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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a reason every bar has bouncers.
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.
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!
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.
Steve's statement about this really pissed me off, due to this ommision.
Fucking comical.
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)
There isn't one. At least not similar or consensus.
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.
from the businesses perspective this is probably the first sensible decision they've made so far
Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?
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
How would that be different from the status quo?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.
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 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.
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.
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.
I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.
It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.
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
Mods that feel that strongly about protecting their community would do so much better in a federated context.
There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.
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.
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
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.
The same type of people who want to be on the boards of HOA's. eg: the ones you least want doing it.
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.
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?
I really hope a mass migration to lemmy instances really sticks.
Why do I need so many members to show up when search for servers? That means I need to have a community somewhere else.
Who would want to instantly have status over millions of people? Hmm, that's a hard one...
They are not asking a lot, just don't shut down the site in a hissy fit
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/14bxljj/the_return_of_...
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?
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 like a master class in how not to deal with this type of situation.
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".
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.
1.66 billion monthly users
430 million monthly users
50 million monthly users
330 million monthly users
Who the hell knows.
[0]: https://chat.openai.com/share/69a9d595-ad26-450e-9810-da39e9...
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?
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.
I made no such statement.
[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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I will bet Reddit will be just fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Reddit owns Reddit, no? They have the right to do whatever they want with their website.
Community is a bit like a butterfly. Try to grip it too tightly and you no longer have a butterfly just mush
Reddit can do whatever they want with their site but they can't force users to do anything.
feeling of power and purpose?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In what way would it be interesting?
There would, of course, be some downsides too.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.jayeless.net/2023/06/on-reddit-and-alternatives....
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
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:
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!
getting 500 million monthly users like Reddit is the hard part
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.
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.
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.
There's also plenty of people who like the authority, or a thousand other reasons, but that's one example.
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.
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.
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"?
The front page politics of even my local subreddit are completely divorced from the concerns of my neighbors and other millenials I know.
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.
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.
The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
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.
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.
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?'
Will the future be Star Trek or Dune as far as AI is concerned?
It's basic human nature to want acknowledgement for going something good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
If they don't think this is a situation for an LLM, you can probably safely assume it's not.
I took this as mods would be considered employees in France. After a second read, it looks like they meant something different.
As I said,
>assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology
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.
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?
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.
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.
There’s definitely possibilities there.
In the us it is the national labor relations board, after all! Not employement relations
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.
In the near future when AGI eliminates scarcity (2025?) this will have to be litigated!
(There would be more people voting if it was a brigade, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. But emotionally it bugs me.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Isn't that literally exactly what a strike is? No one crosses the picket line if a sufficient majority agreed to undertake the strike?
However, they can have volunteers fill the position: https://www.editions-tissot.fr/droit-travail/jurisprudence-s...
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.
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.
Alternative implementations would probably help as well. Kbin seems to be one. Given the sudden recent interest, perhaps we'll see more before long.
> 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"?
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)
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
Everything you wrote is a gross misrepresentation of the stituation.
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
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
This is a core feature that distinguishes Reddit as a "Community of communities". It's not a bug, it's a feature
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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...
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.
Also breaking out “nothing they’re doing is illegal!!” isn’t exactly the slam dunk many seem to think it is, IMO.
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.
A DND club with an IPO?
How much have you deleted, an odd post, or do you have an auto-deleter?
That was what you said before.
I think the larger issue is now the blackout is still continuing the addicts are needing their fix.
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.
They're always free to go start their own subreddits.
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.
How do you do that? Specifically, how would you limit the poll?
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.
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 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.
Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.
Barbecue sauce.
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
If the timings could be adjusted I feel shows might actually be better off.
just not in the way the creators intended
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.
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.
Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."
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.
Or ensure group think.
(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)
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.
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.
Reddit's practices until now said the opposite.
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".
Good shout on bringing it up though
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like Epic, Honest T, or the state of Indiana. Worthy grudges all :D