What took them so long. Moderators are clearly coordinating with each other to close down reddit's website, that s malicious intent, not just a "protest". They should have rules that does not allow that behaviour. Reddit is so poorly ran
Protests are most effective when highly coordinated. Reddit is free to change their attitude and have the website back at any time, it's their choice to continue down this path.
I'm getting whiplash. First Axios said they are not going to remove moderators, then someone on Reddit said they will, then someone here said they won't, which is it?
I really don't think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that's a narrow subset
HN readers are 1-2-5 years ahead what happens in the market. you can tell a lot of things that are coming down the pipe if you pay attention on HN. Once the "nerds" give up on reddit it will be an uphill battle to keep the site viable.
This exactly. There have been a few tech waves where nerd behaviour was the leading indicator by a few years. Search engine move from AltaVista to Google (yes, I'm old). Laptop move to Macbook Pro's. Ignore the nerds at your peril.
lol. you're not that old. remember the days when Intel was kicking AMD's ass and AMD was mostly building a worse Intel clone? Raise your hand if any of the following say anything to you: K5, K6, Duron. If you raised your hand and can go back even further in time tell me at what frequency did a Z80 run. hahahahaah
Haha. I'm so old that the first computer I was introduced to in my first job (it may have been a Data General mainframe; my memory is fuzzy) had a solid copper "ribbon" running along the bottom inside the cabinet, and I was told "Don't drop a screwdriver on that or you'll short out the whole floor". The inside of the cabinet door had what looked like black "flash marks" on it. I also had to recover a program from a paper tape drive in that first year.
I have a feeling Reddit is mostly nerds though, after this I doubt there is going to be anyone left.
Recently I've been moving to Facebook Groups. Compared to Reddit the groups are much more niche, which is a good thing.
On Reddit there is a general sub about a hobby I'm interested in with 198k subscribers, on Facebook I've found groups with the specific niches of that I'm interested in with 16k - 30k subscribers. The questions are much more specific, and the people there are a lot more knowledgeable. The people on there seem friendlier too.
I highly doubt it, most revenue comes from non nerds who don't use adblockers or third party apps that don't show ads. I would not be surprised if Reddit revenues increase with these move. It's the same story as Facebook and Instagram, the real money is from the eyeballs of the masses, not of the niches they started out with.
lol. who do you think does the hard work of keeping the subs clean? agree that some mods could be scumbags but to generalize to all mods is a stretch. reddit without good mods is a guaranteed shit show
Designated moderation is a pretty poor system. Everyone knows who the dickheads are; you just have to leverage that communal knowledge---but in a way that avoids oppressive majorities.
Have a system whereby any user can indicate zero or more other users to be their personal moderators.
This is kept secret by the site; nobody has any idea of how many other people have selected them as one of their personal moderators, other than by leaking that information.
Then have a rule like this: if some (configurable) number of your personal moderators block some post or account, you also automatically block that post or account.
The automatic block doesn't count as a moderating action on your behalf, with respect to those who have selected you as their personal moderator; it's a second-order block.
This could result in a reasonable blend between the classic opposites: someone else deciding for you what you shouldn't read, or else you having to do all the work. The former model represented by moderated forums like Reddit, or moderated mailing lists or Usenet newsgroups, and the latter represented by unmoderated Usenet newsgroups where it's just you and your personal killfile.
Users should have some sort of statistics dashboard to determine roughly much they are not seeing due to which personal moderators.
Personal moderators could be divided into classes. If someone is your class 1 personal moderator, then if they block something, you don't see it. If three class 2 moderators of yours block something, you don't see it. And if seven class 3 moderators block something, you don't see it.
On any user you see, you can pick them to be your class 1, 2 or 3 moderator.
These designations could have an expiry date, otherwise people will "set and forget", and popular users will amass a lot of power to block. E.g. if everyone in a forum chooses you as a personal class 1 mod, you basically decide what that forum doesn't read. That could be a poorly informed choice on their behalf, which would be somewhat mitigated by expiry.
There could be some expiry workflow. On your first visit to the site on a given day, you're reminded of expired personal moderators: would you like to grant them an extension or drop them?
I wouldn't be surprised if they've put themselves on the radar of Harvard Business Review for having the ball in their court and somehow phenomenally fumbling it at every opportunity
I'm kinda curious why none of the third party app developers considered selling Reddit requests as in-app purchases – just charge the rate Reddit charges.
Paying a monthly subscription to only have access to half of Reddit (NSFW will not be available through third-party apps) sounds like a bad deal to me.
There's the aphorism that when you're using/buying a thing, it's always a relationship between you and other humans somewhere in the chain.
That has to be given hygiene and deference. Hygiene in keeping things healthy and in balance and deference in not trying to calcify some lording hierarchy.
If you bust either, your customers/users/whatever will be shopping around. There's other ways to fail but if you look at the most liked companies, you can basically rename that a list of companies that fuck up hygiene and deference the least.
If this wasn't connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country's subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.
It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?
I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy).
I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.
And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.
Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs.
The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.
For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.
The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.
Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. What are your thoughts on a mechanism to oust existing mods? Is there any path you'd be willing to see? Or a lesser of two evils? E.g. mods being able to kick each other out with some plurality vs community members holding that power at some high voting threshold
I'd be fine with some kind of election mechanism built into subreddits settings that could be turned on to allow community member to vote on mods.
With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them.
Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods.
When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently.
For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance.
Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly.
I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.
The host of a podcast having total control of a community seems like the perfect example of illegitimate control. I'd assume they'd remove any critical discussion to the point it would devolve into their own personal website where all it's good for is promoting the product. Users with anything critical to say would be banned, posts removed. That's about as anti user as it gets.
Thanks for writing this down. I don’t know about the details of Reddit moderation for popular subs, but I’ve moderated a pretty tiny one, and have some friends who moderate small communities elsewhere.
The perception that Mods are all power hungry and looking to impose their will is all consuming in some circles, ans it frustrates me. Most of the moderation is pure drudgery that is uninteresting and un controversial. Occasionally a mod will be wrong, or cross a line, and that sucks. But there is a real lack of appreciation for the work these volunteers do day to day.
Like, when I talk about this stuff with some friends who are nerds but don’t hang out in the same circles as any mods, they have no idea that mods are actually doing work beyond occasionally banning someone.
It can be one way for many subs, and another way for others. Go to a sub that deals with controversial issues, find a threat with a lot of deleted posts, and look up that thread on unddit.com. Often times you will see mods deleting all dissenting opinions and not allow any discussion about it to even take place.
I was a contributor to a sub with a specific interest group (think something like your favorite programming framework). I got some value out of the community and so when someone suggested 'it would be really nice if a sub existed for xyz' I just went ahead and made the subreddit and was like, well here you go. By default, when you make a subreddit you're the moderator.
Then once that subreddit grew a little bit two things happened: first moderators of similar subreddits asked if I would be willing to help them out on their subs. The second was that moderators from other subreddits who enjoyed the community would reach out and ask if I needed any help moderating the sub. I both cases I said sure and eventually I ended up just being added to a bunch of subreddits as a moderator.
I would spend about an hour a day doing it and I think I kept it up as long as I did for the social aspect of it - I didn't want to burden the other moderators by leaving.
Then there was a highly politically charged let's say discussion that cropped up on the subreddit around some specific language (think similar to the default git branch being called "master"). It was exhausting to moderate, and it all suddenly felt like it wasn't worth it.
I also said to myself, hey I've got a lot to lose here, I've got a high paying job at a top company, and what happens it someone upset about this issue decides to email my employer and cause trouble? That could have real consequences for me. I'm taking a risk here and it's no longer worth it.
So yeah, I deleted the account and just walked away.
I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely.
This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.
The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"
I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.
The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)
I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.
Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care.
Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
Is this more rigged election without evidence talk? I browse Reddit maybe 20 minutes a week, on the weeks that I think to use it. I'm subscribed to maybe a dozen subs. I voted in favor of the strike in the one sub that was kind of late to asking about the protest and I noticed in time.
I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.
>Is this more rigged election without evidence talk?
I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.
In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.
But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??
If you're just someone who browses 20min/week, I'm not sure you represent the average user in any of your subreddits either much less one that should be weighing in on whether other people get to use the subreddit. ;)
"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.
So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not.
Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.
> they are not representative of the overall community.
I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.
I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)
I read (and very occasionally contribute to) a large number of subreddits that I'm not subscribed to. Recently I use redreader, but I'm the past I did it via the main Reddit website, simply by visiting /r/a+b+c+d..... to show all the posts on the same page.
Selection bias, most casual users are not going to fill out a poll. The only ones who would are those who are likely to support the protest. This is clearly visible when you look at how many total votes there are compared to how many subscribers the subreddit has.
r/nba and r/hockey are particularly interesting examples because the threads before the shutdown were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the subs open and all the upvoted posts were openly trashing the mods over their decision. The poll was also posted in the ModCoord discord servers so was almost certainly not representative of the average r/nba or r/hockey user.
I don't think it matters. As long as the members of a community have no problem with X being a mod, X should probably remain a mod for that community. If the community eventually hates X, X should be removable.
Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.
Yep. Given that this is HN, try looking at /r/California. It's basically a person fief for a single user (granted, he's not nearly as obnoxious as many Reddit mods.) Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.
Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?
The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.
Aren't all protests essentially extortion? We will sit here until you give into demands. We won't work until you give into our demands. We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.
>It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."
Who has said that users shouldn't be allowed to use the new app? I haven't seen even a single instance of that. The problem is that Reddit - the centralized entity with power - is forcing that to be the only option.
Reddit could be reasonable and continue to permit both. Until they decide to be reasonable the protests will continue. If Reddit gets butthurt and wants to call organized collective action "extortion" they can, but their childish whining isn't impressing anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.
The damage here is what Huffman & board are pulling. They can have their website and free moderation back after they grow up and change their attitude.
You could make the argument that it's a reasonable API price compared to other social media sites. What I really wish is they made a distinction between people signing into Apollo to use the app and Apollo making API calls, although I suppose they're probably trying to push people onto their app to improve ad revenue
Reddit is just where a community posted up. Reddit is free-riding off the efforts of the community, it is a lopsided arrangement. Reddit is not a challenging software platform to replicate, there are already platforms ready to be migrated to.
They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.
If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.
I looked at one reddit: r/science. That is blockaded now. A 'private community'. This is (was) an aggregator of SCIENCE news and information. How does blocking the flow of potentially life-saving information help "the cause"?
I think you didn't see the amount of popular support these actions had. Many subreddits put it to a vote to go dark or not. The ones I am a part of were 90%+ in support.
I mean if they follow your plan and replace the moderators of the subreddits I enjoy then I'm done with Reddit. Reddit can't expect to freeride off various communities and then kick out mods without a reasonable excuse, and this definitely does not classify.
And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.
The most 'obstinate' users are the content creators and people actually driving those Reddits. I would hope you're familiar from the history of social media websites what happens when you drive out the users creating content.
People love a good bandwagon too, this will live or die by the PR it gets. People will leave if their favourite community gets messed with and the messaging falls flat, given how tone deaf they have been so far the odds of that are high.
I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.
Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.
Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.
Moderators and content creators. The majority of Reddit users are lurkers. They never contribute anything, they don’t even comment.
The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.
All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.
I left precisely because of API pricing. I'm not using Reddit's shitty mobile app. I see the writing on the wall. old.reddit.com will be gone within a few years along with RES. I won't suffer that.
If "the community" is upset at the moderators, they can take solace in the fact that the communities are almost certainly coming back - it's just a matter of if it's under new management or not.
The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.
Which happened because of API pricing? The moderators are why the community works at all at this scale. They're also how reddit makes the site palatable to advertisers. That's just the current controversy anyway, Reddit inc has been making numerous user hostile choices and their choice to push third party apps away is clearly not for the benefit of the community.
And if they didn't do anything you'd have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.
If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.
Additionally if you pay for it you're a customer, and it's still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.
This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.
It isn't though. Facebook and Twitter have paid moderators that are employees, but since they are uninterested in building communities with quality content, you just end up with what they are today.
By that definition, almost every user on every social media platform would be an "employee". What reddit mods are doing is really not that different from creating a facebook group to organise a party with your friend or a twitter page to share curated content that you love.
Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.
I know one person personally who is a mod. It sure does look like work. He is effectively on-call and always tending to fires. I can imagine this to be a minority but yeah, I thought of it as "his job"
AOL moderators didn't pay from my recollection. And they were therefor screwed the same way Reddit moderators were (My neighbour back then was an AOL moderator, forgot how they were called)
What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for? All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.
It's pretty common in meatspace for communities to have membership fees.
I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.
There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.
Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
I was mostly taking about the moderators, because of the use of "their" in the title:
"Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"
I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content.
metafilter does that. It limits the user-base to those who have command of a bank-account or credit-card and imposes a friction on new account creation by gating it with a one-time $5 fee. They never aspired to be huge but I think they're doing fine.
> What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for?
Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional 'IRL' clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.
> If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't.
Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.
That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn't paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don't really own the content and it can be taken away.
The thing is though that I _do_ pay for it. I'm a long time paying subscriber to reddit and I think I should be able to use the Reddit Sync app like I have for years. But that's not an option that's on the table.
I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.
The problem is that people don't even agree on what "it" is. Low friction of cross-board collaboration increases the spam problem. There will be low quality instances in a federated world. Other people really really just want to post about woodworking or whatever and the federation thing is not interesting at all. Nobody wants a feed without content in it anymore than staring at an empty email account, so you kind of need one of those things to jumpstart it.
There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing.
It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended.
I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.
4chan has a pretty tidy solution by having 10x as many janitors as mods. The janitors recommend posts/threads for deletion but the mods hold the ultimate power. Even better with a functional reporting system.
Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it!
You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.
Why does paying for it making it better? Companies can screw paying customers over too. The issue is depending on a third party like this. And the solution is not some free tech utopia either. Taking risks is part of life, and so when screwed over like this, the parties involved just need to re-assess the situation and move on. And count on being screwed over next time too.
Thanks for the link - I wouldn't have seen that thread had you not brought it up. However, are you implying the original story is being manually supressed? Could it be the discussion there got too heated? There are other factors that determine ranking, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
YC is a Reddit investor, and dang hasn't chimed in connecting the threads, and the other thread was removed from the homepage. It's suggestive but it doesn't prove anything. The guidelines say that HN moderates its own properties less, but that may not always be true, especially pre IPO.
I don’t think it’s suggestive. This came up in an earlier thread[0] and he said it set off the flamewar detector, which likely happened again with this one. He probably just hasn’t seen the threads to merge them yet, it’s nighttime. Thanks for running the asylum dang.
Aren't you the coolest kid in the playground, or the guy on the sideline cheering on the coolest guy. Actually just staring in hoping someone would notice you. Yeah I think is it he last one.
I believe you. But hear me when I say: you would be wrong for doing so. It's one of HN's strengths that it doesn't just not punish contrarian views, but actively encourages them. It's an attitude that resonates strongly with me, and a value that is rare and precious. And, I was careful to say "suggestive", which is an appropriately weak statement.
What's more, is we see evidence of how views like yours, to crush dissent by force, leads to weakness. Every strongman that surrounds himself with yes-men are weakened by the practice. They become detached from reality, coddled by delusion, and ultimately less effective in the world.
That's not to say that all criticism is good - it's not. Plenty of bad faith criticism exists, too: rooted in lies, or envy, or sadism, designed to harm, to demoralize, to weaken. In some cases because someone is paying you, and often because you don't really know what you're doing. Sometimes because you're having a bad day.
How does one distinguish one type of input from another? I think 90% of the time it's easy - when someone speaks in absolutes, when they demonstrate no self-restraint, when they go down the path of "everything bad said about you is true, everything good is false", they have become a zealous enemy, and yes, in that case I think I would seek to ban them. We would all pursue defamation cases against anyone who would attack us in this way (but don't because it's just too bloody expensive).
With my comment, was I doing this? No, clearly not. I may be factually wrong, but I don't think so and I wrote the comment in good faith; it accurately reflects the appearance of a situation. And I know from experience how easily people can grant themselves exceptions to their own rules when it is convenient, and I see it as a gesture of respect to point out the appearance of it. They can take it, and I have faith that they won't punish me for saying so. It feels like...safety. And you would take it away, not just from me, but from others who share these values!
I just noticed I very seldom upvote topics, but writing a comment is correlated with reading comments which is correlated with finding the topic interesting.
It was on the front page earlier this evening, that's how I found it. It probably just got pushed off because any article about Reddit right now devolves into arguing about what mods should do, why it's futile because of how Reddit will react, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-06-05 see top entry: more comments than points, yet stands solid at #1. Pretty sure I've also seen 2:1 ratios before rather than the 1:1 that this is (but I don't remember around which date that might have occurred or how to easily ctrl+f for it while browsing past days).
I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes/flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.
Is there a long list of people willing to do unpaid labour for Reddit at the moment? Or is Reddit going to make their employees/contractors do the moderating instead? At least then you wouldn't have to deal with dissent.
Thanks reddit! I'm going to delete both accounts today and it is over. Also yes you have quality content, but starting today reddit will be totally blocked at dns level on my computers
Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning.
The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided.
Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.
That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving "You might like this" into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not /u/spez too?
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling.
Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps.
Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled.
But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills.
Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills.
But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
Not really. It's usually twenty somethings that somehow think the world wouldn't devolve into chaos if there wasn't a structure to organise society and secure it.
There's no need to devolve into Reddit commenting style. My comment is not defending any *ism and I won't reply with anything worthwhile when the tone is mudslinging.
I've read up on it and while the ideas are interesting, the wording is incorrect, you should not use a word that means exactly the opposite of what you intend. The moment you want to impose a system of any kind, you stopped being anti-system. But I guess that's the essence of anarchism, using confusing terminology to a degree reminiscent of doublespeak.
> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
It is funny and almost the same level of funny as CEOs saying WFH is not fair to people can't do WFH ( why won't you think of all the poor people, who are not laptop class you awful person )!
Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.
The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
That is not what I said. I said I can find 100,000 people more qualified than spez to be CEO of Reddit. I would only pull from a pool if maybe a few hundred globally if I were looking for the position. ie spez wouldn't be remotely considered. That has nothing to do with rounding.
Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.
If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work.
(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)
If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.
For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.
Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.
Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.
Sure, but it's a reddit joke, because r/trees is devoted to marijuana(which exists because of a protest against bad mods on r/marijuana).
Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.
r/videos gets more natural traffic because it's a default sub. Regardless, making a subreddit isn't some competition. You don't need to be bigger than the subreddit you're forking from.
He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.
If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.
Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.
The reason for spez to be out is less the decisions and more the execution and communication. He clearly sucks at PR.
But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.
how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?
you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?
no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.
And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.
Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.
It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.
The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!
Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?
In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.
If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.
There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.
Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?
And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.
If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.
You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.
But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.
That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.
> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.
Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.
Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.
Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.
I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.
That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.
> What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.
Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.
Reddit (spez) created that "landed gentry"[1], and was more than happy with its existence until roughly two weeks ago. It is Reddit's policies, procedures, and practices which created a first-come, first serve, seniority-based moderator role. Not the volunteers who stepped up and assumed that role, uncompensated by Reddit.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.
There's a first time for everything. I agree with spez. That is a very on point description of Mods, and it needs to be fixed. Just because you came first to /r/news doesn't mean you should rule like a king on Reddit. It is too open for abuse and politics.
No, it really doesn't. Both what I wrote and what you wrote can be correct. A moderator on a single big sub can, for example, turn it in a red or blue political direction no matter if s/he is a mod for a week or a year. As Reddit is a Corporation we will never see a democratic style mod selection, but in my opinion it is one of the big changes Reddit needs.
I'm glad u/spez cares so much about "democracy". For a second there I thought he was trying to extract profit off the backs of the mods who built the communities for him.
I can't believe I'm reading this bullshit about democracy and "landed gentry" from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those "gentries" keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.
The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less?
I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.
The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.
The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.
Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.
What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.
That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.com
As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.
>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.
It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.
If friendly UI attracts everyone but the other attracts specific type of people, then you will have different concentration of user types. It's a bit like casual games Vs games which are hard to master - completely different types of users.
The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist.
One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.
Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?
I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.
McDonalds is friendly, their workers all smile at you and wish you a happy day, may even give you three sauce packets for free. Their adverts are cheerful and positive, full of platitudes about how great everything is and how they contribute to your community... But can you honestly say McDonalds appeals to everybody?
Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.
Alienblue was the first app I bought. Then reddit bought it and latter canned it for the offical app. They kept changing it until it became the monstrosity we have today. On mobile, I browse reddit through old.reddit.com - anything else is an awful experience
Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.
To be fair, it's all consistent with Reddit's entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place.
As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.
Mod tools isn't the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.
No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords).
The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.
Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.
> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
Its this. It starts at the top:
> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]
If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.
Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.
To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.
What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.
I find these political theory arguments odd. Reddit is a corporation owned by a few wealthy VCs. There is nothing democratic or communistic or totalitarian about it
With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels.
I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.
So they're getting rid of all their best unpaid workers?
Reddit is very, very confused about what makes it a long-term success. I wonder how many free person-hours have been dedicated to curating the website. And then they just treat them like garbage.
This strategy would work if the people who disagree with the API closure is just the moderators (who provide free labour to reddit). It's not just them though, it might be felt most strongly by the power users, but people also frequent the app because of those power users.
The stickied comment stating that "this contradicts standing policies" is amusing. As if Reddit was somehow contractually bound to abide by random rules that they themselves made up, on their own site.
It's astonishing how many people don't seem to understand what it means to be a user today. Especially if you're not paying, but even if you are.
It's basically boiling down to don't you plebes know we can smash you like insects whenever we want? Now go enjoy your trickles of piss. People are protesting because they do understand, and they don't like it, and they will probably leave.
Reddit has trained users and mods to think that way. They branded the site as a free-for-all, then went along with major social crusades etc etc, multiple times over the years. Ultimately, it's reddit leadership that led moderators to think that way, and now they are paying the price for it. They need to create some red lines to make the website functional and also tolerant, even to all political views
Shockers!! Funny how these mods who work for free thought they have any leverage.. now if they control the instances like a federated nodes, then maybe.
They did have some leverage but only so long as Reddit was still trying to keep up appearances. They probably did the equation and figured that bad optics for a little while outweighs possible long term gains. At that point all the mods power vanishes.
I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community.
I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez
Volunteer means they are doing good for the public, these morons aren’t paid and their only motivation there is to have that sense of power over other users to feel important.
hmmm "Good to the public" maybe not... "Service to the public" yes they are.
They're mods. They provide a service. But yeah... closing the community down is willful destruction of a utility. It makes sense for Reddit to rip em out
The masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they're taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.
Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don't treat users like shit, the better.
One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?
I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderators at Reddit, it would be interesting if this discussion was more of a sticking point. I have to wonder if there's not a world where Reddit shouldn't implement a policy of:
> Look, you moderate a community above N size, we/your members need to know who you are
I'm not entirely sure where my opinion on it even stands but figured it might make for interesting discussion. It does get tricky in the face of subreddits that deal in protest/whistleblower/etc matter though. I don't want to lose the anonymous aspect of the internet, especially when it's been effectively under assault for years - but at the same time, something that powerful and/or manipulate-able seems like it shouldn't get a free pass.
Interested to hear what others think.
(I am also fully open to being wrong on e.g Reddit themselves not knowing who mods are, and invite someone to correct me if I am - but I've not seen anything to date that suggests otherwise)
A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It's dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -> person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -> inbox filled with more and more whining.
But a lot of the moderator decisions on reddit are personal in nature, not because of the rules. That has been one of the biggest issue with the reddit mods, they sit on these fiefdoms and punish anyone they disagree with. That makes for a bad, bad community. It's like if dang and YC rate limited your account because they personally disagreed with your point of view. This kind of behavior is routine on Reddit.
> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?
It doesn't bother me one bit.
If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions.
Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. That way squatting is less of an issue.
> Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes.
The would just create a brigading problem.
Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.
"It's a subreddit" is a diminishing comment when it comes to these channels where you have significant amounts of people turning to them for information.
That's the point of my comment, really: this isn't just some site on the internet anymore.
>Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?
Did you... read my comment? I'm clearly aware that's a risk.
It doesn't stop the question of "should these high-and-wide distribution channels be allowed to be run and controlled by people we know nothing about?".
>Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?
No, but there's no way to change this situation because Reddit won't create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.
Reddit won't create a situation where they have
oversight capabilities for mods... that creates
too much liability for them
It's definitely interesting to watch how they walk that tightrope. Because they certainly do remove mods that are inactive or problematic, like how they are threatening to remove mods that have taken their subreddits dark.
does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some
of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous
Reddit communities fork and spawn offshoots regularly. So for those who "get" how Reddit works it's not an issue.
However, yeah, considering the clout carried by big Reddit communities... it's a concern. I certainly don't think the answer is de-anonymizing those mods, though.
What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have?
The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.
> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?
That doesn't follow; just because people aren't going by their real-world names doesn't mean that they're not accountable. For that matter, what would their real name even tell you? Okay, user someusername1 is actually John Doe and lives at 123 Main St. What exactly do you know now that makes you more comfortable with them being a mod, that you couldn't tell by their history of moderation and interaction in the forum where they're a mod?
Although I agree in principle, they're not removing moderators for being power hungry or weird. They're replacing moderators who are protesting the changes with moderators who are under their thumb. I would be surprised if this led to better moderating
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[ 842 ms ] story [ 3988 ms ] threadI really don't think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that's a narrow subset
Recently I've been moving to Facebook Groups. Compared to Reddit the groups are much more niche, which is a good thing.
On Reddit there is a general sub about a hobby I'm interested in with 198k subscribers, on Facebook I've found groups with the specific niches of that I'm interested in with 16k - 30k subscribers. The questions are much more specific, and the people there are a lot more knowledgeable. The people on there seem friendlier too.
Have a system whereby any user can indicate zero or more other users to be their personal moderators.
This is kept secret by the site; nobody has any idea of how many other people have selected them as one of their personal moderators, other than by leaking that information.
Then have a rule like this: if some (configurable) number of your personal moderators block some post or account, you also automatically block that post or account.
The automatic block doesn't count as a moderating action on your behalf, with respect to those who have selected you as their personal moderator; it's a second-order block.
This could result in a reasonable blend between the classic opposites: someone else deciding for you what you shouldn't read, or else you having to do all the work. The former model represented by moderated forums like Reddit, or moderated mailing lists or Usenet newsgroups, and the latter represented by unmoderated Usenet newsgroups where it's just you and your personal killfile.
Users should have some sort of statistics dashboard to determine roughly much they are not seeing due to which personal moderators.
Personal moderators could be divided into classes. If someone is your class 1 personal moderator, then if they block something, you don't see it. If three class 2 moderators of yours block something, you don't see it. And if seven class 3 moderators block something, you don't see it.
On any user you see, you can pick them to be your class 1, 2 or 3 moderator.
These designations could have an expiry date, otherwise people will "set and forget", and popular users will amass a lot of power to block. E.g. if everyone in a forum chooses you as a personal class 1 mod, you basically decide what that forum doesn't read. That could be a poorly informed choice on their behalf, which would be somewhat mitigated by expiry.
There could be some expiry workflow. On your first visit to the site on a given day, you're reminded of expired personal moderators: would you like to grant them an extension or drop them?
i could dig a system where you have a pool of moderators and they somewhat randomly get assigned to moderate subs on fixed time periods assignments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/147152b/upd...
> There's no possibility to continue the free version of Relay; a monthly subscription price of $3 (or less) might be achievable.
And of that $3 the Developer says in that thread:
> Yes there should be a good amount in there for myself.
If 3rd party apps are so beloved, then $3/month to support a developer doing good work should not be a issue.
There's the aphorism that when you're using/buying a thing, it's always a relationship between you and other humans somewhere in the chain.
That has to be given hygiene and deference. Hygiene in keeping things healthy and in balance and deference in not trying to calcify some lording hierarchy.
If you bust either, your customers/users/whatever will be shopping around. There's other ways to fail but if you look at the most liked companies, you can basically rename that a list of companies that fuck up hygiene and deference the least.
See for yourself https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/corporate-brands-reputation...
I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.
And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.
Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs.
The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.
For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.
The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.
With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them.
Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods.
When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently.
For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance.
Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly.
I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.
that has been the standard in all of reddits history.
The perception that Mods are all power hungry and looking to impose their will is all consuming in some circles, ans it frustrates me. Most of the moderation is pure drudgery that is uninteresting and un controversial. Occasionally a mod will be wrong, or cross a line, and that sucks. But there is a real lack of appreciation for the work these volunteers do day to day.
Like, when I talk about this stuff with some friends who are nerds but don’t hang out in the same circles as any mods, they have no idea that mods are actually doing work beyond occasionally banning someone.
Then once that subreddit grew a little bit two things happened: first moderators of similar subreddits asked if I would be willing to help them out on their subs. The second was that moderators from other subreddits who enjoyed the community would reach out and ask if I needed any help moderating the sub. I both cases I said sure and eventually I ended up just being added to a bunch of subreddits as a moderator.
I would spend about an hour a day doing it and I think I kept it up as long as I did for the social aspect of it - I didn't want to burden the other moderators by leaving.
Then there was a highly politically charged let's say discussion that cropped up on the subreddit around some specific language (think similar to the default git branch being called "master"). It was exhausting to moderate, and it all suddenly felt like it wasn't worth it.
I also said to myself, hey I've got a lot to lose here, I've got a high paying job at a top company, and what happens it someone upset about this issue decides to email my employer and cause trouble? That could have real consequences for me. I'm taking a risk here and it's no longer worth it.
So yeah, I deleted the account and just walked away.
It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'.
The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years.
It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.
This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.
The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"
I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.
The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)
I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.
Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.
I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.
In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.
But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??
"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.
Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.
I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.
I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)
People will say statistically 8000 votes is sufficient for an accurate sample, but only if the voting isn't brigaded.
All comments on other basketball subs at the moment are overwhelmingly in favour of re-opening the sub.
Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.
Alternatively, the users aren't bothered by the moderation there and no one's felt the need to start an alternative.
The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
All that matters is who the community supports.
its more like blocking highways indefinitely.
Reddit's original deal was hands off community as a service. I guess the mods are putting that to the test?
Maybe reddit will provide such function.
Who has said that users shouldn't be allowed to use the new app? I haven't seen even a single instance of that. The problem is that Reddit - the centralized entity with power - is forcing that to be the only option.
Reddit could be reasonable and continue to permit both. Until they decide to be reasonable the protests will continue. If Reddit gets butthurt and wants to call organized collective action "extortion" they can, but their childish whining isn't impressing anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.
The internet routes around damage.
They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.
Reddit is dead to me, too. This is beyond sad.
Digg and Tumblr?
I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.
Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.
Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.
The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.
All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.
Fuck 'em.
The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.
If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that's employee misclassification and backpay time.
Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.
Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn't matter.
Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don't like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.
I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in.
There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered.
Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
"Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private"
I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content.
[1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/
Committee-run churches are this. Obviously not all churches fit the bill, but many do. Also other many other sort of traditional 'IRL' clubs that collect dues to pay expenses but are run by volunteers elected by the members.
Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.
A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.
I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.
There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing.
It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended.
I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.
You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.
Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?
554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments => not on the front page. No, it's not the algorithm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36142285#36143711
What's more, is we see evidence of how views like yours, to crush dissent by force, leads to weakness. Every strongman that surrounds himself with yes-men are weakened by the practice. They become detached from reality, coddled by delusion, and ultimately less effective in the world.
That's not to say that all criticism is good - it's not. Plenty of bad faith criticism exists, too: rooted in lies, or envy, or sadism, designed to harm, to demoralize, to weaken. In some cases because someone is paying you, and often because you don't really know what you're doing. Sometimes because you're having a bad day.
How does one distinguish one type of input from another? I think 90% of the time it's easy - when someone speaks in absolutes, when they demonstrate no self-restraint, when they go down the path of "everything bad said about you is true, everything good is false", they have become a zealous enemy, and yes, in that case I think I would seek to ban them. We would all pursue defamation cases against anyone who would attack us in this way (but don't because it's just too bloody expensive).
With my comment, was I doing this? No, clearly not. I may be factually wrong, but I don't think so and I wrote the comment in good faith; it accurately reflects the appearance of a situation. And I know from experience how easily people can grant themselves exceptions to their own rules when it is convenient, and I see it as a gesture of respect to point out the appearance of it. They can take it, and I have faith that they won't punish me for saying so. It feels like...safety. And you would take it away, not just from me, but from others who share these values!
I just noticed I very seldom upvote topics, but writing a comment is correlated with reading comments which is correlated with finding the topic interesting.
I'm pretty sure it's been well established that a high comment-to-upvote ratio causes the HN ranking algorithm to penalize a story.
I heard the same as you, but I wonder if it has more to do with how many downvotes/flags are being handed out in the comments compared to how many votes the story is getting, rather than the absolute number of comments.
The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.
Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
It's certainly a pattern.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
Get people to run and supply it for free
Sell the supplies and profit
Recruit free labor
Replace them when they stop working
Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling.
Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps.
Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled.
But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills.
Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills.
But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
Lol like he cares about democracy.
(You choose which one!)
That is some hefty fucking projection from him.
The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.
Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.
Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)
(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)
If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.
For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.
Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.
Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.
Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.
The Board is not your savior here.
But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.
Though usually that's a hired gun (e.g., Pao, Wong) rather than a somewhat-harder-to-replace returned founder.
In retrospect, I think Pao earned a bad and bum rap.
you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?
no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.
And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.
It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.
The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!
the mods and community have power and control over operations
Or
Mods get PAID
Really.... Volunteers have a reasonable expectation of influence on how their work is used.
He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.
This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?
This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.
If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.
There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.
Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?
And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.
But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.
Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff
This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.
Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.
Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.
Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.
I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.
Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.
That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.
It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.
Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.
The oldest moderator on r/news has only been in their position for slightly more than 3 years: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/about/moderators
Whose fault is that?
Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.
I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.
I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.
The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.
The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.
Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.
As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.
It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.
It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.
A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.
That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?
One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.
Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?
I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.
Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.
I'd characterize it as "text-dense" vs "spacy and image/video oriented".
The second is more immediate, it takes less concentration, so it attracts more people and more information that's not very meaningful.
By keeping things text-only, you keep the information more meaningful.
They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.
The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.
Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.
Its this. It starts at the top:
> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]
If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.
Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.
To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.
What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...
I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.
Reddit is very, very confused about what makes it a long-term success. I wonder how many free person-hours have been dedicated to curating the website. And then they just treat them like garbage.
It's astonishing how many people don't seem to understand what it means to be a user today. Especially if you're not paying, but even if you are.
It's basically boiling down to don't you plebes know we can smash you like insects whenever we want? Now go enjoy your trickles of piss. People are protesting because they do understand, and they don't like it, and they will probably leave.
I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community.
I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez
They're mods. They provide a service. But yeah... closing the community down is willful destruction of a utility. It makes sense for Reddit to rip em out
Not a mod, or even a power user, but I hope reddit dies. They seem hell-bent on making the experience of using their site as shitty as possible. The sooner communities move to alternatives that don't treat users like shit, the better.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderators at Reddit, it would be interesting if this discussion was more of a sticking point. I have to wonder if there's not a world where Reddit shouldn't implement a policy of:
> Look, you moderate a community above N size, we/your members need to know who you are
I'm not entirely sure where my opinion on it even stands but figured it might make for interesting discussion. It does get tricky in the face of subreddits that deal in protest/whistleblower/etc matter though. I don't want to lose the anonymous aspect of the internet, especially when it's been effectively under assault for years - but at the same time, something that powerful and/or manipulate-able seems like it shouldn't get a free pass.
Interested to hear what others think.
(I am also fully open to being wrong on e.g Reddit themselves not knowing who mods are, and invite someone to correct me if I am - but I've not seen anything to date that suggests otherwise)
That article is so petty it deserves no one’s time.
It doesn't bother me one bit. If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions.
Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. That way squatting is less of an issue.
The would just create a brigading problem.
Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.
It could be limited to active high karma participants of the community, however anyone can game that with GPT powered bots.
Another possibility is to have yearly oustings instead of voting mods in.
At 90% disapproval mods get kicked out. This along with brigading detection should cover damage by bad actors for the most part.
To prevent the use of bot farms (or people farms) to stockpile votes, maybe we could look to the field of sybil resistance and digital IDs?
Stack Overflow has been holding moderator elections for a while. How do they do it?
It's a subreddit, not presidential nomination.
That's the point of my comment, really: this isn't just some site on the internet anymore.
No. Reddit isn't Facebook. The whole place is anonymous. Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?
Did you... read my comment? I'm clearly aware that's a risk.
It doesn't stop the question of "should these high-and-wide distribution channels be allowed to be run and controlled by people we know nothing about?".
No, but there's no way to change this situation because Reddit won't create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.
However, yeah, considering the clout carried by big Reddit communities... it's a concern. I certainly don't think the answer is de-anonymizing those mods, though.
The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.
That doesn't follow; just because people aren't going by their real-world names doesn't mean that they're not accountable. For that matter, what would their real name even tell you? Okay, user someusername1 is actually John Doe and lives at 123 Main St. What exactly do you know now that makes you more comfortable with them being a mod, that you couldn't tell by their history of moderation and interaction in the forum where they're a mod?
You (like many here) seem to think I want full documentation of who a Mod is, when I'm fairly certain my comment implies otherwise.