I agree with Reddit on this one. Like it or not, Reddit is a private company! Moderators are abusing their power and holding communities as a hostage. Reasons why they do it are irrelevant! Next hot issue will be global warming, elections or whatever.
If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
Reddit moderators work for free and are kind of a big part of the experience. If a lot of them are mad about something, perhaps it's worth considering if a mistake was made by leadership.
I guess I use the site less anyway these days but it'll be kinda fun to watch this play out.
While you're technically not wrong, you are very much missing the other side of the coin. By and far the changes affect power users and those are the users largely keeping lights on at Reddit as moderators. Reddit always has the option of disabling making subreddits private, forcefully swapping out moderators, or etc. But even with their doubling and tripling down the leadership at Reddit understands that without this free labor, their site and company would struggle to keep up.
uh..... why should i pay to moderate on reddit (i am the current mod of a sub) when reddit is earning out of my generosity? sure i can and am able to decide if i quit but is there no shame in admitting that without my efforts, reddit would be no better than 4chan?
Let them bring out new people, heck i'd rather jump ship and technically i already have but these new people should know they are and will be spending time and energy and paying reddit to give them the privilege to moderate reddit while reddit earns money. Till now, reddit earning from donations, awards was for survival of the site while all the mods volunteered to keep it a nice place. No one was making money, everyone was working as a community and people were keeping reddit alive by donations.
now, reddit gets to earn while we (or someone else) gets to work for their benefit. nice.
its like they took the concept of gig workers and paid them nothing. heck, the gig workers are being made to pay to do the work. great business
For me it isn't just about API access, its the steadily accelerating march of enshittification across the whole site. Straw, meet camel's back.
Also, Reddit may be a private company, but their content is generated by their users and most of the labor is done by volunteer mods. If they want to leverage their network effect to extract money while ignoring those facts, they can get fucked. If they'd honestly been pursuing profitability in a non-idiotic and community respecting way (better ad targeting to subreddits? Build an integrated Patron alternative to support creators?) that would be one thing, but they've squandered their VC on nonsense like NFTs while making the whole site worse. I hope they implode, but expect they will just slowly decay.
Lol. I thought this was a french-only thing: TV showing disgruntled travelers during transport strikes saying the stereotypical catch-phrase "we're being held hostage!!"
TIL this is apparently an universal thing. The new account with 14 points of karma makes me suspicious. But, heh, we have a "don't assume astro-turfing" rule.
These Moderators have been working for free for years, IMHO they can do whatever they want. And yes, I'm annoyed by it since I cannot do half of my searches, because I append "reddit" at the end of half of my google searches. But I cannot blame moderators for fighting for what they think is right, with the little power they have.
Reddit went down the drain for several years. Several communities were nuked over years. It needs to die!
Sorry reddit search does not work for you. But moderators did that, not Reddit! There is 2 TB reddit dump on internet, there are services that provide search over that.
The amount of effort that goes into good-faith moderating can't be underestimated.
The goal that reddit is trying to accomplish is to reopen the closed subreddits. I think that this MIGHT accomplish that. What I think it may also accomplish is kicking mods who have been committed to their communities for years. Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.
Especially for large communities, signing up for a moderator position without the API-supported mod tools just makes me think you're going to get inept moderators. Nobody who knows how to effectively moderate would take that job. It would be like signing up to build a house with only a screwdriver.
Reddit is banking on the mods coming back and re-opening the subreddit to avoid being ousted. Mods who have put their heart and soul into a sub for years won't want to give it up so easily.
I'm not so sure. My completely anecdotal experience across communities on many platforms is that users love to say "I'm gonna quit!", then never do it, but when mods say that they mean it. I can't recall any times I've seen a mod come back, but plenty of times where it's led to cascading resignations (if it wasn't a coordinated "mic drop" in the first place)
The currency of good moderation is respect, and if you tell a mod you don't need them, there's a high chance of them calling your bluff
> Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.
It very much depends on the sub. There are some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks who do it for all the wrong reasons. Their replacements could well be better.
Obviously many will be worse also, but I think reddit admins will do at least some level of vetting before assigning new mods.
> some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks
I've seen this complaint, but never the reality. I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two. Some subs have strict rules, but I've never thought they were fascistically strict, just that those mods were deliberately cultivating an alternative to another subreddit (usually from the "posts only" alternative to a larger sub that allows image posts, like r/games vs r/gaming).
> I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two.
The heavy-handed moderation isn't typically visible, which is intentional. You'd be surprised how many comments and submissions are silently removed, or how many users are explicitly or "shadow" banned (by automod, not site-wide) for simply posting in a subreddit one of the mods disagrees with. A lot of mods used things like MassTagger to bulk-remove "toxic" users.
Someone in /r/subredditcancer created a transparent mod log project, but they were driven off the site by mods and admins.
No, I have never been banned from any subreddit in my account's nearly 15 year history. Likewise I can't remember any comment or posts being removed, except for automoderated reasons (like a sub that auto-mods profanity, mentions of piracy, or has picky post format requirements).
A lot of these examples are suspiciously lacking in precision. Exactly what kinds of things are you disagreeing with mods about that got you in trouble? Posting in exactly which subreddits got you banned from others?
You wouldn't be aware of any comments or posts removed unless automod or a moderator specifically notifies you. They still appear to you as normal, but show as 'removed' to anyone else.
I disagreed with a mod in a city subreddit about the best cinema, and was banned for doing so. Didn't insult them, just a difference of opinion. Just for example. This is a pretty common thing which is why there are entire subs dedicated to documenting the behavior.
in light of this and the previous mod revolt at stack overflow, I really find myself wondering why people bother volunteering to mod, donating enormous sums of their time to large for-profit companies. I understand wanting to create a great community. but I’m wondering if maybe we have, for the better, I think, arrived at a point where those generous people realize that they should not donate their time when they have zero stake in that business, as well as zero ultimate control, when the business chooses to make decisions against the interests of their communities.
I think the obvious answer is to go back to before these monoliths and build community controlled spaces. We are seeing the beginning of that especially with Lemmy, there's currently a Cambrian explosion of software designed for this going on right now.
I don't understand why there isn't talk and action to attack Reddit's owner and funding itself--Condé Nast. Like organizing to target advetisers pulling their spends off CN's publications, or people canceling their CN owned magazines and services, etc. That kind of action would materially affect Reddit's parent and get immediate attention. I kind of wonder if CN and Reddit insiders have co-opted the anger and discussion against the API changes to direct action towards purely symbolic things like the current protest/blackout vs. going after Condé Nast.
> CN's parent company owns Reddit, it's a fuzzy distinction that doesn't matter
No, it doesn’t. It owns stock in Reddit. After multiple rounds it has influence—it still has a Board member— but it’s far from that of an owner.
Hitting Condé Naste makes sense. But it should be part of a broader campaign to pressure the Board. That means J.D. Power (David Habiger), Joy (Porter Gale) and Y Combinator (Mike Seibel). It might cause someone to notice were, say, an entire subreddit to call their investor relations lines… (Joy is privately backed by Avalon Ventures. Their LPs include Calpers, Harvard, Michigan State, Rutgers, Washington State and the State of Wisconsin.)
The board and shareholders don't matter one bit, Reddit is an entirely private company now owned by Advance Publications (which Condé Nast is a subsidiary of). AP could defund and dissolve the board entirely and decide only people with a birthday ending in 1 and who live in blue houses control Reddit--they're private and have complete control over the company, nothing else matters. Hitting them where their money is made (CN) will have an impact. Going after board members is wasting time or just a diversion to make people not go after the money.
No, Advance Publications entirely owned Reddit in 2017, and have since sold shares in it in a number of investment waves, and as such no longer have the 51% of shares required to take actions unilaterally.
> they're private and have complete control over the company, nothing else matters
Not sure where you're getting your information. This is incorrect.
Private company shareholders, particularly when they collectively own a majority of the company, have significant rights. In Reddit's case, these are shareholders with preferred shares, Board seats and votes.
> AP could defund and dissolve the board
If you sell a company to someone else, you don't get to dissolve its Board because you once controlled it.
> where their money is made (CN)
Again, Condé Naste's entire leverage is their one Board vote. Nothing more. Reddit is a Delaware corporation with a publicly-filed COI.
I don't think there's reason for CN to feel threatened beyond reddit. The public at large does not, would not, care. Power users might try boycotting for whatever that's worth.
This was really the only viable vector for redditors who care about the changes.
CN isn't "the Vogue publisher", they're a media company. They also own Wired and Ars Technica, as examples of something more closely aligned with Reddit's image, plus dozens of others.
I still don't understand the synergies here... to be fair: I don't understand the synergy between holding Vogue and Wired at the same time either but what do I know.
Not least of the reasons is market segmentation. They want their marketing to be able to easily target narrow segments of consumers, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to make sure the consumers are already segmented. If Google comes to them and says "we want to run ads for our phones", CN puts the resulting ads in Wired. If Google later comes back and says "we want a piece about the menstrual tracking on our Fitbits", CN can say "no problem, let us put an ad in Vogue".
It also lets them optimize the shared infrastructure. The content in Wired and Vogue isn't all that similar, but the basic printing of magazines doesn't change enormously depending on what's printed on the pages. And I can't find anything specific, but I'd be surprised if Wired and Vogue didn't go to print at different times of the month.
Advance Publications (CN's parent company) owns a few dozen popular local news sites, and also has large stakes in Charter Communications (very large US telecom) and Warner Bros Discovery, among other things. They owned Random House (publisher) from 1980-1998, and they owned a bunch of television stations until 1980.
Basically they're a major media company across the board, so a stake in Reddit doesn't really seem out of place.
> I don't understand why there isn't talk and action to attack Reddit's owner and funding itself--Condé Nast. Like organizing to target advetisers pulling their spends off CN's publications, or people canceling their CN owned magazines and services, etc.
It's been heartening to see a few subs breaking free and moving to federated platforms.
I've dipped my toes in federated networks, and am now jumping in 100%.
My experience has been surprising. I expected more civility, but I also feel within myself an obligation to be a good netizen- a feeling I haven't had in a long time. (Being more active on HN has fostered some of this feeling, btw.) I know this is a good path to be on.
I loved the best moments of being on Reddit, but I hated the worst parts- they felt like an added burden and I carried it around at least the rest of the day, if not the whole week. No platform is worth that kind of grief.
I feel like I rewriting some pathways here. My mind is more clear, and I feel more confident in the real world. As each day goes by, I recognize more of the toxicity I experienced and the itch to dive back in is receding rapidly.
I'm glad. I know now I won't go back. They can have my ten years of comments and train AI on it, if that's what indeed happens, and make all the money they're hoping to make. I'll gladly calve off that part of me to be free and clear.
I plan to check out the federated networks this weekend. I actually gave Reddit up for the entire summer last year and didn't miss it at the time. I came back in the winter because I get bored and have no outdoor activities.
It was really strange going back because I realized how much I hated it and how much Reddit aggravates me. It seems to make me angry all the time. I mostly participate in smaller subs, like my local city one, but the experience of it has gone sharply downhill this year because of new rules that the moderators added.
My time off also gave me a greater appreciation for this site and the lack of notifications. On my days of heavy Reddit usage and my notifications going off I accomplished absolutely nothing except arguing with people and I realize that's all I do on the site. Even disabling inbox notifications wasn't enough because it was so friction-free to get to comments and check the context. It's much easier here to ignore comment replies and not get into arguments with everyone. I think it's because you don't get notifications, there's a couple of clicks to see your comments, sometimes you can't even reply in the thread of a story without going to the comment directly, and sometimes you can't reply from your comments page.
I think that's a great thing to. It gives you just enough friction to think "Is this comment really worth it?" and not reply. Or you forgot about the comment until 2 days later and it's not worth replying back because that person won't get a notification and is unlikely to check their slapfights from 2 days ago.
It made me realize I really appreciated the slow pace of forums back in the day and that little bit of friction. It's effective in stopping a lot of snap replies the instant I read a comment. Even deleting my Reddit app helps a ton because I can't stand the mobile site on new or old and trying to type a comment on the site is a huge pain especially if it's longer or needs formatting.
edit for a joke: on Reddit I'd fear and expect a clapback like
> I think that's a great thing to.
If you don't know the difference between two, to, and too how can you possibly understand how to <insert basic task>?
That doesn't exist here. It's pretty likely I'm going to get a reply back that's a well reasoned and mostly airtight argument. It's probably going to contain something I will have to fully read and think about. When your substantive comment is met with an equally substantive comment it's more likely for me to think "am I the one who's wrong here?" and actually consider that. When I read a flippant clapback the answer is "no, it's the kids who are wrong".
I think, more realistically, perhaps those burned by this will reconsider contributing so much of their time to a for-profit company whose interests are wildly unaligned with theirs. Especially those who have been mods. In many cases, mods perform many hours per week of unpaid labor just out of passion for the community. This is seeming more and more like an unwise choice.
This seems like a really communist take, but it seems to me that if a site derives essentially all of its value from UGC and the work of moderators, it would be much more fair, if valuable contributors and mods had a significant ownership stake in the site. Perhaps a site will someday emerge with that model. Obviously, such a site would also need to actually BE at least mildly-profitable of course for that to make sense, which is not a trivial achievement.
If you were to poll the millions of subscribers or casual browsers of big subreddits, I doubt the majority would vote in favor of the blackout.
At the same time, good dedicated moderators are very important.
But the moderators are operating with a "democratic deficit", no need to try to sweep that under the rug, so we need to be careful not to conflate their position with the majority of users position.
You can debate who should "own" a subreddit, the moderators or Reddit, but it's not the users either way.
It most definitely isn't the mods. If I stood everyday at the Louvre and gave free tours to guests could I claim the Mona Lisa after a couple years? I think not.
Wow, you’re right. I deleted my comments, then my account, but now I see my old comments are restored, posted by [deleted]. So reddit restored my comments without restoring my account, leaving me with no way to re-delete them.
you have to replace the comments with jargon and then delete them. scripts required to achieve it. and this is one way reddit avoids people wiping out their content.
Is Techradar always an unreadable mess? At one point while scrolling only around 5-10% of the screen was actual article content -- almost a third auto-play videos and the entire background an Azure ad.
17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. Sure there are powerusers and casuals, lurkers who never comment etc. but to say that it's a "community decision" is far from truth when you can't even make 1% to vote
I don’t know, but that’s besides the point. Does 59% of 1% of subscribers signify a community decision? Maybe action should not have been taken since there wasn’t a quorum.
The fact is that they are, and thinking otherwise demonstrates that you don't fully understand how most people on reddit utilize subscriptions. Subscribing to a subreddit is most frequently done so that posts from it can occasionally appear on your front page and nothing more. I would think of the community as the group of people that actually post and comment in a subreddit, and I fully believe that to be <1% of subscribed users.
How many of that 5 million are actually active users, though. I don't mean power users. I mean users that post/comment with some frequency greater than "rarely" and browse regularly. I'd bet the vast majority are users who come in to ask a single question or make a comment in one thread that caught their attention, and then never engage with the subreddit again.
I don't find your argument compelling at all. Just like democracy, we don't force people to vote. The results are indicative of the will of the people who care enough about the nation or subreddit to vote. If the standard were that at least half of the entire population had to vote in the same direction for anything to change, nothing would ever change. "Only" 81 million people voted for Biden, out of a total population of 332M adults. That's only 24%. Are you really arguing that Biden should not have been elected? Of course not.
>I don't find your argument compelling at all. Just like democracy, we don't force people to vote.
I mean I live in a country where voting is compulsory and there is nothing wrong with that. Better than the 1% deciding (and a lot of countries have a threshold to make votes valid)
OK but i am 100% positive at least half, speaking super conservatively, of those 5 million, have come and gone years ago. 5 million subscribers does not mean that 5 million people have even visited Reddit in the last 10 years.
You're ignoring that the vast majority of /r/minecraft's 5 million subscribers are not active daily. Over the last six months, they've received roughly 2,500 comments per day and around 600-700 posts per day. Even if all of those were unique users, that's still just a fraction of the people who voted to close which is just a fraction of the total subscriber count.
Anecdotally, I have 3 accounts subscribed to that sub and I've made just one comment there in the last 3 months. I open the actual sub maybe once a week and that is generally through Relay, a third party app.
There are likely millions of subscribers who have not visited that sub in the last year.
"17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. "
No, because everyone of those 5 million had the option to participate. They choose not to, likely because the did not know/care enough.
So the active users decided - and they are the ones making the community alive. Communities are made up of living, active beings - not lurkers. And even they had the same vote.
(Nothing against lurking, I never participated in reddit communities, but got enough information there)
2k comments per day suggests an engagement-DAU of less than 2k. Suggesting the 17k might at least be more than those that actively comment. (Though it would be cool to see votes/day as a metric.)
If they chose not to vote that's on them. It doesn't matter what percentage of people voted, it matters what percentage of the votes that were received went to each choice. It's like how the right wing keeps winning elections because most lefties don't vote.
If that’s the number of people who participated in the previous poll, why would a new one have a different population of voters?
If we’re going by this idea that “only power users vote” it’s similarly hard for me to imagine a casual viewer reading the details of some Reddit-proposed poll and not just exclaiming “reddits broken” and bouncing.
From their roots they used sockpuppets to make the site seem like it had more users than it did. I consider this fact as a counterexample to your words.
So like voting works almost everywhere? It's decided based on who shows up? Most countries don't have any concept of quorum for votes. I've seen local elections get decided by 1-2 votes with something like 70%+ of people not voting. This happens with all votes. If you don't care enough to vote then you can't complain later.
Amazing how reddit seemingly fast derailed all good that it had going for it. I propose another plan, it's even better; Let the highest bidder become a mod of a closed sub. Just go full out with it, and then on top of that also ask mods to pay monthly or yearly price to upkeep their mod status - let them bring in advertisers themselves to the sub, but also take cut in that too. I can think of a few more even more terrible ideas if you want.
Replace all moderators with ChatGPT; if the users object, replace them with ChatGPT too; if the advertisers object, have ChatGPT come up with some creatives to show in the advertising slots.
What's OpenAI going to do, raise prices for the API?
This is the best advice anyone has given spez this year. All Reddit needs to do is to goad Musk into making a binding offer, maybe by insulting his ego and saying he's too afraid to buy Reddit.
Step two: Reddit admins create armies of bots to vote out protesting mods. Since they removed the pushshift access to their API this will be harder to detect. See:
There are a few large subs with moderators that are basically in Reddit’s pocket. This has the potential of those mods getting voted out and Reddit either losing control of those subs or ignoring the results and angering users even more.
There's a bunch of them that aren't. They'll be the new guard when the protestors are booted, plus Reddit has a core of paid moderators that they call on occasionally for events and special programs.
The main reason I have largely left Reddit and really hope others do too isn’t just the API stuff or even this behavior. It’s where I see Reddit going.
The reason they want to kill third party apps, goad you onto their app from the web on mobile, and will probably kill old.reddit is because they want to gather as much telemetry as possible to optimize for engagement.
That means doing things like watching the exact patterns of your fingers on the screen as you scroll, measuring exactly how long you pause on things, etc. to get as much data as possible to tune that dopamine loop.
They want to be more like TikTok.
It means they are following the rest of the industry away from actually social social media and toward modern addictionware where any content you create is mere filler to drive the dopamine loop. There’s no actual community, just random content cut and shuffled and remixed to keep users scrolling.
This kind of media is social like cigarettes are a breathing apparatus.
This is why they really don’t care about the mods or the community that much. They don’t need them for this model. They don’t need the long form posting either. What they really want are the memes, videos, short form snarky posts, and of course the influencers.
Influencers won’t leave because they love platforms like this. An influencer is not a member of your community. They are the obnoxious asshole you would not invite to the next party in real life because they’re a creep and seemed to be trying to sell something.
I do not believe that anybody who keeps having a smartphone can really quit a social media. It is just impossible that the only beeps it does is from GSM/CDMA activity (calls and sms) and there is no even one Telegram group who use to send you some news. I used to mute all Telegram notifications and delete all Telegram groups and what happened is that some coolhackers used to add their spam groups (very similar to real group I was involved in) into my group list and everytime my smartphone has a connection to Telegram servers it just filled itself with some groups. Only abandoning smartphone with really clear signal to every single friend of mine that the only way to access me is phone for sound and email for text - did the job.
I also quit smoking and that was way easier for me that quit using smartphone. At least nobody argues that I must to return to smoking.
> I do not believe that anybody who keeps having a smartphone can really quit a social media.
I just quit Facebook, not all social media. On my phone, I have three Telegram groups (one tracks the war, the other is my family, the other is my extended family), a Twitter account I look at every 3-4 days (and that may go away because Twitter just isn't interesting other than a few friends telling jokes), LinkedIn because my company sells software to recruiters and HR (and that's where they all are), and SMS. I run with notifications only on for emails for business from customers and employees, SMS and telegram from family.
I hope they do it. All that’s going to happen is every major sub will be overtaken by spam and the site will collapse. It will be absolutely hilarious.
Forcing mods to be more accountable to the community at large can be a good thing.
Given the pressure from revenue objectives, it will be hard for Reddit to identify and prioritize the right safeguards. Failure here would lead to a more homogenous Reddit.
The reason they've never done this in their previous 18 years of existence is because of the enormous army of bots. The moment voting opens for who will mod a subreddit is the moment those countless bots wake up and vote for whoever controls them. Then you're not democratising power; you're consolidating it. And before you start down the path of validating the identity of every user, consider the astronomical costs and legal and ethical implications.
I'm happy to make this bold prediction: they're never going to have democratic voting for subreddits. Huffman is only using words like "democratic" because he wants to break the strike. If this all settles down again those head mods (whoever they be) will remain little kings.
The thing about reddit mods... they're power hungry.
I don't get the feeling that many have any self-worth outside outside of being reddit mods.
A job that pays nothing... and takes up your entire life... you kind of have to do it because you love it, or because you think it's important, or because you love the way it makes you feel.
I've seen mods take posts down they disagreed with, I've seen mods ban people on a whim, and I've even seen mods ask for money to un-ban people.
What I haven't seen mods do? Consistently behave like well-balanced adults.
Anyway the threats seem to be working, most of Reddit seems to be back online now.
So I guess Hoffman wins, and gets to lie about 3rd party devs, and nothing really happened. Hooray... the system works! =P
Except it really opened my eyes about how horrible a place Reddit is. I don't know, like I had a few communities I liked, but ever time I ventured out of one of those I seemed to find filth covered filth.
If we're training AI on how people behave on Reddit... I think we're fucked. Get ready for ChatGPT-5, now with 50% more dishonorable, deceitful, and anti-social tendencies!
mods and admins are the core issue with reddit. it works right up until you discover you have a different political position to them both. at which point all your accounts get permanently suspended. they have excellent fingerprinting too so its hard to sneak back on. I gave up trying.
Considering how conscientious most reddit mods I've seen have been, the "reddit mods are power hungry" sentiment is starting to feel like astro turfing to manufacture consent for this kind of action by the admins.
Maybe the problem isn't Reddit, API pricing, or mods. Maybe it's Steve Huffman. I'm sure Advanced Publications would be receptive to anyone who thinks they could monetize Reddit while being 1000x more relatable than Steve.
129 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadIf you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
I guess I use the site less anyway these days but it'll be kinda fun to watch this play out.
If power users move to some more reasonable decentralized platform, this problem disappears.
> If you want API access, ask your representative and put it in a law!
Are you seriously saying the private companies should be legally compelled to provide api access?
Let them bring out new people, heck i'd rather jump ship and technically i already have but these new people should know they are and will be spending time and energy and paying reddit to give them the privilege to moderate reddit while reddit earns money. Till now, reddit earning from donations, awards was for survival of the site while all the mods volunteered to keep it a nice place. No one was making money, everyone was working as a community and people were keeping reddit alive by donations.
now, reddit gets to earn while we (or someone else) gets to work for their benefit. nice.
its like they took the concept of gig workers and paid them nothing. heck, the gig workers are being made to pay to do the work. great business
That would imply that current mods are irreplaceable which is not the case
Also, Reddit may be a private company, but their content is generated by their users and most of the labor is done by volunteer mods. If they want to leverage their network effect to extract money while ignoring those facts, they can get fucked. If they'd honestly been pursuing profitability in a non-idiotic and community respecting way (better ad targeting to subreddits? Build an integrated Patron alternative to support creators?) that would be one thing, but they've squandered their VC on nonsense like NFTs while making the whole site worse. I hope they implode, but expect they will just slowly decay.
Either way, and given the subject matter is a "community", this is a sure way to win a battle but losing the war.
TIL this is apparently an universal thing. The new account with 14 points of karma makes me suspicious. But, heh, we have a "don't assume astro-turfing" rule.
These Moderators have been working for free for years, IMHO they can do whatever they want. And yes, I'm annoyed by it since I cannot do half of my searches, because I append "reddit" at the end of half of my google searches. But I cannot blame moderators for fighting for what they think is right, with the little power they have.
Sorry reddit search does not work for you. But moderators did that, not Reddit! There is 2 TB reddit dump on internet, there are services that provide search over that.
The goal that reddit is trying to accomplish is to reopen the closed subreddits. I think that this MIGHT accomplish that. What I think it may also accomplish is kicking mods who have been committed to their communities for years. Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.
Especially for large communities, signing up for a moderator position without the API-supported mod tools just makes me think you're going to get inept moderators. Nobody who knows how to effectively moderate would take that job. It would be like signing up to build a house with only a screwdriver.
Yeah that's why HN is good. Not the case with reddit mods
The currency of good moderation is respect, and if you tell a mod you don't need them, there's a high chance of them calling your bluff
It very much depends on the sub. There are some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks who do it for all the wrong reasons. Their replacements could well be better.
Obviously many will be worse also, but I think reddit admins will do at least some level of vetting before assigning new mods.
I've seen this complaint, but never the reality. I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two. Some subs have strict rules, but I've never thought they were fascistically strict, just that those mods were deliberately cultivating an alternative to another subreddit (usually from the "posts only" alternative to a larger sub that allows image posts, like r/games vs r/gaming).
The heavy-handed moderation isn't typically visible, which is intentional. You'd be surprised how many comments and submissions are silently removed, or how many users are explicitly or "shadow" banned (by automod, not site-wide) for simply posting in a subreddit one of the mods disagrees with. A lot of mods used things like MassTagger to bulk-remove "toxic" users.
Someone in /r/subredditcancer created a transparent mod log project, but they were driven off the site by mods and admins.
Well, it happens, more often than you might realize.
It happens enough that there are entire subs devoted to complaining about it, but not so often most of reddit is unusable or affected.
A lot of these examples are suspiciously lacking in precision. Exactly what kinds of things are you disagreeing with mods about that got you in trouble? Posting in exactly which subreddits got you banned from others?
I disagreed with a mod in a city subreddit about the best cinema, and was banned for doing so. Didn't insult them, just a difference of opinion. Just for example. This is a pretty common thing which is why there are entire subs dedicated to documenting the behavior.
And there is the crux of the issue.
Reddit leadership cares about looking good for the IPO. That is it. Whoever is left holding the bag after that isn't their problem.
Condé Naste is a minority investor in Reddit. They have one Board member, as many as Y Combinator.
No, it doesn’t. It owns stock in Reddit. After multiple rounds it has influence—it still has a Board member— but it’s far from that of an owner.
Hitting Condé Naste makes sense. But it should be part of a broader campaign to pressure the Board. That means J.D. Power (David Habiger), Joy (Porter Gale) and Y Combinator (Mike Seibel). It might cause someone to notice were, say, an entire subreddit to call their investor relations lines… (Joy is privately backed by Avalon Ventures. Their LPs include Calpers, Harvard, Michigan State, Rutgers, Washington State and the State of Wisconsin.)
Not sure where you're getting your information. This is incorrect.
Private company shareholders, particularly when they collectively own a majority of the company, have significant rights. In Reddit's case, these are shareholders with preferred shares, Board seats and votes.
> AP could defund and dissolve the board
If you sell a company to someone else, you don't get to dissolve its Board because you once controlled it.
> where their money is made (CN)
Again, Condé Naste's entire leverage is their one Board vote. Nothing more. Reddit is a Delaware corporation with a publicly-filed COI.
This was really the only viable vector for redditors who care about the changes.
It also lets them optimize the shared infrastructure. The content in Wired and Vogue isn't all that similar, but the basic printing of magazines doesn't change enormously depending on what's printed on the pages. And I can't find anything specific, but I'd be surprised if Wired and Vogue didn't go to print at different times of the month.
Basically they're a major media company across the board, so a stake in Reddit doesn't really seem out of place.
Why don't you take the initiative?
Reddit has no credibility left.
From their roots they used sockpuppets to make the site seem like it had more users than it did.
They were caught manually editing comments in the live production database.
They got caught telling lies about the Apollo developer.
That entire interview from yesterday was full of all the same lies Reddit has been telling everyone from the start.
I've dipped my toes in federated networks, and am now jumping in 100%.
My experience has been surprising. I expected more civility, but I also feel within myself an obligation to be a good netizen- a feeling I haven't had in a long time. (Being more active on HN has fostered some of this feeling, btw.) I know this is a good path to be on.
I loved the best moments of being on Reddit, but I hated the worst parts- they felt like an added burden and I carried it around at least the rest of the day, if not the whole week. No platform is worth that kind of grief.
I feel like I rewriting some pathways here. My mind is more clear, and I feel more confident in the real world. As each day goes by, I recognize more of the toxicity I experienced and the itch to dive back in is receding rapidly.
I'm glad. I know now I won't go back. They can have my ten years of comments and train AI on it, if that's what indeed happens, and make all the money they're hoping to make. I'll gladly calve off that part of me to be free and clear.
It was really strange going back because I realized how much I hated it and how much Reddit aggravates me. It seems to make me angry all the time. I mostly participate in smaller subs, like my local city one, but the experience of it has gone sharply downhill this year because of new rules that the moderators added.
My time off also gave me a greater appreciation for this site and the lack of notifications. On my days of heavy Reddit usage and my notifications going off I accomplished absolutely nothing except arguing with people and I realize that's all I do on the site. Even disabling inbox notifications wasn't enough because it was so friction-free to get to comments and check the context. It's much easier here to ignore comment replies and not get into arguments with everyone. I think it's because you don't get notifications, there's a couple of clicks to see your comments, sometimes you can't even reply in the thread of a story without going to the comment directly, and sometimes you can't reply from your comments page.
I think that's a great thing to. It gives you just enough friction to think "Is this comment really worth it?" and not reply. Or you forgot about the comment until 2 days later and it's not worth replying back because that person won't get a notification and is unlikely to check their slapfights from 2 days ago.
It made me realize I really appreciated the slow pace of forums back in the day and that little bit of friction. It's effective in stopping a lot of snap replies the instant I read a comment. Even deleting my Reddit app helps a ton because I can't stand the mobile site on new or old and trying to type a comment on the site is a huge pain especially if it's longer or needs formatting.
edit for a joke: on Reddit I'd fear and expect a clapback like
> I think that's a great thing to.
If you don't know the difference between two, to, and too how can you possibly understand how to <insert basic task>?
That doesn't exist here. It's pretty likely I'm going to get a reply back that's a well reasoned and mostly airtight argument. It's probably going to contain something I will have to fully read and think about. When your substantive comment is met with an equally substantive comment it's more likely for me to think "am I the one who's wrong here?" and actually consider that. When I read a flippant clapback the answer is "no, it's the kids who are wrong".
This seems like a really communist take, but it seems to me that if a site derives essentially all of its value from UGC and the work of moderators, it would be much more fair, if valuable contributors and mods had a significant ownership stake in the site. Perhaps a site will someday emerge with that model. Obviously, such a site would also need to actually BE at least mildly-profitable of course for that to make sense, which is not a trivial achievement.
-reddit's CEO
If you were to poll the millions of subscribers or casual browsers of big subreddits, I doubt the majority would vote in favor of the blackout.
At the same time, good dedicated moderators are very important.
But the moderators are operating with a "democratic deficit", no need to try to sweep that under the rug, so we need to be careful not to conflate their position with the majority of users position.
You can debate who should "own" a subreddit, the moderators or Reddit, but it's not the users either way.
17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. Sure there are powerusers and casuals, lurkers who never comment etc. but to say that it's a "community decision" is far from truth when you can't even make 1% to vote
https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraft
https://i.imgur.com/qYbUaWT.png
I mean I live in a country where voting is compulsory and there is nothing wrong with that. Better than the 1% deciding (and a lot of countries have a threshold to make votes valid)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting
Anecdotally, I have 3 accounts subscribed to that sub and I've made just one comment there in the last 3 months. I open the actual sub maybe once a week and that is generally through Relay, a third party app.
There are likely millions of subscribers who have not visited that sub in the last year.
No, because everyone of those 5 million had the option to participate. They choose not to, likely because the did not know/care enough.
So the active users decided - and they are the ones making the community alive. Communities are made up of living, active beings - not lurkers. And even they had the same vote.
(Nothing against lurking, I never participated in reddit communities, but got enough information there)
https://subredditstats.com/r/minecraft
2k comments per day suggests an engagement-DAU of less than 2k. Suggesting the 17k might at least be more than those that actively comment. (Though it would be cool to see votes/day as a metric.)
If we’re going by this idea that “only power users vote” it’s similarly hard for me to imagine a casual viewer reading the details of some Reddit-proposed poll and not just exclaiming “reddits broken” and bouncing.
Sell all the subreddits to Elon Musk. I heard he likes to buy social media platforms.
What's OpenAI going to do, raise prices for the API?
/jk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848
There are a few large subs with moderators that are basically in Reddit’s pocket. This has the potential of those mods getting voted out and Reddit either losing control of those subs or ignoring the results and angering users even more.
If they are in Reddit's pocket, why are they protesting?
The reason they want to kill third party apps, goad you onto their app from the web on mobile, and will probably kill old.reddit is because they want to gather as much telemetry as possible to optimize for engagement.
That means doing things like watching the exact patterns of your fingers on the screen as you scroll, measuring exactly how long you pause on things, etc. to get as much data as possible to tune that dopamine loop.
They want to be more like TikTok.
It means they are following the rest of the industry away from actually social social media and toward modern addictionware where any content you create is mere filler to drive the dopamine loop. There’s no actual community, just random content cut and shuffled and remixed to keep users scrolling.
This kind of media is social like cigarettes are a breathing apparatus.
This is why they really don’t care about the mods or the community that much. They don’t need them for this model. They don’t need the long form posting either. What they really want are the memes, videos, short form snarky posts, and of course the influencers.
Influencers won’t leave because they love platforms like this. An influencer is not a member of your community. They are the obnoxious asshole you would not invite to the next party in real life because they’re a creep and seemed to be trying to sell something.
Having quit Facebook and quit smoking in my life, I can say with 100% certainty that quitting social media is a lot easier.
I do not believe that anybody who keeps having a smartphone can really quit a social media. It is just impossible that the only beeps it does is from GSM/CDMA activity (calls and sms) and there is no even one Telegram group who use to send you some news. I used to mute all Telegram notifications and delete all Telegram groups and what happened is that some coolhackers used to add their spam groups (very similar to real group I was involved in) into my group list and everytime my smartphone has a connection to Telegram servers it just filled itself with some groups. Only abandoning smartphone with really clear signal to every single friend of mine that the only way to access me is phone for sound and email for text - did the job.
I also quit smoking and that was way easier for me that quit using smartphone. At least nobody argues that I must to return to smoking.
I just quit Facebook, not all social media. On my phone, I have three Telegram groups (one tracks the war, the other is my family, the other is my extended family), a Twitter account I look at every 3-4 days (and that may go away because Twitter just isn't interesting other than a few friends telling jokes), LinkedIn because my company sells software to recruiters and HR (and that's where they all are), and SMS. I run with notifications only on for emails for business from customers and employees, SMS and telegram from family.
Given the pressure from revenue objectives, it will be hard for Reddit to identify and prioritize the right safeguards. Failure here would lead to a more homogenous Reddit.
I'm happy to make this bold prediction: they're never going to have democratic voting for subreddits. Huffman is only using words like "democratic" because he wants to break the strike. If this all settles down again those head mods (whoever they be) will remain little kings.
The thing about reddit mods... they're power hungry.
I don't get the feeling that many have any self-worth outside outside of being reddit mods.
A job that pays nothing... and takes up your entire life... you kind of have to do it because you love it, or because you think it's important, or because you love the way it makes you feel.
I've seen mods take posts down they disagreed with, I've seen mods ban people on a whim, and I've even seen mods ask for money to un-ban people.
What I haven't seen mods do? Consistently behave like well-balanced adults.
Anyway the threats seem to be working, most of Reddit seems to be back online now.
So I guess Hoffman wins, and gets to lie about 3rd party devs, and nothing really happened. Hooray... the system works! =P
Except it really opened my eyes about how horrible a place Reddit is. I don't know, like I had a few communities I liked, but ever time I ventured out of one of those I seemed to find filth covered filth.
If we're training AI on how people behave on Reddit... I think we're fucked. Get ready for ChatGPT-5, now with 50% more dishonorable, deceitful, and anti-social tendencies!
But people who agree with the mod and the protest are less likely to log into Reddit at all, and thus they might not vote.
So the expected turn-out for the two opinions is going to be quite different; in favor of Reddit.