> If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made. If the majority of your userbase likes sub X and some mods (fewer than 10 for such a sub) want to shut it down, then of course Reddit would open it back up.
People here on HN and Reddit decrying this as the end of Reddit likely don't remember all of the controversies of Reddit over the past 17 years since it's been active. Hell, most of the current userbase came in after the most recent blackout in 2015 due to Ellen Pao firing Victoria. This has all happened before, with no effect to Reddit, indeed, much the opposite, seeing their user growth numbers.
Worth noting many subs actively voted for the shutdown. It's very much a case-by-case basis.
Also, shitting on your userbase only works for so long. You keep consuming people's trust and you eventually reach a tipping point where people are actively looking to move to alternatives. It would not surprise me if there is a sudden exodus if a suitable alternative to reddit became clear.
I don't understand why reddit has taken such an adversarial stance on the whole matter - it's stupid and shortsighted in such a community-driven service, and if I were an investor I'd be very concerned about management, personally.
Just as in real life, voting may not be representative of the whole story. Selection bias can occur where people who care very much about a topic would vote for it while most casual users won't even care enough to vote. The polls I've seen on Reddit are a vast minority of overall votes compared to the subreddit size in subscribers, keeping in mind that many lurkers also don't even directly subscribe to a sub but may simply follow them on /r/all, like /r/pics or /r/politics for example. I know I don't follow them but I see them on /r/all and will sometimes click into the comments.
Fair points. That being said, I'd value the participants more so than the run-of-the-mill lurker. One creates the content for the lurkers to consume.
Reddit makes money on the lurkers, but the NEED the commenters and mods to maintain the website as a whole. A straight count of users does not at all reflect who contributes the most value to the website.
If Reddit wants to return to "business as usual" the moderators of the considerable numbers of blacked-out subreddits need to be replaced with a fresh crop of moderators as good or better than the current crop, but who also swear fealty to the administration and are willing to overlook the dire state of the moderation suite.
I don't know about you, but I think the odds of that happening without significant bumps in the road are pretty slim, and are likely going to alienate even more users in the process.
The mods merely have to meet a minimum threshold of quality, they don't have to be as good or better than the current ones. The original mods were also regular users, with all of the averageness that comes with that.
At the end of the day, if you don't care enough to participate you are obliged to accept the outcome that results. If you don't like the results, it's time to participate, continue to watch, or pack up.
Sure. At the same time, if you hold a protest on a platform you don't control, don't be surprised if the platform owners seek to remove you from the platform. A private entity is not obliged as a democratic government is to support the will of their users.
Upvotes/downvotes are not good for democracy. Especially if the upvote/downvote history stays in your account. Think of the yes and no stickers in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries on the front of their government buildings. Even, moderators can pin their thoughts. It is not easy to express a different kind of opinion in the first place.
Mods have always been told that subreddits are their spaces to operate and that as long as they're not breaking any of the site-wide rules, they are free to do whatever they wish. This is a violation of that trust.
How can anyone sincerely believe that being a user, even a mod, on another platform by a corporate entity lets them have their own space? I mean, of course the company owns everything one does or publishes on said platform. There is no trust because the premise is faulty in the first place. The fact that people actually believed that is not really the problem of the platform, there is always inherent platform risk.
It is an issue of trust precisely because a third party controls the platform. If mods actually owned the infrastructure for their spaces, there would be no trust involved, they'd just own it.
In this case, mods trusted the company making a promise about the platform, breaking that promise breaks the trust in the company, and makes the platform risk plain to see for all.
I don’t think any mod could possibly have thought Reddit was making such a strong promise. The moderator community has repeatedly asked Reddit to take an active stance in moderation disputes; the most recent blackout protest before this one was asking Reddit to prohibit Covid denialism.
One should never trust a corporation, who only acts in the interest of money, is my point. That they even trusted them in the first place is a gross misjudgment. It's not about what words a corporation utters, it's about what actions it takes that determines its value.
Maybe they shouldn't have extended that much trust to Reddit as the company grew and changed, but that doesn't change the fact that Reddit admins are now lying. I don't really like this carte blanche idea that everyone is going to do bad things, so when you trusted them in the past it was your fault ideology.
> I don't really like this carte blanche idea that everyone is going to do bad things
It's not about doing good or bad things, it's about following the incentives (cui bono?). Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits, just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success. There's nothing wrong with either incentive, but it's crucial to recognize that those are the incentives present instead of thinking that entities will instead act against their incentives for the sake of others (indeed, even cooperation and sometimes self-sacrifice, as in the case of ants, can lead to greater genetic dispersion of the individual).
Therefore, in this case, there was no reason to trust Reddit admins on what they say, since at the end of the day, they will simply say whatever they want in order to pursue profit, which they are currently doing.
> Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits
The steps they take to obtain that goal matter a lot. If they went around literally stealing money from peoples wallets, we wouldn't just hand-wave it away and say "oh, they're amoral entities"
> just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success
We still consider it unethical to obtain that goal by any means necessary.
> There's nothing wrong with either incentive
I have nothing wrong with either incentive. Making a profit and reproducing are both great things. Doing either of them (or anything!) in unethical ways is the problem.
> Therefore, in this case, there was no reason to trust Reddit admins on what they say
What they have said in the past and what they have done WRT treating subreddits are "your space" is pretty consistent. We didn't just take their word for it. Their actions over the last 10 years in almost every circumstance has led us to believe this is the policy.
> they will simply say whatever they want in order to pursue profit
The public NEED to combat these kinds of problems by holding companies accountable. I would much rather live in a world where a company has to worry about lying to consumers because they will be held accountable than live in a world where anything a company says is ignored because we threw our hands up and said nobody can be trusted to any degree.
Just as a lion eating a gazelle has no moral qualms, a corporation does not either, so long as it's legal. Expecting ethical behavior in a corporation when such behavior is not encoded in its fitness function is misguided. You may not like this answer but it's true. If you want corporations to act ethically, encode it in their fitness function; make there be legal or monetary consequences to acting unethically because until then, they will simply do what they want to do.
In other words, even if you may feel that corporations are acting unethically, without any consequences for their actions, they'll just continue to do so, that's just the reality of it. You can try to change it, as you mention in your last paragraph, but that will be exceedingly difficult.
So maybe it's naive to think reddit wouldn't just seize control regardless of the "rules" (although I've seen plenty of posts from mods that mention this possibility). But that's not relevant to the question which is whether or not the moderators are moderating - as reddit is still using the rules as a pretense. I say to the mods, make it an easy answer, re-open the subs and remove every post that isn't a copy-paste of a stickied statement, something like that. Make them admit the rules were a convenient excuse for something they'd do anyway.
> Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.
I actually take issue with polling to shut down communities as well. Linux and many other huge FOSS projects effectively can't change their license because they are composites created from contributions of many people so you'd need to get _unanimous_ agreement from all those users to actually change the license. In fact, if a sub goes private, that content is still there, but even if you created the post/comment, you cannot edit/delete it without nuking your whole account!
Private subs are a feature mods have access to under the existing system.
Private subs existed before this protest.
Setting a sub to private is moderation. And likely mods are still moderating just a much smaller amount of content from users already in the community.
Its not reasonable to kick out mods because they are protesting, and reddits response is a massive stretch.
Destroying a community is not. There's plenty of obvious precedents where mods that attempted to destroy their own subreddits or merely hold them hostage have been replaced. These were considered obvious decisions, but now that people are angry at the admins we have some weird Mod Rights movement bubbling up.
> Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made.
You're saying Reddit was backed into a corner and had no other option but to knowingly defame the author of Apollo with false public accusations? And that this was a reasonable action?
How is "stop moderating" defined? Is an r/widgets sub that decides the only future discussions topics allowed are "why spez is harming the r/widgets community" still a moderated sub?
Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's response is the only reasonable one they could have made. If the majority of your userbase likes sub X and some mods (fewer than 10 for such a sub) want to shut it down, then of course Reddit would open it back up.
People here on HN and Reddit decrying this as the end of Reddit likely don't remember all of the controversies of Reddit over the past 17 years since it's been active. Hell, most of the current userbase came in after the most recent blackout in 2015 due to Ellen Pao firing Victoria. This has all happened before, with no effect to Reddit, indeed, much the opposite, seeing their user growth numbers.