The thing is if the mods stopped modding the site will crumble and fast.
I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards.
Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators.
I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation.
And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?"
And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.
I tried to "play the tape through" on this, and imagine what it looks like. If Reddit had proactively tried to implement some kind of intervention system to remove abusive moderators from subreddits.
It puts Reddit as an organization in a tough position, because they have to mediate disputes. And it opens up a bunch of other questions. How big does a subreddit have to be before they qualify for this intervention system? Does one submit an organized case like filing a lawsuit? What if the accused moderator is the only moderator of the subreddit?
And what new rules does Reddit add to try to curb abusive moderators? There'd have to be some kind of ethical guidelines drawn up. So now unpaid moderators can be disbarred like lawyers?
Every thing I think of (admittedly not having spent a ton of time thinking about this) is open to potential abuse. Even if you set the trigger to be a 90% vote of "no confidence" by subscribed members of the subreddit, the subreddit would be vulnerable to "raids". If you gate it to "you have to have been subscribed for X amount of time" the time will either be too short and leave raiding or create a new "class" of "landed gentry" that have a disproportionate say in how the subreddit is run.
So I don't know if it's actually a failure. Some of the stuff Reddit did early on, things like vote fuzzing etc... show a willingness to experiment with using the platform itself to enforce better behavior. They might have been able to figure something out, eventually. But then I think of really simple stuff that even Hacker News has implemented (ex. you can't downvote a direct reply to one of your comments) and how Reddit doesn't have that.
Reddit does not want to control its moderators in any way. Because of that, they dont even have any willingness to try to make the mods more accountable.
Yes. It's not easy.
But Reddit knowingly went into a community moderated forum industry. It's not as if this situation was forced on them. Having some plans for this would have been normal business planning.
A lot of this sounds like the plan was:
1. Cool website
2. ?????
3. Profit!!!
Except they never got to 3 and now are scrambling.
What I am arguing is that Reddit did have an established doctrine around subreddits. That doctrine was to give as much autonomy (and free speech) as possible to people who create subreddits. And that was intentional, not a result of lack of planning.
Until now, this has been backed up by their actions over a long timespan. There were many subreddits that Reddit allowed to exist that are almost inconceivable today and only banned after enduring long campaigns of immense public pressure. When they did ban them they changed site guidelines to reflect new rules.
I think overall, the additional content guidelines that were hammered out through this process are fair. I think content guidelines that ban content that may not be illegal but are harmful makes sense. Things like "No non consensual pornography" (aka revenge porn) and "No advocating violence towards groups of people" (no organized racism) are very reasonable.
But it also allowed for subreddits to be created that Reddit as an organization would never have thought of or been able to nourish to a point they became very large. I really think that's what Reddit's secret sauce is and has been.
Gigantic subreddits like r/IAmA, r/todayilearned, r/wholesomememes came from users and grew organically. Yes, this approach has had downsides such as the emergence of powermods and the creation of bad subreddits like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate.
Because of the numerous issues I outlined above, I'm not sure Reddit would have been successfully able to implement or outline a process for keeping the magic of subreddits and a fair system that scales for removing mods and they had no incentive to try. They're going to have to try now though, because I don't think there is any coming back from this.
Does it need to? Reddit doesn't care about the local squabbles, and misleading sub names or bare minimum moderation aren't against their rules. it cares about ad revenue. So while it feels hypocritical to suddenly care about maliciously compliant mods, it's consistent in their goals.
I do agree that even if they don't care, they should fit in SOME ability to hoist a mod by some mixture of the community other mods who disagree but simply weren't there first.
The main point of contention would be on subs where the user base is divided in it's moderation desires, e.g., san francisco crime posts. Half the users think the city is just fine and the crime posts make them angry, the other half think the city is falling apart, and therefore think the issues is entirely relevant. In this type of situation, the obvious solution is to split the sub like Seattle/SeattleWA did, but both sides want control over the sub.
These cultural control subs are the only ones that I think would "fall apart" without moderation, and even then I think the users would eventually self-select for separate subs.
This whole issue has been bizarre, and I definitely did not have the passion about it that some mods do. Still, I think I'm growing weary of moderating, but I think it's mainly that I'm getting old.
I’m still able to use the site with minimal bullshit, but I see the wave coming.
over moderation is just as bad too. the best moderation is human, engaged, and flexible.
you are doing it wrong.
You 'curate' in favor of your advertisers. /r/eatcheapandhealthy has some relationship with Leanne Brown. They let that website's marketers astroturf + they link on the sidebar.
On the bright side, HN doesn't hide that they have perverse incentives, they just pretend that astroturfing doesnt exist.
This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews. You may as well read amazon reviews; what you're seeing is very likely curated by somebody with a commercial interest in the thing.
> But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
This has always been reddit's biggest problem; it's cheaper and more effective to astroturf or buy moderators than to buy ads from reddit. Companies that buy ads from reddit are chumps, they should be taking over subreddits instead. The rate of return is far superior.
when SEO became gamed and the signal filtering was transferred to reddit, it became inevitable that eventually Reddit Optimization would occur for commerce as well.
It's like trying to stomp down on sneakerheads scalping sneakers/GPUs/etc, or fighting hackers in an online game - you have to treat it as a process, not a victory that can be won with a single move, because everytime you make a move they're going to come up with a new strategy to get around it. What matters is that you keep coming up with counterstrategies for those.
The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet.
There's crude versions of this with 'Karma', YouTube and twitch streaming revenue, substack, medium, brave rewards and so on. But nothing that just automatically works without sign up and a lot of friction.
Nobody cares about being paid for content when they're all willing to do it for free. When I post on reddit, I'm not doing it for compensation, but for upvotes. Reddit is just another mini-Google.
What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com.
And maybe a paid app like Apollo.
the problem is that reddit's scale provides value too. those alternatives exist, but nobody wants to post on them because a subreddit/forum with <5 regular commenters is boring and valueless. and the scale provides an endless stream of eyeballs, and low friction of clicking between subs and commenting on a new thing you haven't before (cf: the burden of figuring out 27 different lemmy instances).
in terms of evolutionary advantage, going big is what keeps subs alive, and it's what keeps platforms alive. Someone who is willing to pay to start a centralized reddit 2.0 and establish the definitive r/vacuumcleaners is going to have a market advantage over 30 small lemmy nodes all trying to discuss vacuum cleaners. Especially in anything remotely niche - yeah everyone is discussing video games and politics, but, the really niche hobby interests don't have the user count to survive a 99.9% loss in users.
another related problem is moderation policies: reddit provides a "one size fits all" moderation policy and then allows communities to go tighter, based on the whims of mods. But in the fediverse model, a lot of pods just won't federate with places that have different moderation policies.
There just is a ton of that administrative superstructure that reddit provides that actually adds a lot of value too. And that has been the problem with a lot of the discourse around leaving reddit: the exact reasons Mastodon and Lemmy are having trouble getting traction are the value that Reddit provides in the relationship. People can't solve the problems they can't acknowledge.
And then the mods pretty much pay lip service to user-generated value but then either ignore it or use it as a pawn (going against community votes to reopen, not allowing reopen as an option in the vote, etc) that makes it pretty clear they think they're the real value-add and that reddit would collapse without the dashing handsome moderator who spends 10 minutes scrolling the mod queue while squeezing the lemon on the shitter a couple times a day.
Reddit did not lose money because of the core platform, ie old.reddit.com. Reddit lost money wasting on a number of initiatives like 1.) the mobile app 2.) shitty ad platform. Instagram advertises to me about the next hot restaurant near me, or some small business making a cool Trinket. Google does not get my eyeballs because of adblockers. Reddit serves me ads telling me how IBM is the hottest technology consulting shit in town, when I'm just looking for army compositions for Age of Empires 2.
YouTube was much better the time there was no revenue share. If they were to one day switch off the revenue spigot (like they seem to be on track to do currently), the creators will still stay. You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs? He'll just have to find (and find he will) another way to earn his butter.
this implies that you don't already need to aggressively tailor your feed (and especially users) to get a sane experience. I'm already digging through 90% muck, not much will change there (or, was. Long since quit reddit specifically outside of very specific communities I haven't found replacements for).
>You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs?
There's 3 base levels of content creator here to consider:
- small time ones not monetized or barely monetized (under 10k subs or so). These are the ones who probably could make more mowing lawns, let alone minimum wage. This category will have a fluxuation of those who stay because they care more about the clout and/or the content, and those who wanted to one day make a livinig wage on this. Any other who stay and want to be successful would be playing extremely hard to the algorithm, moreso than they already are. They'd fizzle out otherwise.
- Then there's the ones with the hugest range (~100k-2m subs or so) who are anywhere from "this is a good part time gig" to "this is my full time career with a small to medium sized team contributing". This category would be absolutely decimated by the impact. The larger side may have to dowsize and/or reduce the content stream, likely rely much heavier on ad sponsors, and otherwise compromise their content. The smaller side would just fizzle out, full stop. large but not quite large enough to get more ad deals, likely a solo channel with at best 1-2 editors/help on the side. They cannot live off of youtube any longer.
This is where 95% of my feed comes from and it would only make my experience worse.
- Then ofc there's the massive 10m+ subs, the MrBeasts of the world. They are so massive and have so many pools of revenue to draw from (sponsors, merch, "native ads" where they just make a video about a company under the company's dime, crowdfunding sites, commisions, other social media, etc.). Many of these are efectively millionaires and can stop anytime they want. They won't be as strongly affected, maybe have some layoffs and slight slowdown of content. But it's losing 1 of a dozen different ways they make money; unfortunate but not gamebreaking.
This effectively turns Youtube into a place either of pure passion or top level coporations in all but name. I don't see this as a better time. Maybe pre-Google Youtube was a magical place, but there's no closing Pandora's box to return to those times.
To call it bare bones is an understatement, but I do wonder how it or potential other similar sites may work in this modern era. Will people who truly want quality content and discussion put their money where their mouths are? Only time will tell.
I worked at a fairly popular social media site about a decade ago and paid content moderation farms were a dime a dozen, I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.
If the mods are still gone at that point, there's abandoned-subreddit procedures that will be executed.
And that's the part that mods are trying to exploit for griefing with the "it's not closed, we're just not letting anyone post"/"we're only letting people post unfunny memes in protest"/etc. I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you.
Like it's just kind of funny that the mods are literally Going Galt and just like would happen in the real world, they're panicking with the realization that the world is pretty much going to move on without them.
lolololololol, god i wish reddit would. that would be such an incredible fire.
Reddit will eventually find new mods to replace the ones still protesting, and business will continue as usual. After all, there's no shortage of people who want to lord over others. Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
Neither is cleaning up a beach. You may even get some willing to clean a small part, but having a few people spend exorbitant amounts of time cleaning a beach everyday that is also infested with sharks and crabs starts to turn a simple problem to a specialized one.