It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1]
I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture.
Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2023 with no comment activity at all post, sure, that could be a lurker deciding to comment on this one very contentious issue. When you see a dozen in a sub that has 100k subscribers, that's odd but probably not unreasonable. When you see thousands, maybe something is going on.
I've been exploring the fediverse options like kbin and lemmy and I just don't see it. Maybe someone can explain. If one lemmy instance has a really popular community, say "Memes" how can that scale? There could be millions of posts and terabytes of data. Then if multiple lemmy instances have their own "Memes" communities, that's balkanized and a user would have to subscribe to each instances "Memes" community?
Or are communities federated also? Like all instances "Memes" communities get pulled together? Examining [1] that appears to not be the case.
I think one looking for alternatives needs to understand what they're hoping to gain from other resources.
If you want low effort jokes, or memes, the most likely outcome is you're going to migrate to where the most people are. Similar to how some subreddits overtook others in popularity, there'll be a federated instance that "wins". We're sort of in a new frontiers phase where people are scrambling to find new homes and there'll be a lot of duplication until winners and losers are settled.
But in the end, if good memes come out of the most populous place. Reddit will probably just simply be the best you have. Anything else will be second rate. Perhaps 'the best' will make its rounds through all sites as reposts just as 9Gag stuff and Imgur stuff finds its way to Reddit or Twitter, or TikTok.
But back to the main point. Lemmy/kbin/etc likely will never be reddit. I'm okay with that because I found most value in smaller niche communities (similar to how HackerNews scratches an itch that Reddit never could). I think there'll be plenty of opportunity to drop my reddit habits as I find moderately active NetSec/Programming/Networking/etc. communities on Lemmy. I'll keep Imgur for lazy image humor, and probably nod to reddit for catching the beat on my local community/provincial subs.
I still see it perhaps as a positive for myself. Loosening my Reddit addiction will be healthy long term. I'll be forced to make decisions on what topics matter to me and how I'll consume them instead of blindly marching through reddit on another doomscroll because it was convenient.
I assume there'd be a limit on the number of popular communities each server can handle. CommunityA@ServerB and CommunityC@ServerD can grow separately and you could participate in both.
If you had CommunityA at both, eventually everyone might migrate to ServerB; but then there's more room on ServerD for other communities.
Does this mean that instances that happen to have the popular communities gets hosed on hosting costs? Or stop submissions? Meanwhile "CommunityA" on other instances starve for content and subscribes. If that's true, communities should be federated as well. Like a user should be able to subscribe to "CommunityA" and get that content from all instances who have a "CommunityA".
You can have an account on one instance and subscribe to a community on another. There's no need for every instance to have a "memes" community, though there will undoubtedly be more than one. Then you can subscribe to the one(s) you like best. Not unlike how Reddit tends to have multiple subreddits for popular things with different mods, norms, and feels.
It is unlike that, because it scales completely differently. Basically what the GP is saying is that it's not possible (economically) in the Fediverse to create a community as large as, say, /r/funny.
Basically the federation is happening at the wrong level for that, since the whole community needs to be on a single server.
You can subscribe to the Memes@lemmy.world community from your account on another instance, even if your instance has its own Memes community. Then when you create a thread or post a reply, it'll be sent from your instance to lemmy.world.
> Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this weaken Reddit's claim to Section 230 immunity? As in, they cross the line from simply being a provider of user generated content to being a publisher of it? We're not talking normal moderation but rather publishing what was marked for deletion.
That's the same defeatest advice people always give when you don't like the direction of your country/state/municipality/etc. you should leave/move/etc. I say absolutely not and if you have invested time and energy into something (I've had my reddit account a bit longer than my HN one) then you can and should fight for it. I don't have a vision disability and so am not very impacted by the killing of 3rd party acts but this is an act of solidarity to support those who are (However minor most of our sacrifice is). The least I can do is not complain that my daily quota of cat pictures is unfairly impacted.
You argue the critical importance of Reddit -- equivocating it with legislative bodies (which I find fantastically ridiculous, as an aside) -- but then you also dismiss people annoyed by the blackout as missing out on only cat pictures. It's an extreme example of someone arguing both sides.
Though of course what you probably intend to convey is that people who find the blackout annoying can be dismissed because they're just those weird cat picture people -- they just don't understand the importance like you do, and thus don't count -- and is a perfect example of my point.
I don't care about the API issue, despite being a professional dev. I find sharecropping on someone else's product a perilous path that eventually comes up snake-eyes. Like, the moment someone makes a third party app for Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, or anything else, they are on an expiry meter. Have people not learned this yet?
The blackout thing didn't work because most people don't care, so some people have stomped their feet and effectively started trying to vandalize the site and I think it's achieving absolutely nothing.
> don't care about the API issue, despite being a professional dev. I find sharecropping on someone else's product a perilous path that eventually comes up snake-eyes. Like, the moment someone makes a third party app for Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, or anything else, they are on an expiry meter. Have people not learned this yet?
You are missing the forest for the trees here. The issue is not that they are charging for API access. The issue is that assurances were given that the transition would be reasonable but pricing withheld until the last minute.
Negotiations then proceeded in bad faith, with reddit never intending to allow them to pay the price asked (no methods existed to even make this transaction possible with a 30 day deadline, and other app creators were ignored completely when approaching reddit sales).
When the dev made the situation public (with a 'go ahead' from reddit) then Huffman appears to have taken it personally, and instead of engaging with the community concerns about lack of options for mobile moderators, went on a tantrum. He then discounts any concerns over his handling of the situation and doubles down on libelous claims that were proven false.
This is on top of using reasoning that is not only dubious, but contradictory. If they really care about making a profit, why not offer something of value and charge for it, like the 3rd party apps do? You don't win customers by making something shitty and then removing all of their options and then not even have a plan in place to make money with the shitty alternative.
Huffman has been unable to monetize reddit and he isn't presenting any way to. All he is doing is acting unhinged and destructive -- with both community trust/relations and the corporation itself being used in ways that can not be turned around.
Usually corporations burn their trust as a short-sighted scheme to make a bunch of money quickly (reputable brand cuts so many costs the reputation is lost, etc) and this is tragic, but at least they got something out of it.
This guy seems like he is just burning things down because he is frustrated that they exist successfully on their own using the same resources he has, while he cannot.
It's a metaphor and doesn't need to be perfect. My point was merely "don't like it, then leave" is useless advice IMO. I didn't say reddit is critical exactly (though maybe it is for many who frequent https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/), only that it has value to many. Strikes and demonstrations and such are ALWAYS inconvenient by design. That doesn't mean they are pointless. BART strikes and BLM protests impacted me a lot more than reddit blackouts but I still supported them.
Ultimately we are ALL sharecropping where the majority of the web is "owned/gatekeeped" by a handful of big companies like google, meta, microsoft, amazon, twitter (?), visa, mastercard, paypal, yelp, cloudflare, comcast, cox, etc. You may agree or disagree with my list but hopefully you get my point.
It remains to be seen if it worked or not depending on what the fallout is. Will users, moderators and most importantly advertisers leave? Will reddit IPO? Will they be able to hire? Will spez survive this as CEO?
I actually got accused of "arguing in bad faith" by a hackernews mod once because they couldn't fathom that a real person on this site would disagree with net neutrality.
<< It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
I would have bought this line of thinking about two decades ago, but between now and then a lot has happened that seriously undermined any kind of faith that the post found on the internet is a genuine perspective or, indeed, that it was even generated by a human.
I think the last straw for me was FCC public comment ISP industry sock puppetry related to net neutrality ( not that there were no indications of foul plays before ) and the fact that nothing changed after those revelations.
That said, I absolutely buy that there are reddit users that are annoyed; I will also admit that I have yet to talk to someone, who does not support the blackout. Still, this may reflect my social circle more than anything else so I do not dismiss your point.
I agree with that in principle, but this particular CEO is known for anonymously editing users comments that were critical of him, and reddit itself has a history of creating fake accounts, so in this case both are judged by their past deeds.
> It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
You are absolutely correct that it is a common sentiment. However, this doesn't prove that this sentiment is always wrong.
It all depends on context, for example, accounts that are very new and go strongly against the general "consensus" (as much as that shouldn't be a thing) raise suspicions. Some people suspect the use of LLMs on trying to push for consensus and astroturf. Add the name of a fruit to your answer. Hopefully they will find a solution to that conundrum
> Some people suspect the use of LLMs on trying to push for consensus and astroturf.
I don't even suspect it at this point, I just don't know if it's Reddit or someone else, but what motivation does someone else have to make new accounts that post GPT content unfiltered (and have since been deleted), that also just happen to push against the blackout.
> Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
You're not entitled to the communities or their content. The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.
You don't control what they do and how they should behave. There was a social contract and it was thoroughly broken, so there's obvious instability now.
The "I couldn't care less, give me my memes" can take their own arbitrary advice and leave if they don't like something. See how useless that is?
> The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.
Yes, the sum of all users are the community, not the mods themselves. Therefore if the community is truly aligned in a consensus to not reopen a sub, it won't matter if the sub is forcibly reopened by a newly installed moderator because the community, the users, won't come back anyway. So there's really nothing to complain about; the community is now dead or moved off reddit and it doesn't matter what reddit does with the subreddit that formerly hosted that community.
Unless of course the community is not nearly so united as claimed. Then maybe most of the community will come back to the subreddit. I think this is probably this is what will happen in most cases. And this is why people are mad about reddit threatening to reopen subreddits; because they don't actually have a community consensus to stop using that subreddit. They rely on the subreddit being locked to force the community's hand, and as soon as that leverage is taken away the community will be free to make a decision which is contrary to their own desires.
> the community is now dead or moved off reddit and it doesn't matter what reddit does with the subreddit that formerly hosted that community.
It's an ongoing situation but I love how you're trying to force everyone's hand to get to "how things were" for you. Funnily enough. That's what the protest is about, in a way.
> And this is why people are mad about reddit threatening to reopen subreddits;
I love how the self proclaimed casuals like you who "don't care" have this specific takes about the motives and reasons for things.
The motives are what they are and have been clearly laid out. The one throwing a conspiratantrum is you.
Go create the sub you want. The community will follow you, right?
And yes, that has happened plenty of times that mods go against a community.
> It's an ongoing situation but I love how you're trying to force everyone's hand to get to "how things were" for you.
> Go create the sub you want. The community will follow you, right?
I stopped using reddit 10 years ago, it can burn for all I care. Stop trying to psychoanalyze people (badly.)
If admins lift the blackouts and people go back to using the subreddits, then obviously those people were not committed to not using reddit. This is simply common sense. The answer to this problem is for you to stop using reddit, then reddit's problems won't be your problems.
> If admins lift the blackouts and people go back to using the subreddits, then obviously those people were not committed to not using reddit
Backwards logic. They may be using it to complain or it may be intervened in a myriad of ways. You're set on dismissing while pretending you don't care but then make this claims that display ignorance of typical reddit behavioural patterns.
> The answer to this problem is for you to stop using reddit, then reddit's problems won't be your problems.
You keep going to this myopic well. Hey, if this bothers you shut up. Close your screen. Go to bed.
The only people who act entitled to the communities and think they own them when they don't are the mods here. In what twisted way can you argue that a user of a community not wanting some power tripping mods to close down everything, acting entitled?
Lol don't forget "liquidate all of your assets to donate directly to Reddit and immediately sign up as unpaid interns, and consult with your betters/superiors how to vote in all upcoming elections".
I don't even know what to say, some folk just don't know how to capitalism right.
During this whole debacle, there's been quite a few posts across various parts of the internet that register to me as astroturfing, including a handful on HN. It's not about the opinions presented, nothing wrong with dissent, but the way these posts express those opinions just feels wrong somehow — I've seen 20 years worth of impassioned people posting on the internet, and these posts come off as poor imitations of that.
Not a pattern of hallucinated poetry posted to new accounts, that just so happen to also dislike the blackout[0-6], while also occasionally apologizing for not being able to generate inappropriate or offensive content[7].
So according to you it’s paranoia to assume it’s impacting anything?
I never claimed you were a bot or LLM or anything of the nature, I also never claimed it was everyone but that clearly SOMEONE is doing it and it’s blatantly obvious. Stop making strawmen to attack. I pointed out patterns that people were seeing and your response is “but it doesn’t impact anything.”
Maybe you should check your biases first before throwing stones. Evidence was presented of someone clearly astroturfing against the blackout but it’s just my bias of course. Not evidence.
Honestly I’m getting strong “my opinion is the only valid opinion” vibes from your reply simply because you dismiss actual evidence to go into a straw man that I was attacking you.
> So according to you it’s paranoia to assume it’s impacting anything?
Why are you only selectively recalling what I wrote, despite the fact that what I wrote is literally inches above this quote?
And my opinion is irrelevant here, what you're claiming is not meaningful. It's like the "voter fraud" debates. Could anyone credibly say there's literally zero voter fraud ever? No. But one can say with certainty that voter fraud does not change the outcome of elections in the US.
> Why are you only selectively recalling what I wrote, despite the fact that what I wrote is literally inches above this quote?
Because again, those are your strawman attack points. I never claimed it was Reddit, nor did I claim it was widespread. I was simply presenting evidence that it was happening.
Maybe reread my post which is literally inches above your comment? Hmm?
> People exist, real people, who hold opinions that differ from yours, including me.
Of course, but astroturfing is also a very real thing that those with money to lose have no moral objection making use of, and as such it's naive to take every comment at face value.
The method which one determines which comment falls into which category is variable and imperfect and always will be but it's a sense I've tried to hone. I like to try to give people the benefit of the doubt but it can be difficult to do that when, say, large number of comments parrot one of a handful of talking points with few linguistic variances or elaborations on why the commenter feels that way.
How so? People generally hate reddit mods, for good and bad reasons. The belief that reddit mods are power hungry abusers is ingrained in internet culture so I don't find it strange that this common sentiment is leaking to HN. If anything I find it very surprising that people praise them as heroes now which would have been completely unheard of just a few weeks ago.
There are many mods I actively dislike, for example one on r/confusingperspective who gave me a warning because I tagged another user in a comment because I wanted to highlight something for them. But I still support the mods here. And I also support the third-party developers as well.
Ultimately Reddit depends on moderators being able to do their job, if Spez chooses to pull the rug out from under their feet so that they cannot do their job (which they do without cost for Reddit) effectively, why should I not cheer them on? Especially since they are pretty much the only ones able to coordinate any form of protest after Spez lied (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36247130) about what the Apollo dev said?
It really isn't that odd. Most reddit users hardly interact with the admins. When it comes to mods though, the question is not whether they have had bad interactions, but how many. A job that offers no pay, no benefits, but the dopamine hit of having petty power over random strangers tends to attract poor candidates.
I’ve been on HN for years as seen by my post history. I’ve been on reddit for years. I would love to see the mods stripped of power and the ability to vote them out. A lot of mods are terrible, probably not human beings but terrible at moderating.
I won't deny that as a possibility, but the majority of my Reddit usage has been during its mobile-dominant era so it's not as if low effort mobile posts are unfamiliar.
There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored over the course of their tantrum. I've commented more in the past few days than i have in the past few months, because it's obvious the mods have completely lost perspective of the average user experience.
Lurkers are pure consumers, free-riders. They produce nothing. They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.
People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.
Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!
> They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.
Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand all of these comments talking about Reddit as if it was 100% free to operate and the only important users are the commenters
Reddit at its core is a utility. A "dumb pipe" operator whose main role is to keep the servers running and pay the bandwidth bills. Yet like so many (internet-based) utilities, they have delusions of grandeur, born out of a sense of entitlement to the incredible value produced by their users.
Why did they hire 2000 people? Nothing they have done in the last decade has provided new value to users. If they had simply accepted their role as a utility instead of chasing the mega-growth tech fantasy then they would be a (modestly) profitable company with 200 employees at most.
Lurkers can participate with upvotes and downvotes. You don't even have to join a subreddit to participate in this way.
Lurkers (who did click join, but never posted) are included in the subreddit user-counts advertised on the protest subreddit. If they count as users there, they count as users here.
Only for a centralized, corporate-owned system like Reddit. A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style. This changes the incentive structure: making the administrators accountable to the most invested people (power users).
> A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style
does it exist and works on scale, or it is like communism where everyone will be happy, but it is never achievable and sustainable just because most of the people want money, power and free stuff.
There are social network UIs written for Matrix the same way ActivityPub is used for Lemmy and Mastodon and Flickr-clones. I expect these to multiply as the protocol gains more features too. Recent Matrix enhancements are about modeling content relationships, seemingly to this end.
And yes, the entire foundation structure of the platform and protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point. ActivityPub and Matrix protocol are similar in this regard. And yes the AP impls are seeing huge explosions in growth in the last 3 weeks.
Riku, I can't reply to you because this site is a joke, but I don't think I want to anyway, you don't seem to get the point, across the board. Not everything is about profit for bleep's sake. Also, I'll sign up for s month of reddit premium if you can find 3 subs that voted to re-open. Or literally any single person besides you and spez that think every single app dev is scamming, and nearly every single mod.
And no reddits infra is not a most, lmao. Their site crashes daily and runs on AWS, and every single bit of value is derived from the people you accuse of spamming - you know the ones that keep voting to keep the homepage looking like a wasteland of porn and AITA posts. You're completely out of touch.
> infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search
Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.
I don't see you refuted anything, they still have infra for lots of data with search and recommendation, bootstrapped content and communities and generate good chunk of revenue, and reaching this point will take good amount of effort for rivals.
Except even just viewing a post leaves a trace, whether a the service chooses to display view counts or not. The webhost knows how much traffic they're getting, and those numbers help them set rates for advertisers.
None of that matters one bit to the average Reddit poster: the person who creates a text post without any links. If any value is captured from that lurker, it all goes straight to Reddit.
I dunno, post on /r/games explaining why there were NOT going to black out is still sitting at 0 upvotes (a in "there is more downvotes than upvotes", with comments asking them to sitting on nice few k's of upvotes which would indicate that even people that never comment downvoted it and want the blackout.
The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition vocal minority
Polls and vote counts can no longer be used to measure subreddit sentiment on this issue. That window closed once the first blackout began, which thrust low-information members into a situation where it looks like the subreddit suddenly shut down. The majority of redditors have no idea where their subreddits disappeared to, why, or when they will be back. Therefore, they can't participate in any votes.
All sentiment measurements going forward will skew towards Very Online users following the drama closely, which GP is arguing will ignore a silent majority of the subreddit's actual MAU.
Lurkers should also realize that their experience is shaped by mods decisions. For the better or for the worst, that's a good question, I guess we will soon find out. But given what FB groups look like, I have my own opinion.
Also, lurkers would have nothing to lurk around if it weren't for heavier posters, many of whom use third party apps to paper over the various papercuts of posting with the official site/client.
What do you think it would cost to buy a non insignificant amount Reddit accounts from power users to own their comments and remove them from Reddit? And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Should be cheap, right? With the value of Reddit users being so low?
If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.
> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns?
Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.
There are no material repercussions for bad faith DMCA takedowns, as the evidence has shown [1]. The legal burden still falls on Reddit to triage and action them. With that said, you would want to own the Reddit accounts as IP in an LLC that holds no financial assets to shield you from any liability (not legal advice, we're just having fun talking hypotheticals). You'd own the copyright to the content, let Reddit try to argue in court the requests were bad faith. You didn't agree to the terms when the account changed hands, and you're now the owner.
You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?
Reddit admins could automate the reposting of old content from years ago, complete with comments, and I think most doomscrolling lurkers would never notice.
Karma-point-harvesting bots do this already! Even comments -- one bot user reposts a popular post, and other bot users repost the top comments from the last time it was posted.
Should you rather care about the lurkers that provide no value to the community, or to the users that actually post something and make reddit reddit? For me the answer is clear.
The first party app/website is terrible, riddled with annoying UX and dark patterns. Also, I still want 18+ content on Reddit!
This is just an anecdote, but I just went on my city's sub this morning to see how they were handling this. Apparently the (singular) mod did the initial blackout, then put up a poll on whether it should continue, the sub voted not to, and he is now holding another poll this weekend on the same topic and everyone seems to think it's because he didn't get the outcome he wanted the first time.
I think all the people posting stuff like "reddit is DYING" are in for a rude awakening because the overwhelming majority of users do not give a single shit. They wanna see memes that confirm their biases and maybe see what is going on in their city/locality, and they can't do that if all their subs are blacked out.
That's just honestly sub with a shitty mod, but there is certainly an argument to be made for better tools, sub blackout should not be something so easily implemented by single mod out of whole group.
But I've seen both subs that asked mods, mods that unilaterally decided to blackout, and subs where users pleaded for blackout while power-hungry mods decided not to (presumable coz they were afraid reddit takes their playground from them)
If that really is how it went the mod made a stupid mistake.
If I were a power tripping mod, I would either just inform the sub about the subreddit taking part in the blackout. From the up and downvotes you can then already gauge the sentiment of the subreddit towards this issue and if the downvotes go south, you can always delete the post and do it anyway.
But then you can't go and ask the sub about continuing the blackout. But as a power tripping mod I can't keep the subreddit private as then I would miss out on my power trip.
So eventually I would open it up again, make a poll about continuing and as the sub will deny that I could keep it open and keep on power tripping while at the same time claiming that I only follow the sub's democratic decision.
As an example of why I lurk the majority of the time, the mods in /r/seattle have been perma-banning anyone who posts to /r/seattlewa - the mods have created a situation where each comment has a risk of tripping some unknown drama landmine. I don't want to have to make a new account and re-subscribe to all the subs I'm in if I ever trip one of these mines.
I identify as a lurker although I've made occasional posts and comments. I don't see how the mods are the problem here. Third part apps go, I go. It's that simple.
When the mods said their blackout would be for 2 days, the silent majority rolled their eyes, but did not voice their opinions. Over the years we've all learned that folks who disagree with a mod's opinion will most likely get banned from the subreddit, so since the mods promised the subreddits would be back after 2 days, it wasn't worth arguing about. When the mods refused to bring the subreddits back after that time was up, they broke their promise - they've lost all the trust that the various communities had with them.
Not everyone that disagrees with you is doing so in bad faith. Not everything is brigading, etc. Some of us think that the blackouts are starting to look a lot like a tantrum that doesn't represent the best interests of the community. It is a very one-sided argument, as if the moderators are the reason the community exists. No. Moderators are unnecessary without users. It's a symbiosis.
Yeah I don’t give a shit about the blackouts and have been commenting on Reddit how dumb it is. I have been seeing the polls in the subreddits I frequent and it’s like 65/35 to keep them open. Pretty solid majority.
It’s certainly _not_ dumb to those who are participating in the blackout. Phrasing their position in that light will cause your argument to fall on deaf ears.
I use Reddit to talk about local stuff, ultralight gear. The larger world of mods and “power users” and whatnot - not super relevant. I understand how ya’ll feel, but is blocking people from using r/tempe really useful?
“I’m gonna make Reddit completely unusable so Reddit doesn’t become shitty”
In a couple weeks, the main way many people use Reddit is going to literally be blocked forever. The alternatives are not palatable to many, so the users are basically being unilaterally banished from Reddit. And that's just the opening salvo to monetize reddit.
Give it another year, and your little sub will have 3 ad posts per "actual" post and modded by the Tempe Chamber of Commerce.
> In a couple weeks, the main way many people use Reddit is going to literally be blocked forever.
This is false. Stats showed 3rd party app users were an extreme minority of users.
It's more like mods are a disproportionate number of 3rd party users due to wanting to mod from their phones, and are making the blackout decision for everybody.
Looks like a tantrum to me, with moderators trying to add others who don't feel the same way to their movement.
Example of a subreddit I was in: Moderator opens a poll on whether the blackout should continue. Lays out why it should continue. Doesn't allow discussion about the vote.
A lot of talk about "unpaid labor" of mods while they pay little mind to the "unpaid labor" of the people actually creating the posts.
I'm really not worried about this not because I'm a fan of reddit because there is really nothing stopping a subreddit from coalescing somewhere else. The arguments against this really start to show the value of Reddit, though.
You can read through this thread to find many coherent reasons. They won't necessarily be reasons you personally find persuasive, but that isn't what coherent means. People have different value systems and priorities and therefore they can legitimately conclude different things about the same information. People with whom you cannot find yourself agreeing probably don't share many values and perspectives with you, but that doesn't mean they're being incoherrent. Assuming that anybody who disagrees with you is mentally disabled or a bot is a pernicious redditism.
I have read through this thread and I have not found a single coherent reason, hence my question.
All of the arguments I see here on the other side are assumptions backed by nothing, i.e. "the majority users of subs didn't agree with the mods decision," which is patently false. Just go to the subs that locked down, look at their sticky thread explaining whats going on and why, and find a mountain of support.
Even if it wasn't trivially easy to prove these arguments wrong, they don't even provide any actual evidence for their claims.
I don't think you quite understand what the word coherent means. Just because somebody has a different perspective on what reality is, doesn't mean they're being incoherent. In this thread and related discussions on HN there have been many posts by people explaining that they don't believe blackouts have the user consensus in many subreddits which have been locked. It is claimed that many of those subreddits never had polls at all. There are some who allege those polls were botted and received several times more votes than there are active users of that subreddit. In other subreddits, the votes are a tiny fraction of active users (including lurking readers.) Others (myself included) have pointed out that if user consensus is actually aligned with the blackout then the blackouts are unnecessary because those users can simply choose not to use reddit even if the subreddits are reopened; from this perspective the purpose of the blackouts is to lock out those users who would choose to keep using reddit.
I do not intent to persuade you that these viewpoints are compelling and truthful, because that's beyond the point. I'm not arguing that the above arguments are subjectively correct, only that they are coherent. Whether or not you find these arguments persuasive, they are coherent. Whether or not you think they have the basic facts of the situation correct, they are still coherent. Maybe you think lurking readers shouldn't count; that's a legitimate value which others may legitimately disagree with, and depending on what your values are you come to different conclusions. That doesn't mean people who think lurkers should count are being incoherent. Coherence does not mean subjectively correct.
They will probably have no problem replacing them either. You might have to take a quality dip, at least in theory; In reality it's hard to imagine the mods getting worse. They have a really terrible attitude. It's not just about community relations either, they really, really suck at enforcing rules, so it's not like we're gonna lose quality there.
The only reason reddit continues to play nice is to prevent a mass exudus from disgruntled users. They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
You're painting mods with a really broad brush, here. There are as many different moderator styles as there are subreddits.
> They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
I'm not convinced. I think they want the _current_ crop of mods of big subreddits to leave, to be replaced by users who would never dream of protesting Reddit's decisions.
> That said, they're quite replaceable, it seems.
In terms of popping some users out, and granting others mod access, that's true. In terms of the quality of the subreddit as a result - that would remain to be seen. I've browsed under-moderated subreddits that are relevant to my interests, and it's not a good experience.
Are they actually going to get replaced by shill mods? It seems more like they will suffer some form of loss for some time, and that they're trying to prevent this.
I agree that poor moderation is a problem. However, it seems that moderation on reddit is quite poor to begin with.
> and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods
How about all the Apollo and RiF users? I'm sympathetic and supportive of the mods but I'm angry because at the end of the month the app I've been using for more than a decade will be no longer functional due to choices Reddit is making.
I wonder if Apollo could return as Apollo Premium, with only paid accounts. What fraction of old Apollo users would be willing to subscribe to keep that functionality?
Yeah before I deleted my accounts yesterday, the rate of weird pro-reddit admin comments was getting pretty high. It would not surprise me at all if they are trying to game the numbers more before their IPO, so they can claim they made the right decision.
Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)
It's reddit, I'm sure there are people that have spent the last decade on the site posting cat pics, dodgy stock tips and intimate details of their life being accused of being bots for criticising mods.
But if a bunch of new, dormant or unused accounts start promoting the exact party line of an entity which is known to generate accounts on their service to seed stuff, in a battle they're determined to win, the probability of them all being unconnected individual people popping up to express their support for Reddit's management is pretty near zero...
Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you)
Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
> Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you)
Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if it wasn't for third party apps that are crucial to moderators doing their work. Reddit has consistently done an awful job on quality moderation tooling. They really don't seem to give a shit, and just do the absolute bare minimum. The only reason it has managed to survive in the state it is is because others have voluntarily picked up the slack and built the tooling Reddit hasn't bothered to build.
Just because you don't see it or use it doesn't mean it's not central to what you get to experience. Think bigger, beyond your direct experience and consider how that directly impacts you.
> Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators
This is simply not true. I moderate several subs. 3rd party mod tools are not critical. Mods who claim this is so are really misrepresenting the issue.
Power tools for mods are nice to have for some. I make use of automod extensively. The tools reddit provides are adequate to perform moderation tasks.
Also, since I guess it needs to be said, I'm not a shill for spez. I don't like the dude, but I'm not a sock puppet. This is all winding up looking like an epic toddler tantrum from a small proportion of the higher-power mod contingent.
Yet still a significant portion of comments come from third party app users. Reddit wants to control how I post my likely close to 1000 comments a year, I just won't comment then. The content doesn't come out of this air, it comes from a handful of power users that are far more likely to use third party apps.
> Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
With all respect, that's something we are about to find out.
I find it hard to believe that there are so many people who think that Reddit looked at the mountain of data they have on user and mod behaviour, and API usage, and decided to do the opposite of what that data indicated as a good option.
All the internet posters making the claims you have just made are working blind. They don't have a single iota of actual data to support their conclusions.
I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous value which is now lost.
Even as a non-mod the third party apps are simply a substantially better user experience than the official app. The CEO's statements and actions have made it clear that the user, nor the mods are anything other than a metric to be exploited in their business plan. I'm no longer interested in participating in their cattle drive.
I am a regular user on Reddit and not a mod. But I have managed a very low traffic mailing list before. I cannot imagine doing it for free no matter how much ego boost I get.
So my question is, if Reddit kicks off all the mods from a sub you frequent often, and ask you to be the new mod, would you do it?
And, if it is a busy enough subreddit, would you spend the time those people have been spending, to moderation?
And those new mods are suddenly not going to need better modding tools? They'll just be happy with whatever Reddit has? It's just the current mods who get off on their power, the new ones won't?
Stop for a second and consider: why do these problems exist, and why should they stop?
You can't change human nature but you can get mods that don't care about this particular issue and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too
> You can't change human nature but you can get mods that don't care about this particular issue
Okay, and how will that help you to not get "capricious mods"?
> and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too
And when those ones make problems you get rid of them again? And then again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again?
You can't do anything about that.
Most of them will will be in it for themselves but when they start getting ideas that they own the place (like the current ones think) you cull them
Well, we could always not do your bad idea, then we wouldn't have to go into this loop of getting in new power-hungry mods just to throw them out and replace them with the next ones.
If they would only moderate for feeling power, they wouldn’t risk their mod position by going against the only party who can kick them.
Honestly, I also think that public forums such as reddit shouldn’t build up a walled garden like this and the information should be free to anyone, regardless whether they use it commercially or for research.
It is effectively not possible to be a mod of a subreddit without third party apps. I don’t think people fully understand just how awful the native mod suite is for Reddit, and this is what the blackout is really about: the fact that Reddit seems to want to absolutely refuse to support the unpaid labor that makes the site a source of real human knowledge as opposed to a wasteland of bots and trolls.
This is really well said. It feels like a new Apple CEO who views investments in design as frivolous. There are valid points that Reddit needs to improve and adjust to be a healthy business but recent changes have all the hallmark of a company making a dangerous waiver that visitors will stay because, really, where else are they going to go?
I don't have a third party app, either, but I do care that a business values its customers and partners... And I'm really getting signs that Reddit feels its only customers / partners are the advertisers. They've made their own website unusable because it demands you use the app instead. And the official reddit app just isn't a good app or an enjoyable app—it feels like a play for them to maximize ads & tracking. They don't have great native tools for moderators—essentially their own pool of free labor.
I know these things almost always blow over, eventually, but this has been just another part of the spiral. If you think your only relationship is with your advertisers... someday the advertisers will be the last ones you have left before they too take their business elsewhere.
Fun fact, those humans who put the info in and make up the communities do care. It's not "evil undemocratic mods", the communities in many subs voted in favor of the protest.
I love how many people who seem to complain about the blackout are like "stop whining and go back to produce the content for me".
Time will tell if the deterioration of the relationship will make that content you value less likely to exist, of less quality or more inaccesible.
Next time you have a problem with any device you have, or any doubt in general, google and try to get real human feedback instead of having to navigate through dozens of web pages with shitty answers that don't work
Electronics and gadgets are the easiest to search. As I said on another post, the forums I used to visit back in 2000s-2010s are still around. Reddit is just SEO optimized but not the be all and all for answers for that.
Google is still pretty good when I try to use it especially because I have learned some of their search functions and operators. I haven't done vanilla search since I learned them.
Bard is nice but not for everything. It always gave me the wrong answer about dates and events for the next NBA game.
I don't know. Have people forgotten that reddit mods were almost universally hated before this? It didn't matter if you were a good mod. People would consider you the enemy regardless, so I don't find it strange at all that users take this opportunity to hate on mods.
I think there's some group who's always disliked mods, but I don't think that dislike is necessarily universal.
Speaking personally I've had maybe one or two bad experiences of mods in the ~11 years I've used Reddit, and that time wasn't exactly spent lurking, with my account having accrued ~35k karma.
> It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside.
“Go outside” is an ironic comment, given that the subreddit blackout doesn’t appear to be all that popular among casual Reddit users. It’s popular among the chronically online people who use Reddit so much that they’re intimately involved in every detail of the site, but 98-99% of users don’t use 3rd party clients.
> I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
It’s getting weird that Redditors are turning into conspiracy theorists, believing that anyone who disagrees with the popular narrative must be a shill, a plant, or the CEO himself speaking to them.
No, the CEO of Reddit isn’t spending all day coming to your niche subreddit, creating new accounts, and sockpuppeting opinions to the handful of people there.
This is how reddit was started. If they had tools for mass posting with auto-generated accounts then why would they stop?
Remember - the top subs were being modded by epstein’s gang. If that kind of absurdity is happening then imagine when a political party offers them 10m to rig an election.
It's not that weird if you reflect a moment about the whole situation. Mods are important for reddit, but so are the users who create the content. But what power have they in this whole power? Did anyone ask them what they want and support? Probably not really, because with the subs closed, how can the mods still reach the majority of their users? Some may have found their way to other places, but the majority will remain on Reddit, knowing barely anything about the whole battlefields. So it's natural that they now will also voice their opinions, using new accounts to not suffer under the hate of those how might still have power in the future.
The more obvious answer is that many to most Reddit users do not care about how Reddit treats developers using its API. They just want their memes or discuss sports or their hobbies or whatever.
Long time reddit user and I don’t think the blackout is an outrage but do think the mods need power stripped from them. They are a bunch of power trippers and if you disagree with what they believe expect to be banned. As long as discussion is polite we should be able to voice whatever we want and currently you can not do that on reddit.
Americans (and terminally online Europeans) have a hard time understanding that people outside their social bubbles can disagree with them without being sockpuppet accounts or bots.
I think it's just redditors and twitter users, basically people who spend their time online in a filter bubble designed to keep them addicted to confirmation bias.
I think this is characteristic not of Americans and not even of terminally online Europeans, but rather of reddit users specifically (and heavy users of other systems that operate similar to reddit, or which had very biased moderation for a long time but no longer do, such as twitter.) Reddit is all about forming the illusion of overwhelming consensus; an opinion shared by 49% of users can be ruthlessly suppressed by the 51%, downvoted below zero and hidden from view. The fundamental nature of reddit's comment system encourages this warped perception of people who disagree with you being unreal.
There’s nothing new here. Socialism vs Capitalism. The revolutionaries will lose, and they should. If they want to fight Reddit, they should start their own enterprise and compete in the market. I’m in full support of owners getting rid of problem employees or even volunteers. Reddit is a private enterprise and their owners have the right to do what they please.
Edit: could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You've unfortunately been breaking them repeatedly, and we've already had to ask you this once.
Not at all. Just a regular user who wasn't particularly inconvenienced by the blackout.
Were you seriously inconvenienced by the blackout in some way? I really don't get the overly impassioned 'rise up against the mods' posts I've been seeing.
> Were you seriously inconvenienced by the blackout in some way?
You phrased that in the past tense, but I assure you that a number of major subreddits are still private at this moment. With each passing day, my sympathy for the moderators diminishes and I become more receptive to the notion that Reddit should reopen the subreddit, remove all the existing mods, and hold elections for new ones. With a subreddit that has 1M+ users I guarantee there are at least a few dedicated souls that will jump at the opportunity. Only current moderators think they are a rare, irreplaceable asset.
The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition.
When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived.
For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power
have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics
People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing
edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted
Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad?
Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account
Somebody is policing /r/pics. I'm perma-banned because I pointed out that if people were angry about this particular pic from a bank flier that they can reach the bank at $data_in_pic to complain. They considered that doxxing.
Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).
Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?
You can pretty much leave communities in auto mode and nothing will happen. A few posts will get blocked. A few people will get annoyed. It is both difficult to encourage and discourage people to participate in Reddit communities.
Pretty much, people only notice when mod team decides to make significant changes to how subreddit works (banning certain types of posts etc.), not the power-hungry individual at hand
there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active
This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.
Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far.
There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
>Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular.
Because the current batch of moderation work well enough.
Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.)
Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left.
For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant.
Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew.
You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
>Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad.
Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later?
As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities.
>It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse because of this action by the CEO.
Edit: The parent post edited his post so the arguments are now don't quite directly counter his points. Now it seems like I am strawman-ing. Why would you do that?
X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more.
Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme.
>As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up.
No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away.
>And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse
Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.
Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like:
check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other.
you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats.
rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions.
finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
Reddit came down hard on threatening mods the other year. Did you forget, or are you omitting that on purpose to strengthen your argument?
If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. 90% of your problems in Reddit are caused by 10% of the people. Get rid of the trouble makers and your job is a cakewalk.
> If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user.
threats always come after the ban and is trivial to create a new account and continue the threats. the complaints about mod harrassment are as old as reddit but spez always promissed solutions and never delivered. heck, my sub had its mod discussion archive leaked - on reddit!, we reported it to admins repatedly and they did a big nothing.
one of my mod colleagues got doxxed and had a banned user ringing at his very physical door demanding "to discuss the issue", how would you feel about it ?
edit: and this is a boring country sub, I can't even imagine what modding a political sub is like.
I do not care for the mods themselves, but I do care for their output - which is that each community has its own vibe and rules. Also the Reddit strike showed that powerful moderators are great for self-organisation - nothing like that would be possible if moderators could not shut down the communities, users on their own can't realistically self-organise for action like that.
The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.
You're making my point for me. People are already assuming the new moderation will be noticeably worse to a significant degree, and using that assumption to assert their position as absolute. You know, in a place full of software devs who routinely mess up estimating something far more similar to their past experiences.
No, I said it will be different and as we learned numerous amounts people hate change. The kneecapped their growth with their redesign and now this shit show.
This is a good point, and explains why HN is comparatively quite good while a large number of subreddits (especially the biggest ones) are a complete shitshow. The problem that I see is that many subreddit mods erroneously think they are Dan-level.
Reddit has seriously improved their mod tools in recent years. I really don't understand these complaints.
I'm not a sock puppet, I just don't see the validity in saying over and over that the mod tools are bad, when they are clearly not and work for quite a lot of mods.
Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators.
So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first.
So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
>The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead
OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized?
>Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?
Yeah, I mean what if a Reddit admin abused their power by like, I don't know, editing a user's comment. How would you address that? I guess you could punish them by letting them continue to be CEO or something.
> what if a Reddit admin abused their power by like, I don't know, editing a user's comment. How would you address that?
You (user) can most readily address it by not using reddit. That is the ultimate answer to all of this. If you don't use reddit, then problems with reddit aren't your problems anymore.
Obviously, do you really think someone could do that and keep their job/credibility? I just thought it would be a fun thought experiment, maybe it was a little far-fetched though.
My favorite solution requires a bit of tech work but is very viable. Users can subscribe to a subreddit, but also to specific moderators. If you don't like how someone moderates, unsubscribe to their moderation, and their changes and actions get removed from your feed. Simple.
This ties back into how "freedom to listen" is way more important than "freedom of speech" Though freedom of speech is a prerequisite for freedom to listen. If person X wants to say something and person Y wants to read it, moderator Z shouldnt be allowed to interfere. But you still need moderation or the webpage gets filled with spam and crap. So the solution is simple, if you don't like a moderator, unsubscribe from them and it's done.
Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
> My favorite solution requires a bit of tech work but is very viable. Users can subscribe to a subreddit, but also to specific moderators. If you don't like how someone moderates, unsubscribe to their moderation, and their changes and actions get removed from your feed. Simple.
And then you will find out that most users don't configure their apps. They will complain loudly though. Users also don't know how mods moderate. They would have to see what gets moderated otherwise they can't make informed decisions.
> Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
Opt-in is too cumbersome for most users. Most users don't configure their apps (again). That's why good defaults are important.
You can't solve social issues with technology. Technology might help but only so much.
your suggestion isn't a problem, you can have defaults based on popularity and then the defaults get controlled by what most of the users who do configure their stuff choose.
Don't make the mistake of thinking a mod is above people and needs to tell users what they are allowed to see.
I included in my suggestion that you can see what gets moderated, obviously. Any website with non-public moderation logs tends towards horrible abuse of moderation powers.
> Don't make the mistake of thinking a mod is above people and needs to tell users what they are allowed to see.
They are not above people but they are the ones curating the content in the subreddit. If people don't like that, they can vote with their feet and leave. I've seen this play out several times. Communities leaving and building new subreddits, sometimes overtaking the previous one, sometimes not.
> I included in my suggestion that you can see what gets moderated, obviously. Any website with non-public moderation logs tends towards horrible abuse of moderation powers.
Why should that make a difference? Most mod stuff is boring mundane stuff. Finding the juicy stuff is not that easy. And even if you have unfair mods, you can't remove them even if you can prove that they are abusing their power.
Reddit mods with seniority have power over those with lesser seniority. Changing that to say democratic votes from all mods to oust another mod only leads to more politics and drama.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Am i replying to an AI? I clearly addressed these things, i did not suggest democratic votes, i had a very specific suggestion that solves all the problems you're talking about.
There are options, now it seems these options are under threat. A good example is /guitar. The mod was a tyrant, now there is /r/guitars. It may seem a bit silly and you may say it does not scale, but for the last few years it’s worked. Never let perfect stand in the way of good enough. For me the point is moot, I refuse to return to Reddit. So far it’s like stopping smoking.
It would be great if there were a mechanism which provided some transparency around the decisions being made by the mods. If I could see a list of all of the posts and comments which they have removed, I could get a sense of how reasonable their moderation is.
He doesn't seem to have a great way with words. If you are the owner (implying >50% ownership), you can't be fired by the shareholders. If you hold less than 50%, you are not the business owner.
If Huffman had the foresight to not speak, this whole mess probably would have blown over by now.
The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit.
If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.
Under a few specific conditions minority shareholders can oust an owner CEO. Beyond board seats and voting rights, there is a duty to protect the interests of all shareholders not just the owner. So for example if the owner sells off assets to themselves below market rate it’s not ok.
Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
No, he can still be removed as CEO, and you actually mean >50% of voting shares, and you also have the board of directors etc. It’s more complicated than just having >50%, especially in things like fraud etc
If you have more than 50% and your actions are deemed to be against the company the minority stakeholders can ask legally to take control. Even if no actions are taken but your statements appear incoherent
Minority owners can sue, but it doesn't mean they will win. Especially in this case spez is most likely the lightning rod for the board so Reddit can get a big fat IPO. If majority of the board is behind him, there's nothing minority owners can do except pray.
Investors are happy to preach and virtue signal about the 'S' in ESG until hundreds of millions is on the line. Then you won't hear a peep from them.
> "What I'm suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,"
If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing.
But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
Looks like they perfectly know what they are doing, and the plan is pretty clear to me, and they said it: "mods too powerful", to me this sounds like a government or a big company, they don't like when the people have too much power or when they unionize, so they turn authoritarian and totalitarian, Reddit is just like that, turning into something it shouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they were pressured by the CIA/NSA
Every day that passes I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO.
How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?
And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning.
The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.
That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
> I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO.
Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs.
If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, and tolerating ad blocking. Bring in a new CEO, chosen by the board, and it would likely be a full on squeeze toward making money even if it costs them a vocal minority of users.
It's not that everybody wants the API to be free. Like couple it with Reddit Premium and rate-limit the hell out of free usage.
Even the Apollo dev said that he might have been able to pass down the ridiculous price tag down to his users. But not on such short notice, especially after been told earlier this year that no change in API usage would coming this year.
This is just bad management and now really bad PR. I can't see that this is good for the IPO. Who in their right mind will throw money at this site now?
Reddit has never had great leadership, much like Twitter. There was an idea that you needed a visionary founder to lead a social media company,which is why @jack and u/spez got brought back, but neither have been good leaders of their companies or great stewards of the community.
Instagram and YouTube seem to be examples of social media sites led by non-founders, though those are also subsidiaries.
Do you disagree with him here? Mods are too powerful, many have decided to try and murder the site because of something most users don't even care about. The idea that because I volunteered to moderate r/subcultureX for a few years I can make sure www.reddit.com/r/subcultureX can never direct to any content forever is ridiculous.
nah. there was always a way to remove crappy mods. reddit could and would step in at any point in time.
don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor.
reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
They will step in eventually, and they are going to respond to this blackout with a new voting mechanism to replace mods it sounds like. Both seem sensible to me.
And how should that work? Unpaid mods have to do even more subreddit politics than they do already?
How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years).
As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.
Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?
From personal experience I can tell you that pushshift being cut off has impacted my ability to mod. I often looked up suspicious users and seeing what they wrote in other subreddits helped me decide if they were worth the risk of a second chance or if it was less of a hassle to ban them. Especially their deleted or removed comments were often quite enlightening. That's not something Reddit enabled me to do.
I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things.
Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes.
That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.
Mods give a subreddit its norms and structure. If you kick out the mod team and forcibly reopen r/subcultureX, you're not getting r/subcultureX back, you're getting something new puppeting around its skin. If users really just wanted to start talking about X again, nothing's stopping them from going and creating r/subcultureX2. You can't force people to continue donating the massive amounts of free labor that made these communities what they were.
There already is a function that gives a subreddit its norms and structure. It's the upvote and downvote tool. Mods should not be shaping a subreddit, that's not moderating.
People only put up with so much bullshit. If you allow the annoying and loud trolls in your subreddit you alienate the more reasonable users that bring in quality content and worse case those quality content moves elsewhere.
What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.
Maybe for some definitions of "don't care" most users "don't care" about being forced to use a broken app with a terrible user experience. But I guarantee you almost every user would like to have a better UX than the official Reddit app offers.
Several subs im subscribed to have asked their users what they want to do: continued closure, closure once a week in protest, or open. They respect what their users want in as democratic a way possible.
Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want.
Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.
It depends on the subreddit, some of them really are run by power hungry assholes who will delete posts they disagree with and even ban users for disagreeing.
I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved.
The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.
Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman. It's the task that all other social networks are constantly struggling with and coming up against laws and regulations, while Reddit had it somewhat figured out, or at least had some systems in place that are better than automated blanked removal. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
> significantly more mods than reddit employees. Reddits already struggling to be profitable and you think they can afford to pay moderators?
They're going to sacrifice quality. In the short run, that will work. The smart move would be to moderate with a small, expensive lead and cheaper offshore, arund-the-world talent. (The brilliant move would be to negotiate, but Huffman has made this personal.)
Keep in mind the power law nature of content. What makes Reddit charming is the long tail. What makes it profitable, in the short term, is the short end. They don't need to hire mods for every subreddit, just the large ones, and among those, only those rebelling and unwilling to relent.
Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.
You’re insane if you think that is happening in the next decade. Half of moderation is just deciding what kind of content you want on the subreddit. Should discussion be serious or jokey? Memes allowed? Or maybe a joke is being run into the ground and needs to get banned just to keep the memes funny for longtime browsers?
Something like r/SmashBros closing the subreddit for a weekend when the new game launched and funneling new users (ie casual normies) into an alternative subreddit is sometimes the best thing moderators can do, but getting an AI to intuit when/whether to do that would be nigh impossible.
> Should discussion be serious or jokey? Memes allowed? Or maybe a joke is being run into the ground and needs to get banned just to keep the memes funny for longtime browsers?
Thank you for your perspective. In one paragraph that explains so much about why Reddit sucks.
> Researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the amount of hours worked by mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.
That's not a lot. Reddit's annual revenue is ~$500 million.
The polls I've seen on subs after the reopened have been largely in favor of continuing the blackout. The community supports this, adding a more direct ability to remove mods is just going to be abused by brigading.
It really depends on the sub. Some subs have a lot of very specific rules and higher quality bar and then some are just a shit show of sub-specific content.
Any community that operates with strict structure is done with dedicated mods and bots (which the mods manage).
There's an endless supply of people who want to moderate forums and are happy to do so for free even if they don't get to set the rules or operate as a dictator.
The moderators who consider the lack of "a sense of ownership" a deal breaker are precisely the people you don't want as moderators. They're the ones who are likely interested in that power for the sake of abusing it to serve their own personal agenda rather than the good of the community. It's no different from why we don't want cops to be able to make their own laws (and why laws that are vague enough to give them discretion to act capriciously are bad laws).
The problem is not the supply of mods, it's the commitment. Lots of people imagine they want to be mods but very few people really want to do the work.
I'm sure Hitler brought a lot of jobs and built a lot of quality infrastructure. Is saying the world is better off without him unbalanced because of that?
Some tiny fringe subreddits will die, some high visibility subreddits will have literally 100s of people trying to become a mod, including people who are potentially paid by an economic entity to be moderator of that subreddit.
"Huffman said, though, that he’d like to see some form of revenue-sharing.
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
To actually answer: Huffman's argument is that mods are like business executives and users are like shareholders, and therefore the users should be able to vote out moderators who are not acting in the users' best interests. He said this while also implying that the blackout was only supported by moderators, not by the regular users, and that this means that Reddit administration is having to step in to save the users from the evil, sinister "inactive" moderators who enacted the protest.
Since Huffman thinks moderators should be able to be voted out by users because the users are the primary "shareholders" of Reddit, the parent comment to yours is asking (rhetorically) whether they will extend those policies to the CEO and other administrators.
Which doesn't make sense as instead of voting people out they could just create a new subreddit. Unlike in real life landed gentry works due to limited space. Not so on the internet.
Yeah Huffman's whole argument is disingenuous from the start, which is to be expected from a guy desperately trying to convince people that his platform has profit potential even though just this week he stated that it is not profitable. Uphill battle, y'know?
I vote with my feet. I don’t use Twitter anymore because of Musk and now I won’t use Reddit because of spez. Tbh, it feels great getting these sites out of my life.
It's pretty difficult to coordinate moving even dozens of people in a community to a new place; subreddits can have hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands.
There's not a particularly great way to move, for example, r/askhistorians elsewhere and ask people to follow. There will be a tremendous drop-off, as well as loss of historical (hah) posts, community knowledge, etc., etc.
But also: yeah, users will probably end up going somewhere else. It'll be a diaspora; Reddit arguably prospered because Digg's users migrated there en mass after the redesign fiasco. Tumblr and Twitter have been seeing migration waves back and forth. Other communities will come, and grow - but it won't just be a "move".
without the ton of unpayed moderators they wouldn't be able to comply with hate speech laws (or comply by having moderation systems which are "out of context of the conversation" enough to drive a lot of users away)
without it all the good content would be drowned by spam and other bad stuff
in turn without moderators the most users would leave sooner or later
Lol, users have been asking for this since almost the start of Reddit, and Reddit only cares now because it actually is hitting them where it matters.
This is always so annoying, when sites are stagnant for years and then suddenly they can pump out new features when it helps them even if people have been asking for forever.
See also mod tools (though they have broken that promise more times than I can count) and shit like NFTs. "Can't improve or fix basic bugs but we have time to add the scam of the week to our platform". Reddit doesn't deserve to continue.
Yeah, not only is this crazy a slap in the face to Reddit users who have wanted it for ages, it's also a slap in the face to people who make subs for their own stuff.
So if I made a sub and I post to it, I build the content on it, some group of users can just vote me out randomly?
Fuck that. They do such a thing and reddit becomes salted earth for anyone wanting to post their content on it, and for anyone wanting to run a community where they aren't popular/don't have an opinion in line with the hive mind.
They needed to allow a more flexible moderation system and separate names of groups from the communities so that /r/games could dynamically change with time, but allowing the community to evict people from what they created is downright asinine.
Agreed with what you said. There are topics, and there are communities. They often get conflate. Moderators of communities should feel some sense of ownership over the community. But they don't own the topic.
Too powerful? Don't flatter yourself. I'm the creator and mod of a sub with 25K members.
I'm really not happy with reddit and participated in the 48h blackout, so I'm a good example of what they're talking about.
I'm done with them, but this shows you how much he's out of touch with the situation.
> He said he planned to change the rules so users could vote them out of subbreddits.
I've already posted my resignation notice and have stickied a post requesting applicants to take over the sub. People drunk on "power" do not relinquish their power voluntarily. Mods being "too powerful" are not the problem, because we are not interested in "power".
The powermods who are now leaving reddit are also the powermods who worked tirelessly to remove racist, anti-LGBT, and other bad content that would have pushed advertisers and potential investors away. These few hundred powermods volunteered as janitors for a filthy public toilet used by over 430 million users.
Honestly, if mods can just be voted out by their community, it will be chaos and little noisy groups of people will ruin everything.
I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...
Part of me knows that there are scores of users waiting for their 'turn' to be moderators if the current ones are voted out. I don't think the current moderators see/acknowledge this.
1. not stay moderators a long time, while a lot of people want to be mods most severely underestimate how time intensive it can be
2. want to be mods to abuse the power
3. would be quite bad at the job
4. would continue the protests sooner or later, because they do agree with the current mods on this point (but not other points so they take advantage of it)
All of which would drive users and high quality content away long term.
Not saying that there hasn't always been a lot of drama and power struggles around mods in reddit and that there aren't already bad mods and that this would be true for all new mods.
Still in my experience while there are always scores of users who want to be mods you really don't want to give mod powers to the huge majority of them and doing so is a grate way to destroy your community.
I think what they are betting on is those new mods will be completely inept compared to experienced ones and it will lead to the site becoming worse overall.
I agree, lemmy still has a lot of rough edges, but it would be better to depend on decentralized infrastructure, where no CEO will decide rules.
In case of Reddit it's just beginning. I don't really care about API access, but they send clear signal that they only care about profits, not about users and community. What's next? They will require paid subscription to browse content created by users for free, because traffic generates costs and they "have to be profitable"?
Today they still have huge userbase and it's their only advantage. There was Digg, there is Reddit and soon there will be next thing like lemmy.
Steve just wants this all to be over with so he can IPO, get his payday, and ride off into the sunset with millions of dollars. He doesn't care about Reddit or users or anything other than making huge money.
Is it any surprise we see yet another socially awkward tech CEO value the only thing that makes sense to their brains: money?
The and the only reason the CEO is talking about this now is because it is the mods who are resisting his and Reddit management's awful behaviour.
The CEO et al I would say have no concern about this issue as such - or it would have come over years ago - they are concerned, and concerned now, only because it is getting in their way.
Reddit management to my eye has lost sight of the fact the Reddit exists because a very large number of people decided of their own free will to be there. The content generators do not belong to Reddit, nor is the content generated by Reddit. When large site owners come to imagine they own their site and can do what they like with it, as if the users belong to them, they can break their sites, because users leave - mySpace is the case in point.
If mods want to withhold their own work and resign in protest, power to them. But right now they're hanging this all on mass censoring the work of their users. Screw that.
Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them.
ah yes unpayed people which don't just invest a ton of time and have to use a ton of 3rd party tooling to even make it viable and much more often have to coop with the social backslash of "moderation mistakes" have too much power by .... privating a subredit which likely wouldn't exit without them during a time when they can't moderate(1) it ... except that that and making it read only is pretty much the only responsible thing they can do
(1): due to protesting, also somewhat due to the API changes but that is more complex
I hope Digg is planning a DiggV5 for the reverse migration.
It would be pretty funny if Kevin Rose bought Digg back and turned it into something not sucky that let’s people post links and comment on them. This could finally be his chance to make the twitter clone he always wanted.
Yeah, I think they sold out to some private equity firm that tore it down, but I guess finds it profitable to repost stuff. I think it sold for $30M so I’m sure the current owners would give it up for pretty cheap.
I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).
Some of them go waaaay too far. Mass purges of disagreement/dissent have become normal on there, but they're now going after 'prethoughtcrime' - banning anybody who's ever posted to any of a growing list of subreddits deemed 'bad'.
On the surface that seems like a bad idea but get enough users coming in from another sub and "just asking the question" or not arguing in good faith and you'll understand really quick why it's easier to ban them all than play games where they try to stay just barely on this side of the rules while still harassing your community. You also get a lot of the "I'm a gay black guy [0]"-type people which makes modding even harder.
I understand how on the outside it looks bad but I also know from experience what mods put up with and I totally understand reaching for this tool to avoid it.
If you've got to aggressively censor people en-masse for 'just asking questions', maybe you should question the ideas that you're defending, and whether they're really defensible.
At least let downvotes do their thing. Deleting posts and banning users should be reserved for spam, persistent troublemakers, or actually-abusive comments.
Try moderating any medium-sized sub (or even some small ones) and get back to me. This is not as black and white as you want to make it out to be. Will some people get caught up in the filters? Absolutely but once you've seen 90% of people causing you headaches having the a single (or couple) subs in common it's not a difficult choice to "lose" that 10% to maintain your sanity.
I've had people walk right up to the line of the subs rules (breaking the spirit if not the letter) time and time again and it's exhausting to deal with. I've had about as close as you can come to death threats (without directly saying it) for temp-banning someone after repeatedly telling them to stop doing something. I've heard the cries of "censorship" for removing what is clearly spam. And all that was on a tiny sub. If I had identified a common source/overlapping interest with those people and it was easy to ban/block them I would have done it. Moderating is thankless work that I fell into (and thankfully got out of) and felt obligated to continue/see through to the end. I had no interest in "power", there was no "payday" or similar, it was just me trying to give back to my community and I got a ton of shit for it.
I have no data/info on who all is doing this type of modding, I was just saying I understand it. The only one I know for sure that does it is /r/conservative (which I'm not a part of), but I could absolutely see LGBTQ+ subs making use of it to cut down on the spam/trolls. Sometimes you want a safe space to talk without constantly dealing with bad-faith-actors. It doesn't bother me that /r/conservative does it though I do find it hilariously hypocritical. In fact most of the time I see it mentioned it's making fun of it, not annoyed by it or mad at it.
I don't get why. Am I not allowed to create a community where rule #1 is "no Hacker News posters allowed" and ban anyone that seems to be coming from Hacker News? You don't have to engage with my community.
It appears that they have been moving towards admins taking the moderator role for some time.
I wrote, pre-blackout, what I thought was an innocuous comment stating that I would not be offended if someone called me gay (why would I be?) and I eventually received a site-wide suspension for it. No concern was raised from the moderators of the subreddit it was posted in despite the fact that their rules dictate not violating the site rules, which I apparently did.
I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment.
I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.
It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.
The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap.
Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video.
It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that.
Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far.
I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.
Completely unmoderated would be a disaster. But Reddit was much better 10 years ago when it was much less moderated. IMO nerfing the mods will make it better.
A point against the 'narrative': Mods are very hard to deal with as a business owner.
Look, we all know that going to war with your volunteers is a bad idea.
But the Mods, as individual people, are not easy to deal with. To me, modding any sub on reddit sounds like an insane thing to do. Why would you subject yourself to such a task? Especially for free?
Those are the real human people that reddit's ownership has to deal with. Only a thousand-fold and self-interacting. Herding cats seems like a very simple job now.
Look, reddit is fundamentally changed. We all know it's going down. But Mods aren't the easiest people either. Reddit got fat off of the labor of, to me, people that are just built different.
It was always obvious this would be the result, because spez is a manchild narcissist, thus incapable of understanding he is unfit for leadership… Though I doubt most of Reddit’s senior management is any better, given the way they’ve completely failed to understand their value proposition (or lack there of).
I don't think they've lacked understanding of their value proposition. They thought they had something worthy of capitalizing on, kind of like YouTube.
And they could have capitalized quite a lot on Reddit, but I think they've screwed themselves over the last couple of years by pushing a bunch of features no one liked and not actually focusing on anything that would make them money.
Like, I should be able to pay Reddit to be able to post high quality images and have them posted to all the users of the website without reliance on their shitty mobile app. I shouldn't be able to upload high quality images without paying, and that incentivizes me to give them money.
What are they doing instead? They incentivize their shitty mobile app.
I think they've dramatically overestimated their ability to make money and they've expanded the site to the point that they cant actually sustainably continue to maintain it.
I have half a mind to believe they actually expected the third party developers to pay the outrageous fees and that that would help cover the costs of them running the website.
I think Reddit is unsustainable and it's going to collapse in on itself and go into bankruptcy eventually.
They will continue to fail to make money to support the bloated and shitty infrastructure and hiring practices they've put in place, and when they inevitably fail they will blame these terrible moderators and users for ruining the website.
In reality it was their own greed and shameless lack of self-restriction the wind in terms of establishing their bloated and terrible infrastructure.
But hey, they have an office in San Francisco so they're quite the lovely san francisco high-tech company that's making all sorts of money. And by money I mean investments.
I can say, personally, I was not for the blackouts. It just seemed counter-productive to me.
For whatever subs I subscribe to, that means the mods went against my will. Maybe I was a small minority. Maybe I was in the majority. Not sure how to tell...
On the one hand, if a subreddit is supposed to be a community it doesn't make sense for there to be a class of user, a "mod", of a multi-thousand user community that can't be dislodged even if literally every other member of that community wants them to be. That is clearly a highly artificial structure imposed on a community by rigid computer code.
Let me acknowledge the obviously self-serving nature of this declaration, wrapped up in Truth, Justice and the American Way at a highly convenient time for Reddit, and dismiss it for the remainder of my post here, because I find social network game theory interesting as a hobby and want to discuss the mechanics and implications of having dislodgeable moderators.
The problem I see is that there is no way to build this structure that isn't gameable in a world where everyone uses free emails and has ever-increasing access to an army of LLM and other sorts of bots. You can't build a system where a single person with a bee in their bonnet about some mod can simply marshal an army of bots to get them dislodged. The entire thing about moderation is that it produces a stream of people with bees in their bonnet, and the people who tend to get moderated are disproportionally those people. The bigger the sub, the larger the stream of such people. The nice guy who can't be bothered to start a vendetta probably wasn't a problem poster in the first place.
You can't just "vote" them out by handing everyone in the world a vote. You can't hand a vote to everyone subscribed in the community. You could set a cutoff date but that is weird too. You could give participation points (voting, commenting) but those are easy to game too.
There really isn't a way to define a "community" in a way that code can get a hold of it. Which means that in the end this is just going to be Reddit imposing its central views by fiat. That is not intrinsically morally wrong. The problem is that it's not Reddit today. I expect Reddit is calculating the result of its moves with a simple multiplication of how much money they expect to make on the same community, but if they manage to contract it significantly in the process the calculations won't hold. Moreover, even if they do lever open every single community tomorrow, the damage won't be visible tomorrow. It'll be slowly over the course of the next year or two. There won't be a day where anyone external will be able to point at and say "Look, this proves we were right!". There won't be a day when I'd be able to counter a "Citation?" with objective proof. Reddit will just... fade. One interaction at a time.
I remember this company called reddit, people for some reason flocked around it, then they pissed everyone off and became irrelevant.
Now if only Twitter would do the same in a prompt fashion. Musk tries hard, damn hard, but not has hard as Reddit to scuttle themselves.
If nothing else so fools here stop posting twit links to twit news. Twitter gets no scripting access here, it doesn't really work anymore otherwise, so for me already dead, just wish others would catch up.
Ignoring the elephant and engaging with the premise:
"More democracy" seems like a good thing, as long as it is balanced. There should be some recourse for a mod that actually enforces the rules of the sub (like removing political messages from subs that have rules against those sorts of things).
I don't know how you'd do that on Reddit. All mods in a sub can vote to veto? That seems like they'd still have too much power. Appeal process? To whom?
It is often said that if a product is free then you are not the user, you are the product.
Here it is true, just the wrong way round: users are Reddit's product! And Reddit seems to have totally alienated its product! The product is saying, "go f*k yourself Reddit, we're not backing down".
What is left of Reddit the company after they force their will on the users? No product I would think. Just managers and C-suite.
The funny aspect of all this is how the whole conflict is being feeded by inverse psychology. Mods want to help Reddit notice that the new APIs fees are too high and will harm Reddit itself, to which Reddit could have set very low fees and then slightly increase them until they get a balance between users vs earnings. Instead they followed Musk's gonna-kick-your-ass ways.
Will 2023 be considered the year of the Great Social Media Purge?
He's right. As much as many mods do a great, fantastic job for free, there are those who abuse their power and the admins have always had no issue with that.
Now that it's affecting them they do, so I hope they improve things even if it isn't for exactly the right reasons.
This is hilarious. The fact that he's just realizing this now confirms what I've said for years. Reddit mods act without oversight. It took them damaging his brand to act. Forgot that activist moderators fundamentally destroyed reddit with 1000 slow cuts.
The fact that a discussion topic has centralized moderation is weird to me. Why should a group of biased imperfect individuals control a topic like r/news? Seems like a ripe area to develop automated moderation using the distinct preferences of each user.
Who would develop the automated moderation? Reddit? They would do so in a way that optimizes their profits, not your interests.
There's no perfect solution. If you suggest "let users vote/democracy", then you'll start getting propaganda convincing people to vote for their agenda. If you leave the mods in charge then you get these mini dictatorships. If you let Reddit control then you get a profit seeking algorithm that stuffs any criticism of people who pay Reddit.
One of these solutions is probably better than the others, but there are some major tradeoffs.
Unless you're in a very free speech leaning place, which are unfortunately and increasingly harder to find, every forum is modded and the mods hold varying degrees of influence.
And the site wide admins, when there's such a thing, hold more.
HN isn’t Reddit. I like HN moderation. I come here for the more niche HN discussions. Reddit is much larger than HN and attracts people from a very wide spectrum. A handful of moderators don’t always do the best job at that scale. Especially for larger subreddits.
They aren't hard to find. The reality is that the people who want to say 'whatever they want' are usually just looking to spout endless conspiracy theories, vaccine denial, pro putin propaganda, election denial and lots of other nonsense misinformation with no evidence behind it.
The problem is that these people don't just want a place to say it, they want to find a large audience to broadcast to normal people trying to have normal discussions. Normal people don't want them around, people running sites don't want them around and talking to each other isn't what they want.
Finding a place to say what you want is easy, finding a place where you can foul up normal message boards and everyone just lets you do it is the challenge.
I mean I would actually agree with a little diplomacy, but I get the feeling as soon as this is implemented there'll suddenly be a bunch of brand new accounts spawned to vote out the moderators of those communities who are protesting right now...
Strange that /r/programming has been in lockdown all week. Last I remember, ketralnis and spez were the top two mods on it. Seems like it would be pretty easy to pop it back out of private if they wanted to.
Seems like the right time for someone to start a new site with similar capabilities, and maybe based on lessons learned, different legal and monetary arrangements with the stakeholders. More like a co-op structure?
I'm surprised that noone came up with a free (libre) alternative to reddit where each subreddit would be a deployable standalone server. Or is there a project like that that I'm unaware of?
It's really going down hill I hope someone makes an actually viable alternative. There is no good place to have discussions on a variety of topics on the internet anymore.
The fun part is for me Reddit was pretty much already dead, as these moderators degraded the content over the past several years. I made no big decision to boycott, just subreddits were driven below an interestingness/quality threshold and fell from my browsing, so the only one I've looked at regularly in a couple years is local r/nyc. (which didn't blackout)
I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.
Why is everyone ok with ChatGPT scraping Reddit's data and selling it back to you for a $20/mo subscription, but cringe at the thought of Reddit making a profit from their API?
If anything the users creating the content should be the ones being paid.
Your neural nets (which are not intelligence) and 3rd party apps wouldn't work at all if normal people didn't take their time to post useful content.
A lot of well run subs would never exist in the first place without good mods. A very good example of that is /r/askhistorians, without a heavy enforcement of their guidelines the quality of that sub would be absolute trash.
There are definitely a lot of bad mods, even more in popular subs, and even more in popular subs that are not centered around a community of hobbyist and/or fans. The value of reddit is not this trash though, it's the subs that are well moderated and curated to avoid the spamming, low effort/low quality content and so on. Because the torrent of low quality meme-like content can be found in any number of platforms: 9gag, imgur, etc. but very few places have a /r/askhistorians or a 30k active users community for a niche hobby.
/u/mrgrimm founder of IMGUR should be charging Reddit for their API/'infra' (as spez was on NPR saying they pay "10s of millions per year for infra" to support third party apps - but they are "still talking to several apps"...
IMGUR should pull a protest and charge reddit (although I assume they are already deep in bed together... you can type in any /r/ into IMGR.com/r/pics for example and get all the pics posted to /r/pics -- or any other sub....
The point being that IMGUR should be charging reddit for all the "infra" costs their traffic has on their "infra"
--
EDIT :
Can I sell my reddit accounts to some EU citizen for $1 (eu) such that you then own my account and can use GDPR laws to demand reddit delete my account/comments/history? (I have 17 years worth of comments on there) GDP-[REDDIT-COMMENT-DELETION-AS-A-SERVICE] GPT-GDPRCDAAS
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EDIT2 :
/u/spez was again on NPR, where NPR stated that still "50% of the largest subs are still in protest" -- and then Spez stated that the business hasn't been impacted.
So riddle me thus ;;
If you can shutter 50% of your top subreddits without "significant impact to the business" , then how can you claim that you're paying "10s of millions" to "support" 3rd party API call apps, in 'infra' -- and this is 'unsustainable' yet killing '50% of top subs' has no impact on the business?
/u/spez might want to consider subscribing to /r/theyDidTheMath
Has Reddit paid mods for un-blocking? Has Reddit paid ANY MODS EVER? Shouldnt this be in an SEC filing, if they are hedging for an IPO payout so /u/spez can go off into the tech sunset?
Shouldnt Reddit be required to report which mods they paid off in the past? Should reddit be required to announce which MOD accounts are held as alts by actual employees (admins) of reddit?
This is the thing I don't think people understand. Just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean the mods are bad. Some communities have no-meme rules, this often elevates the conversation. And no "people will upvote and downvote what they want" doesn't work because you are now playing to the lower common denominator. If you don't like the rules, create your own sub with it's own rules. This has happened countless times in the history of Reddit. And before "But how will people know about the other sub? How will it get traction?" - That's a failing on Reddit's part, their discoverability is trash (as is their search).
probably why you were down voted, I think the mods provide a decent service preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social
>Just pay someone to do their job
This I agree with, if the mods were paid well, maybe things would be better. Maybe a rule change like "If your group gets xxx many unique users posting content per day, you get paid X". But that can be abused too.
> preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social
I can’t compare to truth-social as Ive never used it. But big subs like /r/politics are definitely echo chambers and I think they are that way because the mods like it that way.
It's even less likely that paid mods would change that though, they'd only make it worse because they'd only want to stick to a very narrow set of "safe" advertiser friendly opinions, just like most other social media.
Definitely. I think communities are more effective when the “elders” volunteer out of love to run. I don’t think you can pay people enough to make up for passion.
This is based on experiences with community centers, game meetups, marathon planners, and dev communities. You usually have to have someone on the payroll, but having a high ratio of volunteers usually means higher quality community.
My most clear example is the difference between hiking meetups that are just some people planning stuff vs the ones planned by REI. The REI ones are pretty fun, but the meetups are more thought out and better, I think.
Communities are echo chambers with a range of allowable discourse. Moderators serve the important function of keeping that range anchored so the community stays cohesive over time.
>preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber
Reddit mods are notorious for creating echo chambers through 3rd party mod tools. You know, those tools autobanning about any account who happens to post on a sub they consider no-no, often regardless the context. If those tools weren't on the line, they wouldn't care to join the blackout.
In addition to the issues everyone else has pointed out, unpaid volunteer mods give Reddit a lot of deniability.
If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly".
Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.
I like how you think Reddit has the spare capital to hire mods. VCs are running for the door (that’s why it’s an IPO) and index fund retail investors will be left holding the bag.
I mean, they're better than branded subs being moderated by the brand. Imagine Disney just being given the ability to moderate all of the starwars or marvel subs.
Most of them are absolute losers. Almost every single powermod that is open about their real life identity turns out to fit exactly into the "usual suspect" mold (middle aged, usually white, usually nerdy and terminally online). There are screenshots of mods that moderate the most on Reddit begging and crying to not lose their moderator position. Here's a direct quote from one of the most powerful mod on Reddit on hearing they lost mod powers on a single sub:
"I have no job, I dont meet people,
have no money.I only have reddit. Please dont take reddit from me"
Sure sound like a qualified, well adjusted moderating staff overall.
There is a well-known cabal of reddit mods that control many of the most popular subreddits [1] and many of them act like the subs they mod are their personal fiefdoms. Some of them have been alleged to exploit their subs for financial gain, or personal karma gain [2] at the expense of regular users
Some of these mods have operated in cahoots with Reddit Administration to squelch stories they didn't like [3], to push a political narrative, or to stop grass roots issues. While I recognize people should live harassment free, they need to operate with a great amount of editorial discretion to keep conversations on topic and apropos.
Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: what is their motivation for shutting down Reddit? If this is true, these fiefdom mods are hurting themselves financially and personally by keeping their subreddits shut down.
The simplest explanation to me is that they protest because they care. It is not just Apollo. They don't like the overall direction Reddit is heading in.
> Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods:
Reddit mods doing things like this is well known [1] [2]
What is really strange is how the mods will tend to infiltrate a subreddit, get mod rights, and then bring over a bunch of other mods that are already cross-modding important subs across Reddit.
This has led to weird situations where a few mods control much of Reddit's top subreddits [3]
'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!'
It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.