling, NFTs, and all the other dumb shit. And the power mods.

> People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing.

I'm sure that the majority of this is

WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER

true, but i think the API is one of the worst parts now. But there is

WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER

some functionality I use for old.reddit.com, that I'm pretty sure will be next on the chopping block...

Admin has been particularly horrible lately. Mods complaining is the tip of the iceberg. Today's Reddit is a far cry from what it used to be. Honestly I do have this sort of feeling that I could care less if it dies.

It’s not exactly new. It’s just that it’s being seen now.

You know the best day I ever saw on Reddit? The day after Trump was elected. The bots and mods and preppanned Clinton themed party made for seemingly ONE DAY of actually unique and genuine content if you could get past all the crying in some places.

2016 is when I learned just how much the narrative is controlled. When they had nothing to post, it was a completely different place.

I’m sure because I dared mention Trump as a date reference some people won’t believe me.

No, admin used to be much more hands off. You are complaining about moderators.

> "The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line."

Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.

Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.

Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?

What? They're not gonna put a bunch of edgy 4chan guys on the mod teams, that's not what advertisers like. They'll get the type of people who moderate every other mainstream site. Extremely left-leaning authoritarian types.

> Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.

So why would Reddit do it?

More likely, Reddit will pick moderators who are extremely advertiser friendly and who will squash "controversial" viewpoints -- as we've seen on other sites/ services, those "controversial" viewpoints are things like the precautionary principle, biological sex, free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.

What supports the argument that it will go to "bigots, cranks and the severely deranged"?

>I have a feeling they won't have a hard time finding deranged weirdos who want to mod and will remove anything that could in any way raise an eyebrow of advertisers/payment processors/etc

Yea this is a surefire way to end up with greedy, power-hungry moderators that have no interest in making the community better.

If mods on Reddit really believed they were irreplaceable, wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?

But that's not why the protest is happening...?

No one is claiming to be irreplaceable, although if you have evidence to the contrary you're welcome to provide it.

>If mods on Reddit really believed they were irreplaceable

I was going more for "very hard, especially in bulk and on short notice" than irreplaceable there.

>wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?

Already did a while back...used to mod some big-ish subs.

Going private seems like a reasonable intermediate step though. A bit like workers holding a strike instead of straight to mass resignation

8 years ago a bunch of Reddits went dark to protest the firing of Victoria Taylor. The AMA sub claimed that they wouldn't be able to continue without Victoria's help. Eventually the sub opened back up and things continued as they had before; the average user noticed no difference. If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh.

I still use Reddit and I get that beloved people get fired for any number of reasons, but AMAs have been noticeably worse since Victoria’s time running them.

I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.

Actually this is a great example of wht they're going to get. AMA's used to be a GREAT use of Reddit when Victoria ran them. The questions were fresh and it was a very broad pool of people they interviewed. Since then they've either been 1) terrible 2) obviously pimping something or 3) a combination of both. They're not even worth reading and I stopped looking at them years ago.

I agree. I thought they'd be able to replace Victoria and it'd be no issue. But the magic of AMA, part of what drew me to reddit in the first place, was gone. I scarcely look at them now.

Yeah Victoria did a good job queueing up a high quality experience for readers and the AMA participant when celebrities did do their press tours.

My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”).

And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.

> I stopped looking at them years ago.

Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic.

After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.

> the average user noticed no difference

I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.

Yeah I'm thoroughly confused by OP because AMAs are a noticeable bungled opportunity on Reddit's part: They were attracting extremely high-profile people (Obama did one at one point), and now it's far less a preeminent part of the platform than it used to be.

The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.

AMA’s now are thinly veiled publicity events - like celebrities dialing into your local radio show to shill their latest project. There is rarely any feeling of actual engagement in modern AMA’s.

> If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh.

That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.

When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.

Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.

I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.

> With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.

Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.

It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.

I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.

It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.

> I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.

It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.

The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).

None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.

> It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that.

The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.

Everything you're saying actually corroborates OP's claim.

> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there

That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.

If the sub is experiencing substantial user growth isn't that an indication that the sub is doing well?

No, /r/IamA was a default subreddit for many years, thus all new users would get subscribed to it (I think defaults have been gone for some years now, but subscriber inflation already happened)

> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure.

It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.

Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.

I think r/IAMA got a lot worse since Victoria left.

I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.

Huh, that explains why I haven’t looked at a Reddit AMA in the last ~5-10 years or so. I’m guess it was actually 8 years and I never realized what happened.

It's subjective I guess, but the AMA content quality on reddit did seem to fall off a cliff after she left. Not reddit destroying but definitely left a hole

AMAs are basically dead on reddit these days. Scroll through this listing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all

I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago.

It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.

I haven't seen a good AMA in a very long time. Tons of enshitification is eventually tolerated, especially by people who had no experience with an older version. That doesn't make it good.

They were actually right. This is exactly when Reddit AMA's went from something spectacular to spectacular garbage. They were producing bangers left and right, and what have they done since then?

That's funny because I use this example the opposite of you. AMA's completely changed after Victoria's departure and haven't been the same since. There were weekly high-profile AMAs that got large media coverage and it never went back to that.

Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.

Jesus I completely forgot about r/IAMA and Im a daily reddit visitor.

I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.

But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.

Lot's of people would love to take over as the new mods. The current mods aren't quiting for a reason, they enjoy it.

Somebody told them AI can do it?

I used to moderate a support subreddit, we eventually moved to Discord and encouraged everyone to move there as well. Behaviour such as only supports our move.

I wish Discords were discoverable.

Why do I need so many members to show up when search for servers? That means I need to have a community somewhere else.

https://disboard.org/

Ironically, discord doesn't support use of third party clients and you risk an account ban if you use one of the many unofficial clients.

It’s obviously not really about the ability to use 3rd party clients. It’s because of the sudden change and the official app being flaming garbage.

This wouldn’t be an issue at all if the official reddit app was even half as good as the worst of the 3rd party clients and reddit actually providing parity in mod tools across their own clients. I have to go to new reddit to do multiple mod actions.

I despise Discord, but Discord's app works well. Its kind of like the Yin to Reddit's UI Yang.

Some people don't like that its electron. And its fairly crappy on Linux if you use Wayland.

The /r/science mods are all coming back on Monday, a decision they made a few days ago, before any threats were made. They are worried that if they got replaced, it would be with people who would destroy the community they worked so hard to build.

I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.

And thus, Reddit holds all the power. If the mods are so attached to their community, that Reddit can dictate whatever terms they want, then the mods have no leverage.

On the one hand I can understand it...but also that is such a feeble stance.

Mods that feel that strongly about protecting their community would do so much better in a federated context.

Federation works for Twitter, it doesn't work for Reddit. If my Mastodon instance federates with yours, I can see your posts, you can see mine, we're fully merged. If my lemmy instance federates with yours, we can browse each other's communities, but those communities themselves don't merge. The userbase merges but the communities do not, and the community is the base unit that gives Reddit value. Federated Reddits will never take off for this reason. You either have a bunch of fractured communities that are all worse because there is no network effect, or you have one instance (or one community) absorb all the traffic and become its own centralized fiefdom.

That's actually bottom of the barrel reasoning in my book, to cave to the admins because Reddit admins would punish you.

It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.

/r/science was already thrash too so biased it hurts, might as well be /r/politics2. Honestly nothing value would be lost with that sub.

Current front page:

>A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories

>Being female, liberal, intellectually humble, and having weak party identification are all positively associated with writing more persuasive political arguments

>When house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy

Reddit management is delusional. The IPO money is blinding them.

I really hope a mass migration to lemmy instances really sticks.

People want power, why wouldn't you want to be a mod of a popular subreddit?

Everyone.

They are not asking a lot, just don't shut down the site in a hissy fit

Maybe we'll have paid mods, but not paid by Reddit, but paid with people and organizations with money, an agenda, and some societal changes in mind.

I'm pretty sure that's already happening in some cases, and not for the good of society.

do you have any evidence backing the statement that moderation quality correlates with sub closure?

> do you have any evidence backing the statement that moderation quality correlates with sub closure?

I made no such statement.

> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.

sorry for pharaprasing.

do you have any evidence that there is a negative correlation between 'bottom of the barrel mods' and 'mods that are going to be outsted by the message about subs having be made private?'

Does reddit care? Free labor that doesn't complain costs less.

Based on a quick google search, only .004% of Reddit users are mods. I find it difficult to believe that reddit will have a hard time finding competent mods within the remaining 99.996% of its userbase.

Counter-argument: 99.996% of Reddit users apparently don't want to be moderators or they already would be, so finding more will be very hard.

I really don't think that's the case. If you want to mod r/politics, you don't just raise your hand and then get mod powers. Moderators are a closed group.

You can create your own subreddit and be the sole moderator of it in about sixty seconds of effort.

Sure. But that doesn't really have any bearing on whether Reddit can find volunteers to take over big subs.

This sounds distinctly different from one raising their proverbial hand to gain moderator powers on one of the most popular subreddits on the site. How many non-moderator users don't care about moderating a subreddit with 1 user but do care about moderating a subreddit with 1M users?

If someone wouldn't be willing to start and grow their own subreddit, should they really be entrusted with the keys to a big one?

> Counter-argument: 99.996% of Reddit users apparently don't want to be moderators or they already would be, so finding more will be very hard.

That was what you said before.

What is the process for starting a new subreddit?

You click the "Create Your own Subreddit" button and fill out a few fields.

>I find it difficult to believe that reddit will have a hard time finding competent mods within the remaining 99.996% of its userbase.

Competent - many I'm sure. Damn near anyone that has supervised people in just about any context is probably overqualified.

Competent and willing to put in hours of unpaid work dealing with crazy people and drama and bickering and spam deletion...less so.

>Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?

Who would want to instantly have status over millions of people? Hmm, that's a hard one...

/r/programming was predicted to remain open during the strike, due to it being modded by Reddit admins. But they also went dark when the top post was collecting examples of chatgpt generated anti-protest comments. https://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddi...

I always savor the moment when people discover they are being led by morons.

Pretty much, essentially ones that will be left are ones wanting the power rather than good of their community

Ever since most of these social sites launched their advertising portals, moderation has basically become a practice in how to creatively subvert non-paying posters anyway.

These sites need to ensure they deliver on numbers represented to paid advertisers, and now it's pretty much the only way to make it to top rankings, so how much one is willing to pay determines what's on the front page more than anything else now.

The corporate mods are the ones that prevent harmful and deceptive things from staying at the top of the front page I bet, and they're not likely to be regular mod roles any time soon due to the power wielded.

These massive social media sites all get corrupted after a while and then can never manage to come back. This may well be that point for Reddit.

If I were reddit I would probably think "LLMs will moderate just fine".

So the mods will stay the same. Got it!

> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.

There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.

This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.

Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?

> Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?

The same type of people who want to be on the boards of HOA's. eg: the ones you least want doing it.

I'm almost starting to think they really will break Reddit.

When all this started I had no doubt that the protests would come, make their point, end, and then Reddit would continue on its way.

But this has been so poorly handled.

I think a key to reddit's "success" (such as it is) is that they figured out how to scale moderation -- by getting volunteers to do the tough work for free. I'm sure reddit can toss all the uncooperative mods and get as many new ones as they could ever want.

But they are changing the fundamental dynamic between mod, subreddit and reddit the company. I wonder if this won't actually break the system.

Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.

Now mods will have to accept that supporting reddit's business goals is the "zeroth law" for any subreddit. I just wonder if enough quality moderators will be willing to put in the time and effort required to keep a larger community from devolving into a cess pool, or to build up new subreddits -- for free.

When you're working for yourself doing what you want, when you want, you don't mind not getting paid for it. When a boss is telling you want to do and when to do it, you expect to get paid. Reddit is making itself the boss of the mods.

The thing is, this is an entirely unforced error. Overwhelmingly, the natural interests of subreddits are aligned with Reddits business goals, or at least aren't in opposition to them. The horribly handled roll out of the API pricing has essentially backed mods into a corner, basically forcing them to protest and then extend the protest.

IDK, maybe this was all 4D chess, and reddit wanted to get rid of third party apps and have an excuse to purge moderators with a sense of ownership over the subreddits they moderate. But it sure seems to me like they just don't know what they are doing. I know reddit needs to figure out how to become sustainable (profitable), and changing the dynamic between reddit and third-party apps is likely a necessary part of that. But I can't believe disengaging moderators can possibly help.

> Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.

As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.

As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.

So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.

If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.

> The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.

That's often the case, but not always. A bad mod can drive people to an alternate subs. And having the default name doesn't mean that a sub with an alternate name can't thrive. I enjoy r/marijuanaenthusiasts despite the fact that I've never smoked.

> When you're working for yourself doing what you want, when you want, you don't mind not getting paid for it. When a boss is telling you want to do and when to do it, you expect to get paid. Reddit is making itself the boss of the mods.

This is spot on. Reddit's success relies entirely on the intrinsic motivation of moderators. That intrinsic motivation in turn is derived from the feeling of building something of long-lasting value.

There is no instrinsic joy in wading through your mod queue and deleting spam and garbage. The work itself is deeply unfun.

The reward is feeling that if you do that work and do it consistently, then you will create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive.

Now Reddit is sending a clear signal that at any point in time, they can stomp all over your community and kick you out. If I was mod of any decent-sized Reddit, that would make no longer feel safe investing the time it takes to earn that intrinsic reward, when the reward could evaporate at any moment.

> create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive

> the reward could evaporate at any moment

Wait a minute, is the reward the fact that the community exists? That's not going to evaporate overnight when Reddit replaces a mod.

The fear of your reward evaporating sounds a lot more like this work is driven by ego and the desire for control.

Would you want to clean your whole house and throw a party if you knew you might get kicked out before the party was over?

It's basic human nature to want acknowledgement for going something good.

I'm -> <- this close to deleting all the posts in my 15 year old reddit account. It's not just moderators they are losing.

Per another thread, it appears Reddit is rapidly undeleting such posts.

Sounds likely illegal if true.

They definitely undeleted all mine this morning. Waiting to see if they come back again.

In my experience Reddit seems to have various different cache/worker servers and it can takes a while for things to fully propagate. But they could be so overloaded the deletes are silently failing.

Check out the other thread. It looks like they just globally zeroed their is_post_deleted column.

Things I deleted are still [deleted]. Sounds like a bunch of FUD and rdrama.net trolling.

Well, a decent number of people have been hit by it, from the looks of it. I just got to spend a bit of my morning re-deleting things.

How much have you deleted, an odd post, or do you have an auto-deleter?

I haven't deleted anything recently. Delete not working temporarily could just be denial of service or the scripts may not work anymore. Reddit made it a lot more difficult for autodelete scripts a while ago, it's not something new or some recent intervention.

Are the posts you deleted currently still deleted? Were they deleted within the last 5ish years?

Yes. And yes. In fact I remembered a post I deleted two weeks ago and it's still gone.

Ok, so it's definitely more complicated then a global flag change. I killed my posts manually and they were gone for at least a day and a half. So, undo deleted posts on any account that axed at least N posts in the last week? Something like that?

Well, if the posts come back again, I guess I'll just get in an edit war with them. Disgusting behavior.

Thanks for the data point!

EDIT: Huh, so now about a dozen have come back. I wonder if they'll trickle back in, and what the thresholds are...

I'm going to have to clear the account in batches of five or something aren't I.

Why bother?

Spite mostly. Company's run by someone I hold in contempt, and they undid my small protest. So, I'll make it stick one way or another, delete the account, and never give them my time again.

Like Epic, Honest T, or the state of Indiana. Worthy grudges all :D

They don't give a shit about us (14 year old account here), they've already gotten everything. What they want is the endless hordes of TikTok normies posting animated gifs and HD user pics etc. And it's working. The old reddit we loved is never coming back.

I think you're right. I've been active on Reddit for years. It has always been a fractious collection of niche communities. It can be hard for an outsider to navigate. For all our complaining that Reddit is turning its back on its users, what makes us think they want to keep us around? I remember when Facebook started making changes so it could appeal to people outside of a handful of college campuses. There was a lot of complaining, but Facebook grew massively as a result.

This moment could be remembered either as Reddit's "own goal" moment where they kill their platform, or their "MTV stops playing music videos" moment where they redefine who they are.

Key paragraphs

> If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.

> Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.

Kinda crazy how a lower mod can request a higher mod's removal. Pretty unhealthy precedent for a community where mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod who spends all day needlessly moderating the subreddit can appeal to reddit with "look how much more active I am than him; he barely does anything! So, gimme the subreddit pls."

Normally it's only possible when the top mod has been inactive for a long time.

> mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod

I mean, here you are just describing the mods that are holding these subreddits hostage. It seems appropriate for reddit to return these to the community in the case where the obsessed power hungry mod's behavior goes against what the community wants.

Have there been any subreddits that voted to open instead of stay closed? All the ones I’ve heard about were in favor of maintaining the protest

r/NewOrleans and r/SaltLakeCity voted to end it. There has also been rampant brigading from the pro-blackout side (see r/magicTCG, in addition to a Twitch stream brigade users on r/freemagic talked about voting in the poll despite being banned from r/magicTCG). I’m curious how r/FanFiction will go since they’re doing much more robust polling with karma requirements to stop brigades.

There’s been brigading from both sides, it’s just more noticeable when it’s an outcome you personally disagree with. I’m having to remind myself that just because a) my subreddit has someone who’s never posted there vehemently arguing to stay open and b) staying open is winning the poll, that doesn’t mean it’s a brigade.

(There would be more people voting if it was a brigade, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. But emotionally it bugs me.)

I run a thousand member subreddit that is probably going to vote to stay open. Insignificant but it’s a data point.

Holding them hostage? The reddits I’ve been a part of voted to be closed.

If the higher up mods clearly don't want to run the show anymore it is natural, just and right to rely those who do.

They are still running the show. Making your subreddit private is, or at least used to be, a perfectly legitimate way of running things. Remember, reddit added that feature to their website.

Yeah I have a feeling that that feature may be going away after this all blows over.

There's still automod that you can use to just delete everything the moment it appears.

Classic attempt to break a strike. Would mods be employee, this would be illegal (at least in France). This shows how Reddit the company think how the people who work for them for free on Reddit the platform and make its value.

My mind immediately went to strike-breaking too. This isn't quite the same as they are targeting a volunteer group that has shown no interest to form a union, but this is so obviously a play out of the union busting handbook. Divide the group, make it seem like only a few select leaders want whatever they are negotiating over, and offering to elevate cooperative people into positions of power if they are willing to participate in a coup.

Is it not a real strike if the volunteers provide labor? A question for the philosophers, and in the coming years/decades, the lawyers.

In the us it is the national labor relations board, after all! Not employement relations

I think it’s something different than a strike and should thus not have any legal protections. Strikes are fair in some sense because workers aren’t being paid during that time (or at the very most by the union coffers) which goes up against the company’s ability to weather the lost revenue during the strike.

In this case, mods can keep subreddits dark without any cost to themselves because they aren’t being paid by Reddit. It’d be like if library volunteers protested by closing the library and stopping any new volunteers from entering by installing a lock on the door. OFC the library is within their rights to break the lock to let other volunteers in.

Mmmm I have an issue with the specifics of that metaphor applying to Reddit, but in general, people volunteer because volunteering brings them some non-monetary benefit, so I see it as basically the same dynamic. Of course you can’t lock the doors, just like you can’t physically obstruct/harm scabs.

In the near future when AGI eliminates scarcity (2025?) this will have to be litigated!

Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee. People who don't like what Reddit is doing should stop showing up. Mods who don't like it should stop moderating. It's as simple as that, if enough people agree, Reddit will be no more.

I will bet Reddit will be just fine.

Of course there are within their rights from a legal pov. Doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible, outright hostile move.

It was hostile by mods to close a sub like r/nba the day after the finals, and hostile to close an important sub like r/science. A poll with a small fraction of the users that was only up for a few hours and potentially brigaded doesn't mean the majority of actual users wanted those subs to close.

How would the poll have to be done to convince you it's what the majority of actual users want?

Open for a couple days in advance and only for members of that sub. The indefinite one should have opened up for a new vote. Maybe r/nba could have provided a link to an alternative sub for discussing the nba finals on Monday.

> Open for a couple days in advance and only for members of that sub.

How do you do that? Specifically, how would you limit the poll?

> Would mods be employee

Also breaking out “nothing they’re doing is illegal!!” isn’t exactly the slam dunk many seem to think it is, IMO.

> Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop.

A DND club with an IPO?

The club isn't IPOing. The real estate investment trust that hosts the DND club is. Ironically the REIT's main appeal to investors is that it's popular with DND clubs.

They work for reddit for free. You can work for someone without an employment contract or official relationship.

>Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee.

DND has no control over people doing DND at a local hobby shop, but if Reddit gets directly involved in hiring and firing and other such management of free labor then it is setting up to be viewed as an employer. There are many differences between an unaffiliated 3rd party club and direct corporate involvement in personnel management where the more Reddit tries to manage its free labor, the more it runs the risk of running afoul of FLSA. Under labor law there is a difference in working for free for a non-profit, government, etc versus a for-profit entity where they are not the same when it comes to providing free labor and FLSA rights cannot be waived away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

I'd love to see a poison mod take up their offer then and start the ball rolling on asserting some rights.

They aren't firing mods, they are telling the mods they can't come in the store anymore, they are free to look through the window.

How does that work for online French Forums or other internet platforms that are community based? What about old school BBSes?

A strike is very well defined, a "volunteer moderator strike" doesn't constitute a strike from a legal perspective

>Would mods be an employee.

I took this as mods would be considered employees in France. After a second read, it looks like they meant something different.

If this was France the mods would already be building a guillotine

That's how The Reign of Terror was invented.

The analogy appears fitting at first glance, but it's crucial to note that the moderators in question aren't simply choosing to abstain from their duties—they're actively hindering others who might wish to take up those responsibilities.

I may not be an expert in French law, yet an analogy that comes to mind would be envisioning workers of a grocery store who've decided to go on strike. But rather than merely expressing their refusal to work, they also opt to seal the store's doors, blocking customers from entering.

Of course, customers might find the current situation unfavorable due to the absence of employees (think of barren shelves, paralleling communities overpopulated with off-topic discussions). Management, too, would likely find the situation objectionable due to a lack of employees to ensure transactions are being made legally (equivalent to the absence of moderators who uphold site rules, a scenario potentially hazardous to Reddit). Even though management might be compelled to shut down the store under these circumstances, it's essential to remember that closure remains a management prerogative, not a decision for the striking workers.

> they're actively hindering others who might wish to take up those responsibilities.

Isn't that literally exactly what a strike is? No one crosses the picket line if a sufficient majority agreed to undertake the strike?

Again, not an expert on French law, but in the US you can just hire someone else to do the job in the case of most strikes. pejoratively called scabs.

It's illegal for employers to hire fixed-term employees in this case: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F34

However, they can have volunteers fill the position: https://www.editions-tissot.fr/droit-travail/jurisprudence-s...

Interesting that it’s the case that they can have volunteers in french law given the context of reddit volunteers.

It sounds to me like there are Top Mods who want to continue the boycott, with others who don't and that Reddit is looking at giving the other mods a path forward.

One of the things I have noticed is that the boycott is not from the users but from the mods of the community. Even if the community had a vote, if you want to boycott fine but they are forcing others to go along with with them.

So either they are not the majority or they feel that the community has such little willpower to continue the boycott that they must force them to take part.

Huh? All subreddits that have ran votes, the community has been in majority favor of closing.

I voted on a few of those, so these were real, and the outcome was overwhelmingly voting for blackout.

I think the larger issue is now the blackout is still continuing the addicts are needing their fix.

Not what I've seen at all, which is why many subs are reopened with stickied posts saying it's what their communities wanted.

That is (1) not true and (2) meaningless given most of those polls were brigaded by a small set of vocal whiny users voting in subreddits they aren't even involved in (3) even given both if those, I doubt you can find a poll for a large subreddit that shows even 10% of users supporting a blackout.

So, can you show how most polls were brigaded?

r/freemagic users who were banned from r/magicTCG talked about voting in the r/magicTCG poll. Apparently, mods of r/tennis posted in a Discord asking people to come help and vote to support the blackout as well. A lot of polls were mentioned in r/ModCoord which biases strongly in favor of the blackout. There’s much more incentive to brigade on the blackout side since users who don’t care about the subs in question lose nothing by those subs going private.

Eh, I gave you the clear out under #3 where you could show that these blackouts were really the will of the people. You haven't done that, if your strongest argument is about "oh, prove there was brigading", I think we're at the point where, at best for you, any polls are basically just meaningless (if they were meaningful you could use them under point #3 to refute me).

I saw posts in threads here saying that some sub-reddits didn't have votes.

And the vote or not does not adress my point about forcing users who don't want to participate to have to.

If the majority of the users wanted to boycott, then if they don't go to Reddit.com, simple as that.

>And the vote or not does not adress my point about forcing users who don't want to participate to have to.

They're always free to go start their own subreddits.

The same is true for the mods. Mods don't own subreddits, the community does. If they want to close down communities that aren't theirs, why not just quit Reddit? They are free to stop moderating.

> Mods don't own subreddits, the community does.

Reddit's practices until now said the opposite.

And that's a pretty terrible thing. I guess it's biting them in the ass now.

I think it is a weird subject for popular vote to begin with.

Every individual already had the option to post or not post, moderate or not moderate. The vote only impacted those who wanted to remain active.

Very likely non-representative due to sampling bias and brigading.

Prove it.

That's not how it works. If you want to claim some poll as evidence of user sentiment, you have to prove that it is representative.

Do you claim all polls are brigaded until disproven? Or those you don't like?

No, just the ones that people are strongly motivated to brigade, and ones where I saw discussion of discord groups where links to such polls were posted to mobilize brigaders. But none of that should matter. If you claim your poll is representative, you need to demonstrate it. Don't make claims that outpace your evidence. It's not that hard.

r/pics had 56,000 votes. That would be quite a lot of brigading... https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14b2a6q/poll_decide_o...

I guess r/SaltLakeCity and r/NewOrleans don’t exist.

You'd end up with unmoderated subs if the mods just went on strike.

And that would then be Reddit's problem would it not?

Possibly much more harmful to the users.

First labor strike, huh?

Ask yourself, who told you that was true? The strikers? Or the guy with the vested interest in breaking the strike and desperate to find anyone -- literally anyone -- to cross the line?

If the mods want to go on strike it's not a problem. What I am talking about is that the mods decided to drag the users into their issue.

I don't even use Reddit that often, I see that there is a vocal contingent that is telling me how Reddit is ruining Reddit.

If the company wants to kill their community, that is their prerogative. If it kills their company, that is what happens.

Strikes can't stop people from crossing the line and becoming scabs. I think that sets this situation apart in an interesting way.

Subs didn't vote on if they wanted to keep posting/moderating. They essentially voted on if dissidents or the minority can keep posting/moderating

They voted on making their subs private.

Everything you wrote is a gross misrepresentation of the stituation.

I think it perfectly accurate but maybe I'm missing something.

If I want to participate in a protest by not creating content, I don't need a vote or moderator permission to do so. I can just do it.

Going private means that people who want to post can't.

In terms of a strike, it wasn't some people walking out. It was a vote to walk out and then prevent everyone else who wants to work from doing so

The communities I frequent voted for the blackout and voted again on whether to make it permanent

It sounds like that to you because they’re implying that, without evidence. Worth evaluating the biases of the sources here :)

I guess the trick would be to flood Reddit with requests from allied mods that will keep the sub closed anyway. Presumably Reddit doesn't have the bandwidth to really vet these requests.

This is the way. Especially if the action can be more unpredictable than simply taking the subreddit private. Maybe remove all new posts or something.

If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.

I mod a top-1000-by-subs subreddit with about 800-900K subs. It has tight rules and aggressive automods. And people like that subreddit.

Not gonna lie, if reddit strips our moderation, once the automod rules get figured out by the spammers, the value that particular subreddit will collapse into trash and spam.

so, sure, aim that footgun and start pulling the trigger... go on then.

I don’t blame them. Reddit owns the subreddits, not redditors.

I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit in the first place. A Reddit model where the mods share in profits (kind of how YouTube creators do) would be interesting.

But if you’re going to sign up for that, you can’t expect Reddit to just let you tank their site. It was never yours.

I’d do the same thing if I were Reddit, though I guess I’d also not be in this situation if I were them either because I’d just price the API reasonably.

There are distinct questions here: whether Reddit has the right to forcibly reopen subreddits, whether it’s justified in doing so, and whether it’s a good idea at all. The first isn’t in dispute, but the other two are open for debate.

It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platform. It could also ruin some communities if the wrong new mods are chosen.

I’m not sure how likely this is but it is plausible.

> whether Reddit has the right to forcibly reopen subreddits

Reddit owns Reddit, no? They have the right to do whatever they want with their website.

Reread the comment you are replying to.

> *The first isn’t in dispute*

Yeah. I get the whole fear of the same thing happening to Reddit that happened to Digg. But digg had Reddit nipping at its heels and it was still small, Reddit is huge there’s nowhere to chase them to.

The other alternative is for Reddit to just stand by and let the blackouts chase people away indefinitely. It is hard to imagine that is better. It will upset the people who have already decided to leave Reddit anyway, but for most of the people who just want to see funny GIFs, it will be better.

The other other alternative is for Reddit to meaningfully engage with the issues that the mods have raised around API pricing.

They’ve clearly considered and rejected that idea.

> I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit

feeling of power and purpose?

Pretty much.

Weird conclusion. Power users are often groups of people operating under one account. (Motivations vary) not insane people.

> Power users are often groups of people operating under one account.

As I said,

>assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology

Landlordism is a parasitical economic strategy.

And yet mods sign up for it!

I don't like mods either but parasites? I mean sure they act like the communities they mod belong to them but that's a bit much!

I'm referring to the owners of the company, or rather their executive proxies.

A subreddit is made up of users, not an entry on reddit.

Reddit can do whatever they want with their site but they can't force users to do anything.

Thats why I argue that the boycott should be user driven and not mod driven. Let each user individually decide if they want to boycott rather than trying to force everyone into a boycott but shutting down entire subs.

Every subreddit I read that closed down first had a poll. All the polls were overwhemlingly for closing indefinitely.

Reddit doesn't seem to be ok with that either as there are reports they're undeleting content users delete in protest. The basic message is: "we control every aspect of content you put on here".

Well, according to their TOS, they do. It's really no different than any other site being able to use what you post on there.

They have the right to reverse deletions, but it's a supremely bad look and if they're really doing it (this is the first I've heard of it) I hope they catch a huge amount of flack. There could be very good reasons for some of those deletions that might impact safety, job security, or personal relationships.

I manually deleted all my content on Wednesday afternoon. As of 8 am this morning all the comments were restored. So, yep, they're definitely undeleting content.

> would be interesting.

In what way would it be interesting?

You might get a lot better mods and more participation with profit motive. It certainly had that effect with YouTube.

There would, of course, be some downsides too.

Content moderators do not get paid on Youtube unless you're talking about employees, which do not share in the profit but get paid a salary.

No I’m talking about content creators getting paid on YouTube. They get a cut of the advertising.

A Reddit Mod should be able to make money. They do a lot of work and growing a subreddit is a lot like growing a YouTube channel. Like a YouTube channel, it creates a lot of value for the site owner.

>Reddit owns the subreddits, not redditors.

Community is a bit like a butterfly. Try to grip it too tightly and you no longer have a butterfly just mush

> Reddit owns the subreddits, not redditors.

I view a subreddit as a composite of three parts: The authors, the curators, and the host.

Reddit, Inc. owns only one of those three, and it's arguably the one that's most easily replaced.

I think it’s the one that’s hardest to replace. There’s no viable competitor. People aren’t going anywhere else.

To large extent, the authors are only authors because the sub is on Reddit. They have the network effect that brings the other two. That’s very hard to replace. You could easily find another person to make up dumb rules and arbitrarily enforce them, which is what they’re doing and we’re discussing. They will succeed.

There's a quite simple non-malicious reason to become an unpaid mod - to make a community that you use better. I'm sure a substantial percent of mods joined for this reason. I've been a part of poorly moderated communities and thought: "wish I could just take down this non-compliant story or abusive comment".

Then there's a lot of negative reasons to join. For power, to gain a sphere of influence, possible to sell this as a product.

Mods should engage in malicious compliance. Historically, Reddit has done absolutely nothing to help communities suffering from malicious moderation, including banning users and censoring posts without good reason. Mods can just open up their subs, but start moderating in such a way that they drive away users. Reddit would look very hypocritical removing mods who do this now when they have been fine with that sort of behavior historically.

In the last week Reddit has shown it has no qualms with being incredibly hypocritical. Addressing issues it's ignored for sometimes it's entire lifetime only now that they are threatened. It's quite disgusting especially since I've been on the other end of begging for help/changes/etc that they ignored.

That's a hell of a way to treat the volunteers who make the existence of that site possible.

Because they know most will put up with it, just like users. At least, in my view. I've moved from Reddit (user, not a mod), but i think we're fringe. Reddit is going to be humming along like normal soon enough as long as they don't severely upset the average user.

Just like twitter.

TBH, thinking back i'm kinda shocked Digg managed to die over this stuff. Was it just a different audience back in those days? Has Reddit reached a different more apathetic audience? Or is Reddit just not upsetting people as much as Digg did?

Clearly the internet has continued to grow more mainstream which brings a larger, alternate audience. I'm just speaking to the idea of why Digg failed and why Reddit won't (in this pass at least).

"Too big to fail" perhaps?

Digg was much smaller than 2023 Reddit, and it had a competitor (Reddit) that was already leeching some of its userbase.

By the time Digg did their redesign, Reddit was already getting something like 250 million page views a month. Reddit was a clear alternative to move towards. Today, there is no clear and large alternative to Reddit, as Reddit was to Digg.

Same can be said about how they mods are treating the rest of the sub.

How so?

People want to participate in their communities and have access to historical posts and comments. Mods are not letting them do that.

In almost all of the subs I've seen doing this, there were days of polling and discussion ahead of time, with the users themselves demanding the blackout.

A lot of people claiming that the moderators are producing the content when they are more like editors in the scheme of things. Non-moderation redditors are the one producing the bulk of the content.

So I'm saying that the moderators consolidating their whole sub's voices into the voice of the moderator is analogous to how reddit is telling everyone how the site as a whole must be used.

Couldn't agree more. This is a flagrant abuse of power by mods. I hope this is a wake-up call to major companies never to let your employees unionize because the employees don't care about you or your company - they'll kill it just to spite you and then move on to the next company.

Unionize? They aren't even employees, they're unpaid volunteers that Reddit can't afford to replace with actual employees.

What a bullshit take. Employees only tend to unionize when companies don't give a shit about them. Companies that treat employees like people and pay them fairly have much less to worry about

> the employees don't care about you or your company - they'll kill it just to spite you and then move on to the next company.

Ah yes, this is in contrast to the benevolent employers who deeply care about each and every employee and would never lay them off just to buy another ivory backscratcher for the CEO.

On the one hand, I think this a stupid decision for Reddit, that it's disrespectful and very bad for the internet.

On the other hand, if it's what they're going to do, then that's how it is. You can't really expect them to just leave a namespace like, say, /r/politics in the hands of someone who openly says they aren't going to use it. So of course they're going to remove mods who stick to a blackout, what else could they do? At the end of the day it's their site and everyone's free to leave if they don't like how it's run. This was always the problem with making a home on Reddit, some of us have been saying so all along.

(PS: Please understand that Discord is going to have a moment like this. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, but it'll happen. It is inevitable.)

At least with Discord there's an obvious and robust alternative that's always been around... IRC.

Err, Matrix too?

> in the hands of someone who openly says they aren't going to use it

Closing it IS using it, in a very public and visible way. They just don't like HOW it is used by the people who built it.

For them, making it private and not allowing users to use it are equivalent. I can't blame them either.

If you want to change the license for FOSS software like the Linux kernel, you need to get approval from _every_ contributor. To me, this means for a sub to shutdown as they have they would need permission from _every_ subscriber.

I can take your GPL code and never show it to anyone any more, that doesn't violate the license. I also don't have to publish GPL code indefinitely simply because I showed it to you once. Terrible analogy.

reddit moderators have an unbelievably inflated sense of their worth, which is why they thought this blackout was going to accomplish anything in the first place.

I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods. There's a reason its nigh impossible to become a mod of a big sub, the people that are doing it really like doing it and dont want more people joining to dilute their share of the power.

But many subreddits took a vote before taking action, so it's not like the moderators did this out of the blue.

The subreddit model seems to me to work as a combination of moderators setting and enforcing some rules, users submitting content (hopefully good) and users upvoting and commenting on content.

If the mods are wrong on all of this, then the users who voted to blackout either weren't contributing much or will back down and things will go back to business as usual. But it's also possible that replacing the mods will just lead to many of the users who voted to blackout taking further action. A subreddit without content or with protesting users posting spam isn't fixed by adding more mods.

>reddit moderators have an unbelievably inflated sense of their worth

If moderators were inconsequential Reddit wouldn't be trying to hire and fire them.

>I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods.

The willingness of others to do the same work doesn't make what someone does inconsequential. Would you say an NBA player is inconsequential because you could find a million people who would like to play in the NBA? Obviously being a Redditor moderator and being an NBA player are two different things but by how you are valuing based on willingness to replace, an NBA player would be more inconsequential than a Reddit moderator.

this comment is so incoherent i dont even know where to start.

I think it's likely that at least some of the reason they don't add more mods is that it's hard to find and vet good mods, so there's an element of risk in adding more mods.

It's not easy to find good people, even in a large subreddit. Here's a concrete example - (https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_cod...). They have 243k users and got 14 candidates, two of whom are suitable.

I don't see a way that Huffman can follow through on his threat. According to Reddark [1] at the time of this writing there are still 4752 subs that are dark. I understand that powermods exist, but were Huffman to follow through on his threat he would have to come up with many hundreds of willing moderators, on a rather short timeframe.

Frankly, I don't see this happening, at least not without significant pain. Not to mention the ill will that is continuing to build, which will only compound the difficulty of getting new volunteers on board.

[1] https://reddark.untone.uk

I tend to agree. Their thinking has to be that most mods (at least for the most important subreddits) either aren't willing to risk their positions or aren't that invested in the protest.

It’s actually not that hard since they have processes in place for this sort of thing. They have u/ModCodeOfConduct make a post in the affected community (I assume they reopen the sub and restrict it except for that post). https://www.reddit.com/r/oldbabies/comments/143cszv/new_mode...

I really hope a decent Reddit replacement shows up soon; my impression is that HN is mostly webdevs, so surely some of y'all are on it?

deploying a reddit clone online takes 10 minutes

getting 500 million monthly users like Reddit is the hard part

500 million monthly users isn't a community. I certainly don't have any subreddits that are this large nor do I give a shit about how many users are on a particular website. My reddit communities are niche and skill-based. We'll go wherever we go. Oh no! The giant horde of September stays behind on Reddit! Quelle horreur.

The thing is: By being on reddit the barrier to enter a small niche community is low. Having to register with a new account, when maybe the favorite username is taken already is a barrier, even if it takes just few minutes.

You only need 1 account on lemmy though, and then you can access any community that your instance federates with.

wait that’s the opposite: reddit uses a flat username space, whereas the federated ones have a hierarchical namespace that reduces collisions. there can only be one “johannes” on Reddit, but right now there can be 200-300 “johannes” on Lemmy (rendered “johannes@<remote_instance>” when viewed from a foreign instance).

Assuming Lemmy will be "the winner" currently it is a small player, where differ etc instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.

If not at each forum I have to decide which variant of my name I pick and then remember. On reddit I could take that choice once for a huge number of forums. (as long as I was willing to share identity over different subreddits)

> Assuming Lemmy will be "the winner"

there's also kbin, and you can post/read from either with any Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey account just with a worse UI. i'd be surprised at this point if the winner isn't just Activity Pub with some thin layer on top.

> different instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.

instances usually provide at least some reason when they defederate with each other. maybe users will learn to be cognizant of who they're associating with when they pick an instance. i've seen that with tech-literate friends joining Mastodon who pick a 4chan-like unfiltered/unhinged instance as their home without understanding that such an instance causes outsized complaints compared to the "average" instance and will have less access to outside communities as a result.

i'm sure there's an opportunity for better admin/mod tooling -- hopefully some of the defeds that have happened in Lemmy recently will reverse once things settle down -- but i think even with that it has to be a new way of thinking both for users and operators about what it means to be a member of an instance. it seems that when you hand someone a magic knob they can turn between "less toxicity/abuse" and "broader reach", most will turn it further toward that "less toxicity" edge than Twitter or Reddit do themselves -- even if the tooling for it's so crude. i get why that worries people, but honestly, the benefits of that in other federated systems i use so far have been incredibly worth it (and the cost of migrating to a different instance overblown).

Makes sense, but at least Reddit are doing everything in their power to help drive users to alternative platforms right now!

Lots of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.

I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts.

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

To be fair Reddit also is missing the core idea of what it itself is

Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?

But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.

"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."

I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!

But how does it work? Who moderates the communities?

Anyone can create a community. It's up to the community owners to decide the mod teams and moderation rules they want their community to abide by. We are looking at leveraging AI to assist the communities moderators.

Here's a list of the core community features:

1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos", "Car-sales", etc. This is different from Reddit where typically you only have a singular discussion board per community.

2. Voice chatrooms. Community owners can setup Discord style voice chat rooms where users can communicate via voice.

3. Real-time text chatrooms. Currently we only have a singular chatroom for the whole community however we are looking at adding the ability to create multiple rooms per community.

3. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player. Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Their community's player cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.

4. Baked in monetization. Community owners can offer tiered monthly membership subscriptions that allows the members to support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal to receive donations. Also adding paid post bumps and comment awards that users can purchase where the revenue is shared with the community owner.

That’s actually quite a good idea. Reddit become increasingly shit as people join a subreddit. Being able to restrict new users to a specific subforum and have topic forums would cut down on the trash.

There’s definitely possibilities there.

I was confused at first by the federated nature of Lemmy, but making an account was easy and I'm thoroughly enjoying it now.

The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance.

The instance I joined – vlemmy.net

An aggregator of communities to join – https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Isn't there an issue with instances blocking certain communities on other instances?

Isn't there an issue with reddit banning certain communities? With the fediverse you can choose to be on an instance that doesn't block others or be on an instance that does block. For example, the instance I'm on defederates from 4 instances while beehaw defederates from 100+

Is there a visual / graph that shows these relationships and blockings? Would make navigating whom is censoring what much more easier.

Why would I care what reddit does? I'm trying to understand how Lemmy works.

Yes but if I recall correctly, whatever you are subscribed to you still see in your feed, even if it’s blocked by the instance. I may be incorrect and if so please correct me.

I think you're thinking about "limiting" another instance, where content from the limited instance is excluded from public feeds but still shows up in personal feeds to those who are subscribed.

Sadly limiting instances like mastodon can do isn't available in lemmy or kbin afaik, so highly moderated instances like beehaw are resorting to complete disconnection (defederation) for now until moderation tooling improves.

One caveat about the current implementations is that a defederated instance doesn't seem to know it's been defederated from, so a stale copy of the remote content still exists and can be interacted with (users can post in the remote community that defederated and comment on stale posts, or even new posts in the remote community that are made by local users, however none of that will get synced to the remote communities / instance that defederated).

Problem easily solved: start your own instance, or find one that doesn't block other instances...

Can your own instance be behind a firewall, or does it need to be available from the web in general?

No. That's silly.

Seems lemmy community has some issues.

https://www.jayeless.net/2023/06/on-reddit-and-alternatives....

Those issues (per the article) being that it's not a perfected platform yet and that it's slightly different than reddit.

How do you go from this:

> There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China.

Which makes up 50% of the article, to "it's slightly different than reddit"?

You could just join a different instance, like the article recommends. The bit you quoted is one paragraph out of 10, not "50% of the article". It's not like Reddit has never had ugly sub-reddits, especially earlier on when it was trying to be a bastion of free speech.

It's more like 3 paragraphs, but that's not really the point. It's one thing to have ugly subreddits / communities, it's another if the developers and the main instance is the ugly one. If one of the main issues of those federated networks is fragmentation, telling me to just ignore the main one doesn't bode particularly well.

Rumors of "tankies" running lemmy.ml gave me pause at first, but since it's a federated network with established independent nodes, it seems to me that a single problematic one shouldn't condemn the whole Lemmy platform (let alone the whole Fediverse, of which it is a part).

Alternative implementations would probably help as well. Kbin seems to be one. Given the sudden recent interest, perhaps we'll see more before long.

Incredible. Tankies managed to infiltrate it, before it even became remotely popular.

That's true as long as your instance does block or get blocked by the insurance you want to interact on.

This is too complicated. I don't have time to keep up with all that.

There's quite a few, and most of them federate with one another.

What's interesting is that Reddit isn't really a single community - Each individual subreddit has it's own moderators, editorial voice, group of people, etc. They can each move independently.

For example, /r/startrek and the related startrek websites have all moved to https://startrek.website

This federates with Lemmy, kbin, etc - So if a user posts to startrek.website it shows up everyone else's servers, and people can reply from whatever federated site they use

There are dozens of alternatives to reddit, the issue is that the vast majority of reddit users don't care at all about this drama. Reddit is not going anywhere.

i’m less certain than i was. the two people in my life who actively use reddit have both told me “it’s over”. one of them joined lemmy.blahaj.zone after r/196 reformed over there: he told me that it’s the community he was most active in and i got the impression that unless the Lemmy one folds he’s more or less done with Reddit — even though it means he’s interacting with the other communities via different mediums than he was before (chat instead of forums).

as someone who stopped using Reddit a year ago, i get it. topical communities no longer exist in just one place. if you’re interested in 3d printing, say, you can join a reddit, join a chat group (in Discord, Telegram, Matrix — whatever app of choice), join a FB group or explore the topic on TikTok, find a 3d-printing themed Mastodon instance, …: and each one of these hosts adjacent communities. Reddit is no longer the only “community of communities” on the internet. if you zoom out, it’s been losing that moat for a while. users can get by decently well these days by choosing from 5+ apps they might already have installed when exploring a topical community. reddit killing their share of that app space doesn’t really help them.

I think Reddit faces more potential downside here than other similar platforms might, because of the popularity of third-party apps among key contingents of the site (particularly moderators), and also because of the missteps that management has taken dealing with the API changes. If they lose even 5% of their traffic to this debacle they've made a bad decision, IMO.

I've started browsing https://tildes.net/ recently. For now, since the community is small, it feels like hackernews2, but I hope it gets bigger.

Tildes in general will be pretty in line with the HN community. If anyone wants an invite, find my email and say hi :)

Me either, but like we saw on every twitter-clone attempted until now, it's really hard to make people move to another platform if the first one still online.

I'm thrilled to watch reddit burn itself down, but of course the mods of big subs were one of the main reasons it was so terrible. If reddit could clone dang a few dozen times, then sure, kick the old mods out and maybe the site could get a handle on itself and be mildly worthwhile. But in reality, whatever jabronis they end up putting in place are not going to be any better than what they had before, and probably even worse. And so the site is still going to be awful, but now with a worse UI.

> the mods of big subs were one of the main reasons it was so terrible

I've heard this, and was just reading a thread on Reddit where many users told of their mistreatment and unjustified banning. But anecdotally I've never actually noticed mod misbehavior, and I've been a Reddit user for like 17 years. Could be the subs I read ... most of which aren't extremely huge, I guess. Still, I feel like I should have been banned from somewhere at some point if capricious, power-hungry mods really were as rampant as they're made out to be.

Threatening your unpaid volunteers who are responsible for keeping your site clear of the worst most vile freaks on the internet (something your site has repeatedly made international headlines for) is not long-term thinking.

> worst most vile freaks on the internet (something your site has repeatedly made international headlines for)

You have to remember that Steve (spez), the CEO, is precisely one of those, and was the head moderator of r/jailbait before that finally shut down.

You should read these threads if you want to get an idea of how the normie users think about the whole lockout: https://www.reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here... https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/14al426/rapple_black...

I didn’t know r/nfl represents the whole of reddit. Mind = blown.

Here's another good one: https://www.reddit.com/r/NBATalk/comments/14aftuz/reddit_adm... r/nba shut down for the Finals.

The reopening thread is hilarious as well:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/14bxljj/the_return_of_...

That mostly seems like an expression of low empathy by users of a large sub, which largely tracks.

In my experience, whenever volunteer mod positions open, there is a near infinite supply of people that want those roles. For whatever reasons, people want it and those that have it typically seek to hold onto it.

It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?

Some section of population is attracted to power. And just about any type of power. Even if that was 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 it would still be substantial number in large enough communities. And if it were lets say 1 in 10k those same people would still search for all the places they could have power in.

Much like why some people contribute to open source projects, sometimes people find a thing useful but think it could be better, and spend some of their time to make it so, either by helping to organize things so the subreddit isn't frequently the same 6 posts, or organizing community recurring events, or a million other things to foster a community.

There's also plenty of people who like the authority, or a thousand other reasons, but that's one example.

> It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?

Being a gatekeeper for a popular subreddit is a form of meaningful influence. Meaningful influence can lead to money and other benefits. Reddit mods in the past have been exposed for using their influence to push certain content and block other kind.

Maybe for some major subs, but I've had multiple small-to-medium sized subs die because a mod retired/deleted their account and no one stepped up quickly to replace them. Reddit kills unmodded subs really fast.

Sure, the major frontpage subs will be fine, but there's plenty of more niche communities that are already dying/getting banned for being unmodded because no one wants to mod them. I literally opened a link to a sub today that was banned for being unmodded 2 hours ago, presumably because the last remaining mod deleted their account.

So many of the discussions here seem to be people mostly thinking of reddit as the big frontpage subs, which also seems to be what Reddit Corporate seems to think. What we're all likely about to see is how much value there is in the longer tail of smaller subs that are being run as a passion project by a few people in a niche community. It's easy to point to the small subs that are some power-trip for one mod or set of mods, but there's also plenty of small little subs that are niche and interesting and simply would never have enough interest or activity to support more than 2-3 mods.

>It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?

> It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?

I wasn't sure what it was going to be like when I was invited. It's not fun telling people to behave, but I've found a lot of personal satisfaction in coding moderation tasks and working with the team. There are whole classes of work that I've automated away and it's easy to deploy improvements.

I think /u/spez needs to take a look at /r/maliciouscompliance. I cant see how actions like this wont lead to malicious modding to destroy the communities they helped foster.

That sounds like toxic work, any sane person would rather move somewhere else and do something productive, like building a new community, or find an entirely new hobby.

This has been massively discussed this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36350938

Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private - 1573 points, 12 hours ago, 915 comments

This is getting ridiculous. I was not necessarily in agreement with the protest, but after seeing the reaction from Reddit, I am going to unsubscribe from all subreddits that are not part of the protest in support.

This is like a master class in how not to deal with this type of situation.

It's worth noting Reddit has never cared about absent mods except maybe in very high-profile subs. Relatively active subs with absent mods (or an absent mod) preventing new mods from being added or spam have traditionally fallen on deaf ears. I've watched at least 1 subreddit die due to such neglect.

As with a lot of things Reddit has done in the last week this falls under then "Oh, you only care about this now??? Screw you Reddit".

Well that’s a highly optimized take on The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Facebook has ~a billion or so~ users and is worth ~$500B.

Reddit has ~hundreds of millions of~ users and is not worth anything like that.

Why? Facebook's content is provided by all its users for free? So if Reddit can figure out a way to monetize it like Facebook, it's worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars.

Which is why the leadership of Reddit will do anything if there's a chance that they can dramatically increase the value of the company. From their perspective, it absolutely is worth the risk. From our perspective it isn't worth it, ofc, because the upside for us doesn't involve lifechanging amounts of money.

There’s no way reddit has anywhere near a billion users. It has millions. Facebook is ubiquitous, pretty much anyone from any age, gender and a country has heard of Facebook. Reddit is a big site, but it’s still a niche site when compared to the big social media giants. It probably has less users than twitter, which has a fraction of Facebook’s.

I tried to Google how many users Reddit has. The numbers are all over the place. Various links on the front page say:

1.66 billion monthly users

430 million monthly users

50 million monthly users

330 million monthly users

Who the hell knows.

Calling it now. Reddit will supply the firehose of data to OpenAI in return for AI moderators. Boom. Human problems solved.

Yep.

I’d love to see how OpenAI’s overbuilt autocorrect would serve as a moderator in practice. Delightful chaos.

I'm very very not great at prompt engineering and was able to get this working by thinking about it for 30 seconds, so I'm sure you could do way better than this[0].

[0]: https://chat.openai.com/share/69a9d595-ad26-450e-9810-da39e9...

I mean it makes sense to moderate a reddit that's mostly bots with other bots /s

The almighty Dollar brought about more change in Reddit than many years of users complaining.

This feels so disingenuous:

> Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.

Where the fuck were you guys when, for example, people were complaining about the mods over at /r/india?

Everyone saw this coming. Still, it's disappointing to see. I will be taking my valuable 0.12$ elsewhere thank you very much.

Wasn't the 'protest' of overpriced or non-existent public APIs for popular websites really the additional server cost due to endless web scraping? The whole concept of a general strike of subreddits seems like an antiquated way try and strong arm Reddit into complying.

If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.

There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.

Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.

Aren't those methods potentially expensive? And if you did make a hastily-built frontend backed by scraping, couldn't Reddit continually break it without much effort?

Did they change the code of conduct to retroactively put the protesting mods in violation? Reddit management does not realize this but these actions make them look worse and reduces the attractiveness of Reddit as a platform for the 99% readers who are not mods.

I think this will be a net positive even if they are replaced with worse moderators. Users are more than capable of self-regulating their communities and upvoting quality content.

Moderators are too concerned with weeding out people and bad content as soon as possible and as much as possible. But it's OK to have a bunch of low quality comments and posts, and just let the users decide what gets seen by most of the people.

I'm much more concerned with moderators thinking they can decide to protest on behalf of millions of people, than I am with millions of people seeing content that breaks a subreddits rules.

I don't know if you have much experience managing an online community, but I believe you will discover eventually that everything you claim about self-regulation is false. A small fraction of bad actors can do enough damage to make a community not-self-sustaining.

There's a reason every bar has bouncers.

This sounds like it could be the death of the platform, or at least the beginning of. I can see it devolving into bot generated content and intrusive ads. Once being a site noteworthy of high signal to noise ratio for content (ie google'ing with 'reddit' for quality search results) will now enshitify as it attempts to squeeze out every drop of revenue.

Had the owner of twitter not fired all of his employees, they very well may have been able to seize the opportunity and develop an alternative which could have integrated with their current users and product.

It is quite impressive to see the detailed intimate knowledge of the personality and inner landscape of reddit moderators shown by commenters in this thread.

Clearly the moderators have many psychological characteristics in common and are motivated by the exact same personality flaws and doubtless it is because of this that the commenters here are able to achieve such startling generality in their succinct evaluations!

Just the threat of this on bigger subs, combined with the two subreddits that reddit did actually shuffle around mods in, seems to have totally broken the blackout. The benevolent dictators who moderate were threatened with losing their power and seem to have completely caved (.

The mods realized that they are replaceable and that they don't have infinite rights to the moderator spots on these subreddits. Did they not consider that they do not own anything here and are all just operating on reddit's platform and reddit could just remove them and install new mods?

It seems highly plausible to me that reddit has now effectively won this one, though, I strenuously think they could have achieved their goals with far far less negative press but it wouldn't really be reddit if they didn't do something in the maximally inefficient way.

I do think this could lead to a situation where reddit moderation is more democratized, with moderators being elected (in a more formal way than how some subs do it now) and I think that would be an overall net positive for the communities and for reddit as a whole. Moderators at this point operate as mostly benevolent dictators and benevolent dictatorships have their plusses but I think that the limitations are starting to show now.

If the Reddit admins don't want mods to have the ability to set a subreddit to private, then why did they even give them the option in the first place? Couldn't they just disable the "private" flag for all subs and be done with it?

I'm really surprised this isn't what they're doing. It has the same effect without causing a lot of strife and backstabbing that is surely just going to poison the well further.

We really should all collectively just stop using reddit already. It went to shit years ago

The API changes don't impact Mod tools but many (most?) Mods use Apollo or other apps because they have far better moderation tools.

Steve's statement about this really pissed me off, due to this ommision.

Now what remains is to stop moderating posts and write scripts and automations to fill Reddit with AI-generated spam. Then Spez will have a bag full of sh*t to do IPO with.

> benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.

Fucking comical.

the algorithm simply elevated other open communities to the front page

users that disabled the algorithm and only use niche subreddits never see the protest at all

I definitely think Reddit company’s view of the outcome is accurate, and that them choosing to not unilaterally open subreddits is favorable for them because it doesn’t matter too much, aside from useful information in old posts being locked away (for now)

I still don't get what alternative everyone is going to.

There isn't one. At least not similar or consensus.

Weird to burn bridges without a plan.

I pretty much stopped going to Reddit and it never really occurred to me that I would look for an alternative. I’ve reduced the amount of social media in my life (and I do count HN as social media) and I think I’m better off.

Lemmy's user base doubled since Monday and heading towards 200,000 plus right now. I definitely think there's a migration, even if it isn't all of Reddit.

I don't think there is a single platform for all subset of reddit users - but for the more social sqwok might be of interest:

https://sqwok.im/

I guess I'll try Lemmy again, but I'm not hopeful. When I used it last week any sub-community I was interested in either didn't exist or was completely dead.

Better off without.

>Weird to burn bridges without a plan.

It's just casual entertainment, not life/career.

That said you are right on the alternatives being in short supply. Which is a problem in itself and another reason to bail.

Reddit should have been like the wiki.

I think this was quite a clear and non-threatening note. How is this threatening?

setting the users against the mods didn't work, so now they're trying to split the mods from each other

from the businesses perspective this is probably the first sensible decision they've made so far

Should 2023 be officially named the year of the Great Social Media Purge?

I wonder what reddit means with "retaliation attempts". This all sounds very threatening. Are they going to pull a wizards of the cost and start sending Pinkerton agents after mods who dont play ball?

Ah, digital feudalism. It's so efficient.

The big problem here is what will young people do without the paid posters from /r/white/blackpeopletwitter and /r/politics forming their worldview for them?

Instead of harassing mods, Reddit should be paying them. Mods should get kickbacks from coins spent in their sub.

some of the sub-level censorship on reddit has gotten so bad in recent years, I see this as possibly a welcome change

Reddit management is in the process of learning from what had seemed the boon of unpaid labor, that the struggle of management and ownership against the unpaid moderator workers is over control of the means of production and the relations of production.

don't be scabby the rat lol

Inevitable that this was going to happen. I have no issue with it.

Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.

More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened, and it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore.

The mods that actually polled their communities and acted on those results are the only ones I have respect for out of those protesting.

> More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened

Hard to prove one way or the other at the moment since the subs that vote to go private are now inaccessible, but almost all polls I've seen have been in favor of the blackout. r/all consistently has highly-upvoted protest messages from the restricted subreddits.

> it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore

That a protest against X results in inconvenience for the customers/users of X is pretty mild. If that crosses the line into unacceptable, you'd be against the vast majority of protest/boycott/strike action.

>Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.

Same here. Not a mod, but have always used Reddit from the desktop (with the new UI turned off), so zero interest in third-party apps. It's one thing to do messaging or email while out and about, but why would I want to intentionally use a text-intensive system like Reddit through a small screen without a keyboard to type on?

I wonder if the API change will end the practice of mods sharing automated block lists (Context for others: If you post in a wrongthink subreddit, many other subreddits will preemptively ban you regardless of your actual activity in them, if any). If so, and if there are fewer handfuls of powermods that control dozens of subreddits, I'm all for the change.

I know spez said he is going to let mods be voted out, that's already a huge improvement. One sub I'm in with about 300k people has the mods punish anyone who expresses an opinion they disagree with, and it's a majority opinion. They also let rampant bigotry go unchecked. I don't think they would last long.

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