Apple subreddit reopens after moderation team threatened with removal
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
Might I recommend requiring all posts to your sub to tag u/spez, or having an even number of characters, etc. All of which can easily be done with Automod.
This lets you to moderate your subreddit and enforce the rules while allowing it to wither on the vine.
All knowledge is rotting in there unfortunately.
Presumably the mods are protesting because they want a good Reddit/subreddit experience, and the new policies are hurting that. How is handing power over to someone who is supportive of Reddit's new policies helping that?
I was a former lead mod a year ago of a large subreddit. I saw the writing on the wall THEN, and took the sub private, and booted the other mods I brought in. I then started purging content.
Not a few hours later, the other 2 mods I invited in messaged the admins, and removed my moderatorship and then banned my account.
Those subreddits, no matter how many "mod kudos" you have, were never yours, are never yours, and will always be digital sharecropping.
Burn it to the ground. Power is the ONLY message the admins and C levels understand.
Otherwise, you're just burning digital books.
I'm curious to see what happens when people start following this advice (it's really the only reasonable path forward), and then what happens with the inevitable lawsuits about how reddit "owns" the content that the authors are "pirating".
Here's a concrete proposal: Set automod to delete any post/comment longer than 20 characters.
This makes discussion virtually impossible, and starts to impact the quality of Reddit posts. With enough subs cooperating (e.g. the subs that went private over the blackout), it'd already be making a serious impact on the usage experience of Reddit. Furthermore, this policy can be enacted indefinitely without stopping the "regular operation" of Reddit (i.e. mods can sit on this policy for as long as they need to, as opposed to the blackout which even from the start was planned with a time limit.)
Sounds like Reddit has ran out of patience.
Let through offensive porn, copyright infringement, spyware, trojans.
There are hyper active pervert/malware communities out there who will eagerly assist.
This path opens Reddit the Corp up to lawsuits and regulatory oversight and does far more lasting damage.
Minor nitpick: I agree with the idea, but the deletion of any post that doesn't contain an owl on r/Superbowl isn't a ridiculous rule. The subreddit is dedicated to "superb owls" and not to anything else.
You can whitelist a set of accounts that can message you.
You can also turn off notifications for username mentions.
Reddit mods who do not want to be exploited further are best walking away now and trying to reform - if they decide, this must be exhausting - on the Fediverse.
If Reddit starts losing popularity due to this incident (and that is not guaranteed by far) this is going to be the money quote which sums up the entire situation. An unaware CEO unable to understand his own product nor users.
With that said I think there is a strong chance that this will end up being a tempest in a teapot - there doesn’t seem to be any immediately obvious damage to the Reddit brand because of the blackout.
For all the people that leave there are plenty of Facebook refugees trickling in at the same rate. Reddit doesn't want it's power users, it wants Facebook/etc's users and cares nothing for it's original userbase (or culture, as shown by the post-VC capital emphasis on posting to /u/ user profiles instead of subreddits).
I keep hearing people say this, but why would that be?
By "power users" it seems like people are broadly referring to people who submit lots of original content-heavy posts and comments. Why would Reddit not want that?
Basically, they're chasing away the folks who are most likely to cause a ruckus when Reddit inevitably tries to go IPO or otherwise make a profit. Everyone is saying this is in prep for their IPO, but I agree with Huffman's analysis that now is a really shitty time to be pondering an IPO. My guess is he has a checklist of items he needs to accomplish on the site handed to him by leadership to make everything look good for an IPO. He may have realized a lot of these would not go well with the community - this isn't his first rodeo with this stuff - so he applied draconian measures, hardened his heart against the mods and app devs who made the site what it is, and is hoping and praying there will be something left when the smoke clears. And there will be, especially as they force subreddits back into the light and encouraging mods to turn on each other. Basically, this is a loyalty test, and all of the disloyal people are being forced out. The loyal people who will pretty much go with anything Reddit leadership wants will be all that's left, and they're banking that will be enough. Add the influx of Facebook and Twitter refugees who likely see all of this as just nerd posturing, and, yeah, Reddit will likely survive and go IPO.
But it will not be Reddit. It will be a sad, corporate shadow of the vibrant community it once was. And it will not last. I honestly believe distributed social media - ActivityPub, BlueSky (ew), or something yet to come - will be the future. It will look like your favorite social media feeds now, but it will act like email, just hopefully with better moderation and spam handling. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even YouTube will eventually relent and tie themselves to this ecosystem as a last ditch effort to stay alive, then probably picked apart by private equity vultures in an ignominious final act.
EDIT: WOW - within five minutes of posting this, this other news story crossed my transom, more or less confirming my theory. Neat! https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-prote...
The only consequence Reddit will suffer from this is an increase in ad revenue and maybe the added side effect of reigning in the power of moderators. Let me be clear: Reddit messed up in their communication and execution of effectively cutting out third-party apps but the underlying strategy remains sound.
What a pleasant way of putting it.
As always, Reddit moderators always end up being blatantly and obviously motivated by anything but their own community. Users not having access to their community is fine, as long as the mods don't lose their petty fiefdom I guess.
Context for others: 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.
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.
Basically, losers who crave ruling a (as you said) petty fiefdom.
Bonus: The classic post in which a mod thinks what he does is worth $175K a year <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orquit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>. Be sure to read to the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".
This is where things have escalated to.
To be honest, I'd love for reddit to enhance a community's ability to control it's subreddit without needing to cede full control to some power hungry basement dweller.
They know that if Reddit found new mods, the users probably wouldn't notice or care.
I'll happily take the mod slot for any subreddit involving Donald Trump, as long as they keep allowing NSFW content.